Black Life on the Mississippi by Thomas C. Buchanan Black Life on the Mississippi is based on an impressive and imaginative body of primary sources. A number of slave narratives, particularly the recollections of William Wells Brown and interviews with former WPA slaves, provide an inside view of life on the Mississippi. Buchanan also employs newspapers, drawing particularly useful information from advertisements for runaway slaves. Plantation records explain the role steamboat slave labor played in the region's economy. Where Buchanan goes beyond the expected range of sources is by using a wide range of court documents. When a slave was killed or ran away while rented to the captain of a steamboat, there was a good chance there was a cause. Free blacks and slaves took advantage of federal Admiralty laws that extended to America's waterways and gave them a legal status that most of their contemporaries did not enjoy. And during Reconstruction, newly trusted steamboat workers often took their employers to court. With these sources, Buchanan achieves his goal of illustrating "the way slavery in the West was shaped by its connection to the Western river system and its workers" (p. 16) and to explain "the labor experience of workers African American rivermen, their pan-Mississippi world, and the actions they took to improve their condition” (p. 17). The book's first chapter offers an overview of this pan-Mississippi world, a place where the delivery of crops to market relied on the steamboat system. While we may have a tendency to think of Huck Finn and Sam Clemens going up and down the Mississippi River when we think of steamboats, Buchanan reminds us that steamboats also plied the eastern waters along the Ohio River system as late as Pittsburgh, following the Mississippi River. north to St. Paul, skimmed the Missouri River west to Kansas City, and carried cargo and passengers deep east into Texas on the Red River. Chapter 2 narrows the scope from the entire pan-Mississippi world to the confines of the steamboat itself. By the 1830s, steamboats had begun to take on the classic "wedding cake" shape. To navigate rivers, steamboats had only a shallow hold where goods were stored.