The journey of the Cabeza De Vaca expedition is one of the greatest survival epics in the history of American exploration. They became, in other words, whatever it took to stay alive long enough to inch their way toward Mexico, the only place where they were certain they would find an outpost of the Spanish empire. They became faith healers, arms dealers, canoe thieves, spider eaters, and finally, when there were only the four of them left in the high Texas desert, they became itinerate messiahs. They had become killers and cannibals, torturers and torture victims, slavers and enslaved. The four survivors of the Narváez expedition brought nothing back from their sojourn other than their story, but what a tale it was. Eight years and some five thousand miles later, three Spaniards and a black Moroccan wandered out of the wilderness to the north of the Rio Grande and into Cortes' gold-drenched Mexico. One part Heart of Darkness, one part Lewis and Clark, Brutal Journey tells the story of a group of explorers who came to the new world on the heels of Cortés bound for glory, only four of four hundred would survive. With such an expert hand on the tiller, Old Man River is an astonishing journey.A gripping account of four explorers adrift in an unknown land and the harrowing journey that took them across North America 270 years before Lewis and Clark Though the busiest waterway on the planet today, the Mississippi remains a paradox-a devastated product of American ingenuity, and a magnificent natural wonder. Schneider traces the history of the Mississippi from its origins in the deep geologic past to the present.

A conduit of real-life American prowess, the Mississippi is also a river of stories and myth. Mark Twain and Herman Melville led their characters down its stream in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Confidence-Man. In the 19th century, home-grown folk heroes such as Daniel Boone and the half-alligator, half-horse, Mike Fink, were creatures of the river. Sherman both came to President Lincoln's attention after their spectacular victories on the lower Mississippi.

George Washington fought his first battle near the river, and Ulysses S. Since then, the river has been the site of historical significance, from the arrival of Spanish and French explorers in the 16th century to the Civil War.

Some fifteen thousand years ago, the majestic river provided Paleolithic humans with the routes by which early man began to explore the continent's interior. In Old Man River, Paul Schneider tells the story of the river at the center of America's rich history-the Mississippi.

Brutal Journey by Paul Schneider