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"This is one of those rare books that one can get lost in and finish in a day or two. In some ways, it is reminiscent of Mark Twain's "Life on the Mississippi," and almost as much fun. ... Highly recommended for anyone interested in American river life between 1800 and 1952, when the book was published."

Richard Hegner

The Monongahela

Richard Bissell

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Richard Bissell has artfully intertwined his experiences as a pilot on the Coal Queen with historical facts and anecdotes about the boats and men who made the Monongahela River in West Virginia into one of America's greatest workhorses. "In order to have a river in your blood, unforgettably and forever. . . . You've got to eat it, sleep it, hate it, and breathe it until you've got river in your shoe soles and in your pants pockets."

The reader will be hooked from the first page as the author launches into describing riverboat life, early settlement of the region, the dust and sweat of coal mining, almost everything you'd ever want to know about steamboats, industrialization, the terrifying steam boiler, and an unforgettable description of Pittsburg's shoreline that surrounds the reader with the smoke and noise of Pittsburg's factories and steel mills at night with the varied architectural landscape of the river banks by day.

"That's the way it always was on the river, and the way it always will be, until the Monongahela and the Youghiogheny and the Tygart and the West Branch run dry, and the last steamboat whistle has echoed back off the hills, filling the valleys with that mournful music that haunts you wherever you go."

Thank you, Mr. Bissell, for a memorable journey.

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