Deep River
A Memoir of a Missouri Farm

A history, both personal and regional, of a river-bottom farm in west-central Missouri. The author traces the generations of Native Americans and frontiersmen who lived on the bottomland over two centuries, and discusses how the area is passing from intensive agriculture to restored wetlands.

Most recently it was briefly and intensively receptive to farming, just as family farms were making their last stand. Deep River is composed of four sections, each exploring aspects of the farm and its neighborhood. While the family story remains central to each, slavery and the Civil War in the nineteenth century and Native American history in the centuries before that become major themes as well. The resulting portrait is both personal memoir and informal history, brought up from layers of time, the compound of which forms an emblematic American story.