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triscuit807's review against another edition
4.0
The story is a simple one: young man has difficulties at home and sets out to make his fortune. Set in the 1830s when the President was Andrew Jackson, this is primarily a story of rivermen on the Mississippi and the way logs were floated to market. Young Chris Dahlberg from the upper Louisiana Purchase (Minnesota) acts on his friend Louis Hale's idea: he timbers some land and puts the logs in the local river and floats them to the Mississippi where they're joined to others to float to St. Louis. In the course of the adventure he meets a French/Indian (Chippewa) who is in charge of the log raft. This man, Pierre Dumenille, is the first problematic character. Meigs handles the dual ethnicity fairly well, but has some trouble getting past her era's attitudes concerning the First Nations. While it's only a bit patronizing towards Pierre, the attitude is far more racist toward a group who live along the Mississippi. Overall, I did enjoy reading about Chris's adventures. I read this for my 2018 Reading Challenge and my Newbery Challenge (Honor Book 1933).
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