The narrative moves with the current, each bend of the river bringing a new scene. Thwaites structures his account as a series of daily stages, from the Rock to the Fox and Wisconsin Rivers, punctuated by portages and encounters with steamboats. The prose itself drifts between lyrical descriptions of sunset glows and terns perched on snags, and matter-of-fact reports on the economics of river towns—a sawmill boarded up, a hotel with only the schoolmaster as guest. This alternation between the picturesque and the practical gives the book its distinctive rhythm.

The River as a Living Archive

Thwaites treats the waterways as repositories of history, but his evidence is not drawn from books alone. At Lake Puckawa, he notes that Marquette occupies the site of an Indian fur-trading camp, a fact he mentions only in passing. More telling are the physical remnants: two deserted saw-mills, abandoned warehouses, a rotting sidewalk. The landscape itself becomes a document of economic decline. The author does not moralize; he simply records that the village is “dying, if not already dead,” and that the passage of a law against spring shooting has cut off half its business. The reader is left to connect these details to the larger story of industrial change in the Upper Midwest.

Steamboats and Canoes: Two Scales of Navigation

The contrast between the author’s canoe and the steamboats he encounters is a recurring structural device. When the T. S. Chittenden looms above them, Thwaites compares it to “a whale overlooking a minnow.” The steamboats are erratic, their schedules uncertain; the “Chittenden” and “Ellen Hardy” are the only boats on the upper Fox, making a through trip perhaps once a week. The canoe, by contrast, is nimble, able to drift through reed swamps and stop for supper on the water. This juxtaposition underscores a theme of scale: the industrial river versus the intimate one. Thwaites does not argue for one over the other, but the reader senses that the canoe’s pace allows for observations the steamboat would miss.

The Doctor as Character and Lens

Thwaites’s messmate, referred to only as “the Doctor,” serves as a foil and a source of color. He is an enthusiast of his profession, capable of describing a Vienna hospital patient while holding cake and lemonade. He diagnoses Lake Puckawa as a fine field for fly-fishing and grows so animated over nesting ducks that Thwaites must restrain him from breaching the reeds. The Doctor’s presence allows Thwaites to shift tone: from the Doctor’s medical anecdotes to his practical skills—he deftly spreads a canvas for a supper cloth and prepares lemonade with expertise. Through these details, the narrative gains a human counterpoint to the landscape, and the journey becomes a shared experience rather than a solitary survey.

Stillness and Decay in River Towns

Thwaites repeatedly pauses to assess the economic health of the settlements he passes. Marquette is described with precision: three hundred inhabitants, a pretty clubhouse used twice a year by Chicago duck hunters, and a hotel where the schoolmaster has been the only guest in six weeks. The author does not invent a cause for this decline, but he notes the physical evidence—boarded storefronts, a rotten sidewalk, the grass-grown street used as a footpath. The tone is observational, not elegiac. Yet the accumulation of such details creates a portrait of a region in transition, where the river once sustained commerce but now carries only the occasional canoeist. The stillness is not romanticized; it is simply recorded.

Thwaites’s account rewards readers who attend to small details: the way a steamboat’s paddle is called a “wheelbarrow paddle,” the precise length of Lake Puckawa, the fact that the Doctor’s lemonade is a recurring motif. The book is best read as a series of vignettes rather than a continuous narrative, each stop along the river offering a fresh combination of natural observation and human encounter. The author’s preface promises a “simple, truthful narrative,” and he delivers exactly that—no more, no less.