Excerpt from Report of the Submerged and Shore Lands Legislative Investigating Committee, Vol. 2: Made in Pursuance of the Statute to the Governor of the State of Illinois and the Forty-Seventh General Assembly of Illinois It is the opinion Of the Board that the importance of this improvement, together with the necessity for avoiding legal complications, justifies the recommendation that the channel to be improved and controlled by the Government be in general 200 feet in width, and that the boundaries of this channel be establi'shed as a dock line to limit any construction by private parties or corporations. An Act to preserve and Prevent Encroachments Upon the Excavated Chan nel of the Calumet River, Illinois. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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Shantyboat dwellers and steamboat roustabouts formed an organic part of the cultural landscape of the Mississippi River bottoms during the rise of industrial America and the twilight of steamboat packets from 1875 to 1930. Nevertheless, both groups remain understudied by scholars of the era. Most of what we know about these laborers on the river comes not from the work of historians but from travel accounts, novelists, songwriters, and early film producers. As a result, images of these men and women are laden with nostalgia and minstrelsy. Gregg Andrews’s Shantyboats and Roustabouts uses the waterfront squatter settlements and Black entertainment district near the levee in St. Louis as a window into the world of the river poor in the Mississippi Valley, exploring their daily struggles and experiences and vividly describing people heretofore obscured by classist and racist caricatures.