"Many in the crowd got roaring drunk - and the drunks at their most extreme were hard to tell apart from the fallers and the jerkers and the howlers. Others gave in to the general mood of riot and began fighting and beating each other up over nothing. But what made the camp meetings truly infamous were the orgies."
This is not the Mississippi River that most people remember from Mark Twain. This is the real deal in all its lurid detail.
Lee Sandlin, who will be speaking at the Bettendorf Public Library on September 27 and the Upper Mississippi River Conference on September 28, said in a recent phone interview that he aimed to re-create "the Mississippi River culture in the first half of the 19th Century" in his 2010 book Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild. "Basically what I'm doing is trying to introduce people to that kind of very strange little world that had formed then around the river."
"Very strange little world" is the gentle way of putting it.
