The Monongahela

If anyone had told me I’d be entranced by a book about coal boats moving thirty million tons of coal down the Monongahela River during the 1940’s, well, I would have thought you’d lost your coal stones. I guffawed my way through the first chapter and was pinned to the pages from thereon in.   Richard Bissell has artfully intertwined his experiences as a pilot on the Coal Queen with historical facts and anecdotes about the boats and men who made the Monongahela River in West Virginia into one of America’s greatest workhorses. “In order to have a river in your blood, unforgettably and forever. . . . You've got to eat it, sleep it, hate it, and breathe it until you've got river in your shoe soles and in your pants pockets.” Fill up your pockets and read on, reader.

The story of The Monongahela includes early settlement of the area, the dust and sweat of coal mining, almost everything you’d ever want to know about steamboats, industrialization, the terrifying steam boiler, culture – “Out of the grime, and smell of slag, and glow of nighttime blast furnaces came poems and songs and paintings.” – and an unforgettable description of Pittsburg’s shoreline that surrounds the reader with the smoke and noise of Pittsburg’s factories and steel mills and coal mines at night and with the “curiously varied architectural exhibits of the hillsides” by day.

 “That's the way it always was on the river, and the way it always will be, until the Monongahela and the Youghiogheny and the Tygart and the West Branch run dry, and the last steamboat whistle has echoed back off the hills, filling the valleys with that mournful music that haunts you wherever you go.”   Thank you, Mr. Bissell, for a wonderful book.  I now I, too, have a little bit of river in my blood.