The Houseboat Book: The Log of a Cruise from Chicago to New Orleans — Story, Setting & Ideas

The Doctor's Dilemma and the River's Demands

The prelude frames the voyage as a reform: a doctor tired of city practice, a printer's devil crying for copy, a banging telephone. Yet the friend's refusal to let him go suggests that escape is never clean. Once on the river, the log records not idyllic drifting but constant problem-solving. At Helena, the crew lands on a muddy shore and finds the town full of holidaying men carrying suspicious jugs. Waugh notes the irony: game cannot be sold, but whisky flows freely. The practicalities of provisioning—securing bear-steaks at twenty-five cents a pound, hunting for a turkey fit to eat—anchor the narrative in daily struggle.

Mooring, Mud, and the Mechanics of Staying Put

Chapter XV, titled simply “Mooring,” reads like a manual. Waugh describes fender poles six inches thick at the butt, chains that will not chafe like rope, and the ideal of a narrow creek or cove—though he admits they have hardly seen such a place. He warns against tying close to a crumbly bank, a tree that may fall, or over a snag. At Memphis, a stake forty feet from shore washed out in an hour. The log is full of such precise, earned knowledge: the back current that carried the cabinboat onto a sand bar, the tug three hours warping off with an anchor. Mud coats everything; its fine grain makes it hard to remove from clothes.

Encounters Ashore: Law, Custom, and the Levee Camp

At Allison's Landing, Arkansas, a levee camp, a big negress comes aboard to see what they have for sale—drygoods are wanted badly. Waugh reports the story of an Indiana man arrested for carrying a pistol in Tennessee, unaware of the law, sentenced to a year less a day. The local saying: safer to kill a man than to carry a weapon. The log does not moralize heavily, but the juxtaposition of such incidents with the daily tasks of making candy and grabbing for presents in a basket suggests a quiet commentary on the gap between northern expectations and southern realities. The crew searches Memphis papers for news of a missing friend, J. J., and finds none.

Readers will find that Waugh's log rewards attention to its small, concrete details: the price of bear-steak, the length of a fender pole, the texture of Mississippi mud. The book is less a travelogue than a working document of life on a houseboat, where every landing brings negotiation with local custom and every mooring is a lesson in hydraulics. Approach it as a record of practical experience, not a polished narrative, and the river's own rhythms—slow, repetitive, punctuated by sudden hazards—will emerge.

Reading Waugh’s account of muddy levees and stubborn river currents, I found myself thinking of another traveler’s notebook, one that lingers on quieter, inland observations. There is a shared patience there—a willingness to sit with place rather than conquer it. Studies in the South and West, with Comments on Canada — A Reader’s Guide felt like a familiar hand on the same tiller, steering through landscape and human habit alike.