Newbery Honor book
Barred from his family home-stead by his mean-spirited uncle,
eighteen-year-old Chris weathers a Minnesota winter in a small cabin
with his grandfather. Poverty and the tempting stories of a wandering
Easterner convince Chris to harvest the trees on his grandfather's land
and float the logs down the spring floodwaters of the Mississippi to the
lumber mills in Saint Louis. Filled with stories of raft hands and river
pilots, this fast-paced novel has all the momentum of the great
Mississippi.