Murder on the Ohio Belle

"A carefully crafted microhistory of a riverboat and life on the Western rivers that reveals the tensions and realities of America on the eve of civil war." -America's Civil War Review

In March 1856, a dead body washed onto the shore of the Mississippi River. Nothing out of the ordinary. In those days, people fished corpses from the river with alarming frequency. But this body, with its arms and legs tied to a chair, struck an especially eerie chord. The body belonged to a man who had been ...