In 1682, the French explorer Robert de La Salle became the first European to journey from the Great Lakes down the Illinois and Mississippi rivers to the Gulf of Mexico. There at the delta, he claimed for France the vast heartland of America. With the passage of time, the Mississippi River has become a central part of the American psyche, a running theme in our history and folklore.

Long fascinated by the enigmatic La Salle, Daniel Spurr traces La Salle's route. From the upper Midwest, where seemingly every town has a street or park named after La Salle, they head downriver to New Orleans and beyond. What follows is a journey of remembrance and awakening, a juxtaposition of the nation that has grown up along the banks of the Mississippi and the untamed wilderness of La Salle's time - a "pre-America" that is revealed by the journals and documents of La Salle and his contemporaries.

As Spurr, his son, and his grown daughter encounter the people and culture of the region and imagine its history, he illuminates the changes that the landscape and its denizens have undergone. Spurr himself comes across a kindred spirit in the polio-stricken Lee Politsch, who has spent much of his life studying the engravings on a sandstone tablet found in Illinois. The tablet, he believes, proves that La Salle, not Louis Jolliet and Father Marquette, discovered the Upper Mississippi.