Elevations: A Personal Exploration of the Arkansas River

The upper Arkansas River courses through the heart of America from its headwaters near the Continental Divide above Leadville, Colorado, to Arkansas City, just above the Kansas-Oklahoma border. Max McCoy embarked on a trip of 742 miles in search of the river's unique story. Part adventure and part reflection, steeped in the natural and cultural history of the Arkansas Valley, Elevations is McCoy's account of that journey. Going by kayak when he can--by Jeep, on foot, or by other means when he has to--McCoy takes us with him, navigating the Arkansas River as it reveals its nature and tests his own. Along the way, and when he isn't battling the current for his overturned kayak; braving a frigid Christmas Eve along the river; or joining the search for a drowning victim, he steps out to explore the world beyond the river's banks. Here for instance is Camp Amache, where Japanese Americans were imprisoned during World War II. Here is Ludlow, where thirteen women and children died in a standoff between striking coal miners and the militia in 1914. Farther along we find Sand Creek, site of a massacre by US soldiers in 1864, and, uncomfortably close, Garden City, where white supremacists were charged with planning a terror attack on Somali refugees in 2016. Whether traveling back in time, pausing in the present, or looking forward, Elevations captures the Arkansas River in its thrilling moments and placid stretches, in its natural splendor and degradation at human hands. The book shows us the river as a flowing repository of human history and, in the telling of this gifted writer, as a life-changing experience.

About the Author :
Max McCoy is professor of journalism and director of the Center for Great Plains Studies at Emporia State University. He has written a mystery series and works of historical fiction, three of which have won Spur Awards from the Western Writers of America.

Review :
"An engaging work that details the often tragic stories of people who lived in the region watered and drained by the Arkansas River from Leadville, Colorado to Arkansas City, Kansas."--Kansas History"McCoy uses the natural eastward flow of the Arkansas River as the prime organizing principle for his narrative, but we soon begin to realize that, just biographies of complex individuals, the life story of this river contains a mix of tragedy, heroism, humor, and, in McCoy's case, the opportunity to confront and wrestle with personal demons and failings."--Great Plains Research "Blending journalistic skills with that of a natural-born storyteller, McCoy tells a story of exploration and devastating human disregard."--Roundup Magazine "Max McCoy's Elevations is a sensitive, in-depth view of a river and its human and natural history. McCoy's prose is as fluid and absorbing as the river itself. The Arkansas' currents and rivulets embroider human history since before white settlement bent the river toward mining, irrigation, and drinking and waste water. The river's banks, however, are "where most of our interaction with the river stops and the wildness begins." Touching and moving, Elevations shows the author's personal connection with the Arkansas and why the river matters to us as Americans."--Patrick Dobson, author of Canoeing the Great Plains: A Missouri River Summer and Seldom Seen: A Journey into the Great Plains "McCoy floats through a valley haunted by gold--not only in mines along the continental divide, but in corporate wheat farms that bleed the Ogallala aquifer and in the fantasies of Coronado--a valley where marijuana is legal but canoeing public waters is not, where the same values that desecrated the river also desecrated its people at Sand Creek and Ludlow, at a Japanese American internment camp, and at immigrant communities in southwest Kansas. In his meticulous search for the story of the Arkansas, McCoy unearths a deeper story of his own personal battles and of America at the dawn of Trump."--George Frazier, author of The Last Wild Places of Kansas "Elevations is a Blue Highways kind of book about a swipe of America from Colorado to Oklahoma, down the fabled Arkansas River that in its lower length now flows salt and sand. A riverine biography, it hits all the notes--from past massacres like Ludlow to barely missed modern ones in Garden City, from declining groundwater to ascendant marijuana. The stories are perceptive picks, but best of all is the author's voice: unsurprised and unflinchingly honest."--Dan Flores, author of the award-winning books Coyote America and American Serengeti