Mississippi Jack by L.A. Meyer (2007)

Fifth delightful book in the Bloody Jack series. Our dear Jacky Faber is taken by the British at the end of the last book, as she returns a hero with the all of her classmates back to Boston after being kidnapped. Her classmates try to save her, but it is actually Higgins who saves her by engaging his actor friends to run a scam. Realizing she can't stay in Boston, she heads west with Higgins and Jim Tanner (she picked him up in Boston, a street kid, that she hired to mind her boat). The head to the Allegheny, where she has heard it runs into the Mississippi and down to New Orleans.

They are first joined by Katy, one of the servant girls at the school that was from a farm in Ohio, but just did not belong in the city and was heading west herself. Along the way they run into Mike Fink, a huge, tall tale telling, obnoxious drunk on a flatboat, but he does know the rivers. They steal his boat, pick up Clementine, Crow Jane, a Native American woman as cook, the Hawkes boys as crew, Yancy Cantrell (card shark) and his "slave"Chloe, Lightfoot and Chee-a-Quat, Reverand Clawson, Daniel, the Honeys, Solomon. You get the gist. Some start out as paying customers and then end up as part of Jacky's band. Others they rescue from nasty fathers, river pirates, and Solomon is a runaway slave. They spruce up the flatboat - Belle of the Golden West, make it a traveling entertainment boat. They arm it with small cannons that Jacky know how to use, as it is dangerous territory and those come in handy more than once.

So here we get a good history lesson on the life along the rivers of the US in 1806. The travel along the Allegheny, Ohio and Mississippi. They stop off in towns that are major cities now - Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, etc. I was surprised to recognize all the street names in New Orleans, so the French Quarter really is the old part of town. Slavery continues to be an issue that varies from state to state, individual to individual.