Winona, located on an island where the upper Mississippi River flows from west to east, has been linked to the river from its earliest days. Before the community's settlement, Native Americans and white explorers sailed past Wapasha's Prairie in birchbark canoes, keel boats, and small sailboats. As early as the 1820s, steamboats plied the river while carrying people and goods to and from the state's interior. Before bridges began to crisscross the river, merchants had to use boats to bring people and supplies to Winona before they could travel farther west. The first bridge to cross the river was a swing bridge that allowed steamboats to pass. Images of America: Upper Mississippi River at Winona uses images collected and archived in the Winona County Historical Society's History Center to illustrate the history of the Mississippi River near Winona. Many of the photographs exhibited in this book have rarely been seen by the general public and have never been published.

This engaging and well-illustrated primer to the Upper Mississippi River presents the basic natural and human history of this magnificent waterway. Immortal River is written for the educated lay-person who would like to know more about the river's history and the forces that shape as well as threaten it today. It melds complex information from the fields of geology, ecology, geography, anthropology, and history into a readable, chronological story that spans some 500 million years of the earth's history. Like the Mississippi itself, Immortal River often leaves the main channel to explore the river's backwaters, floodplain, and drainage basin. The book's focus is the Upper Mississippi, from Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Cairo, Illinois. But it also includes information about the river's headwaters in northern Minnesota and about the Lower Mississippi from Cairo south to the river's mouth ninety miles below New Orleans. It offers an understanding of the basic geology underlying the river's landscapes, ecology, environmental problems, and grandeur.