I. The Hudson River : A celestial call to board ; Up rivers without sources ; There lurk the skid demon ; A drowned river ; Where Mohicans would not sleep ; Snowmelt and a nameless creek

II. The Erie Canal : The pull of a continent ; Released from the necessity of mundane toil ; Like Jonah, we enter the leviathan ; Knoticals and hangman's rope ; We sleep with a bad-tempered woman tossed by fever

III. The lakes : Hoisting the Blue Peter ; How the sun rose in the West to set me straight

IV. The Allegheny River : An ammonia cocktail and a sharp onion-knife ; A flight of eagles, an iron bed, and so forth ; Unlimited sprawl area ; Zing, boom, tararel!

V. The Ohio River : Proving the white man a liar ; The day begins with a goonieburger ; Enamel speaks ; Along the track of the glaciers ; From humdrummery on down toward tedium ; A history of the Ohio in three words ; A river coughed up from hell ; A necessity of topography and heart ; Nekked and without no posies ; Eyeless fish with eight tails ; The great omphalos in little Egypt

VI. The Mississippi River : A night without light on a river without exits ; The ghost of the Mississippi ; Of swampsuckers and samaritans ; To the tune of "Garry Owen" we get ready

VII. The Lower Missouri River : We start up the great Missouri ; I attach my life to the roots of the cottonwood ; A language with no word for flood ; Looking the river in the eye ; Clustered coincidences and peach pie ; Gone with the windings ; Pilotis's cosmic view gets bad news ; The dream lines of Thomas Jefferson ; A water snake across the bow ; Sacred hoops and a wheel of cheddar

VIII. The Upper Missouri River : We find the fourth Missouri ; The phantom ship of the Missouri reeds ; How to steal Indian land ; A conscientious woman ; Flux, fixes, and flumdiddle ; Sitting Bull and the broom of heaven ; How to be a hell of a riverman ; Yondering up the broomsticks ; Chances of aught to naught ; We walk under the Great River ; Why Odysseus didn't discover America ; Pilotis concocts an Indian name for God ; Trickles, dribbles, and gurglets ; My life becomes a preposition ; Little gods and small catechisms ; Eating lightning ; Imprecating the wind ; Into the Quincunx ; Planning for anything less than everything ; Over the ebullition ; Ex aqua lux et vis ; Weaknesses in mountains and men ; A nightmare alley ; No huzzahs in the heart

IX. The mountain streams : We meet mister eleven ; Eating the force that drives your life ; An ark from God or a miracle of Shoshones ; A shameless festal board

X. The Salmon River : Bungholes and bodacious bounces

XI. The Snake River : My Hermaphroditic quest ; Kissing a triding keepsake ; Messing about in boats

XII. The Columbia River : The far side of the river cocytus ; Place of the dead ; Theater of the graveyard ; A badger called plan A ; Robot of the river ; A taproom fit for Raggedy Ann ; Salt to salt, tide to tide.