It was a familiar place that William Walker returned to in the summer of 2012—back from a writing career in Europe to his boyhood home in Eastern South Carolina and to the Little Pee Dee, a legendary river celebrated from the time of Revolutionary War hero Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox. He had made a promise to his dying cousin Ben to paddle the river of their youth and he meant to keep his word. When he could fi nd no book to guide the 109- mile journey Walker wrote one. Down The Little Pee Dee—Paddling South Carolina’s Legendary Blackwater River records the events of the trip made by the author and his friend and cousin, naturalist L.L. Gaddy. The two paddled the Little Pee Dee from its headwaters at Red Bluff Lake in Marlboro County, S.C., to the junction with the Great Pee Dee River near the Atlantic Ocean. Walker’s entertaining and often deeply personal narrative intertwines the history of the Little Pee Dee—and his family’s history—with the two paddlers’ adventures on the river.
