Wicked River

by Lee Sandlin

  That was the appeal of Fink: he was a creature of pure impulse—and yet whatever he did, no matter how bizarrely random it might be, he did perfectly. He achieved without effort what nobody else could do in a lifetime of labor. His air of godlike grace, of what in classical literature was called arete, transcended everything about his personality—which was in all other ways appalling. In story after story, he was casually shown to be a psychotic thug. He had no morals, no conscience, no principles, and no remorse. His signature quality was his murderous rage, which in him seems indistinguishable from happy-go-lucky high spirits. There’s one story where he cheerfully boils up puppies in a stew and laughs uproariously at the horrified reaction of his dinner guests. In another he puts kindling around his wife’s bed, sets it on fire, and watches in delight as she wakes up in terror and has to jump through the flames.

  And yet the storytellers perpetually rhapsodized about him. They sang the praises of his great soul, his invincible backwoods wisdom, and his heart as big as the river itself. He was, in the words of one writer, “the tallest, strongest, longest-winded fellow in the section, carried the truest rifle, knew more Ingin ways, was the wildest hand at a frolic, and withal, was the greatest favorite in the country.”

  Maybe they could praise him like this because they no longer had to live with him. The submerged theme running through all the Mike Fink stories was that he belonged to the heroic days of the river’s past. He was often called the Last of the Gintys. “Ginty” was river slang for a tough guy—Fink was the last because the old-style tough guys were falling out of favor on the increasingly tamed and civilized river. He was also called the Last of the Keelboatmen. The keelboats were vanishing from the river as the century went on. Or else he was simply the Last of the Boatmen, because the voyageurs had the feeling that their livelihood was rapidly becoming obsolete.

  There is even a Fink story about what was happening to the old river culture. It describes Fink’s first sight of a steamboat. As he saw it go cruising serenely up the river during a flood, he thought it must be Noah’s ark. The white puffballs furiously billowing from the smokestacks, he decided, were the breath of all the animals inside.

  Fink wasn’t given to reflection; any thoughts he had about this vision he kept to himself. But the point of the story would not have been lost on the river men in the audience. The increasing dominance of the steamboat on the river meant the end of their way of life. If the steamboat was Noah’s ark, after all, then Fink must have been left behind, part of the world that was drowning.

  Fink himself seems ultimately to have gotten the message. In the end he gave up the river life and struck out again on his own. The later stories in the Fink saga describe how he went off on a new adventure in the wilderness country up the Missouri. One night on a riverbank he was playing his favorite game of marksmanship and, for the first time in his life, missed his target. He was trying to shoot a tin cup off somebody’s head at fifty yards, and instead the man fell dead. In some versions of the story, Fink missed because he was drunk—“corned too heavy,” as they said on the river. In others, he deliberately missed because he and his victim were having a fight over an Indian squaw. But what happened after that was abrupt and final: a bystander picked up a gun and shot Fink dead.

  In some stories, the bystander was a stranger. Sometimes he was the victim’s brother. In one version, he was Fink’s best friend. That didn’t matter; the point was the same. It ended for Fink brutally and thoughtlessly, the way things had always happened with Fink, the way life had always gone on the river.

  Was Fink a real person? Doubtless not—but people talked like it. Sometimes they seemed to be bursting out with the need to reveal the truth about him, as though they’d had to keep glancing over their shoulders while he was alive for fear he was listening in. There was an anonymous letter in the Western General Advertiser, in 1845, claiming to be by somebody who knew another anonymous somebody—“a friend of mine, one of the oldest and most respected of the commanders of steamboats in the Nashville trade”—who actually had known Mike Fink personally. According to the letter writer, this friend had said authoritatively that the real Mike Fink was “worthless and vile.” The letter goes on: “Mike was one of the very lowest of mankind, and entirely destitute of any of the manly qualities which often were to be found among the bargemen of his day.” Not the sort of thing usually written about a folklore hero. Perhaps letters like this make it slightly more plausible that Fink did exist.

  There was at least one thing about Fink that wasn’t purely fantastic. He reflected, in a distorted and abstracted way, an attitude that people in the river valley actually held. They all lived for the spontaneous, heedless surge of wild exuberance, the sudden recourse to violence with no provocation—the violence if not of act then of thought and of language. They routinely did and said extraordinarily foolish things for no reason other than joie de vivre. John James Audubon, in solemn correspondence with the most distinguished scientists in Europe, often enlivened his descriptions of the fauna of the Mississippi with absurd creatures out of his own head that he claimed were as real as the alligators and the passenger pigeons. He had nothing to gain by this kind of shameless romancing; in fact, his reputation could easily have been destroyed, given how self-evidently preposterous some of his inventions were. It was as though he couldn’t help himself. After pages of scrupulously accurate observations of the river’s wildlife, he was somehow obliged to imagine the gigantic Devil-Jack Diamond-Fish, with scales that were impervious to bullets and that could be used as flints to strike fires.

  This kind of submerged taste for the manic became familiar to the people around Abraham Lincoln. In the White House he was well known for his air of forbidding gloom, but he would also frequently interrupt the most serious discussions of military strategy with nonsensical tall tales about two squirrels fighting on a log, or an old woman and a chicken thief. In the middle of a debate over a desperate battle, he would suddenly snort with laughter and say, “This reminds me of when I was a boatman on the Mississippi” or “This reminds me of a fight in a bar-room at Natchez, but I won’t tell that story now.” Such moments of private levity gained him a reputation among the sophisticates of Washington as an incomprehensible barbarian. Even those who admired him had to admit that they usually had no idea what he could possibly think was so funny.

  The voyageurs had a ritual game they’d play called shout-boasting, the point of which was to make up surreally violent claims about themselves and then dare to fight anybody who challenged them. Here is one shout-boaster, on a raft heading down the Mississippi at midnight:

  Then he jumped up in the air and cracked his heels together again and shouted out: “Whoo-oop! I’m the old original iron-jawed, brass-mounted, copper-bellied corpse-maker from the wilds of Arkansaw! Look at me! I’m the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam’d by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, nearly related to the small-pox on the mother’s side! Look at me! I take nineteen alligators and a bar’l of whiskey for breakfast when I’m in robust health, and a bushel of rattle-snakes and a dead body when I’m ailing! I split the everlasting rocks with my glance, and I squench the thunder when I speak! Whoo-oop! Stand back and give me room according to my strength! Blood’s my natural drink, and the wails of the dying is music to my ear! Cast your eye on me, gentlemen! and lay low and hold your breath, for I’m ’bout to turn myself loose!” All the time he was getting this off, he was shaking his head and looking fierce, and kind of swelling around in a little circle, tucking up his wrist-bands, and now and then straightening up and beating his breast with his fist, saying, “Look at me, gentlemen!”

  The scene is from the original manuscript of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain might be thought to be burnishing to an especially high glow his nostalgia for the old river world, but in fact he wasn’t exaggerating what shout-boasting was typically like. Similar dervish dances of language can be found throughout the early lit
erature of the river—particularly in an odd series of joke books that began circulating around 1840, spoofs of the famous Farmer’s Almanac, featuring the supposed adventures of the frontier hero Davy Crockett.

  The real Davy Crockett, who had died a few years earlier at the Alamo, actually had been a wild and charismatic man, a kind of true-life Mike Fink. But in the almanacs he was reimagined as something much grander—as a demigod of the river valley, a mythic superhero who wrestled wild animals for fun, wiped out whole Indian tribes out of pique, and rode his pet alligator up waterfalls. The stories were written in a bizarre parody of frontier slang, where illiteracies like “satisfakshun” and “Kornill” (for “Colonel”) and heavy dialect like “I war skeered” were jumbled together with weirdly pompous nonce words: “explunctify,” “flustification,” “insinnivation,” “absquottleated,” “tongariferous,” “sarcledicular.” Crockett was always bellowing things like “My name are Thunder and Lightning!” and claiming that he once fought a bison a thousand years old, “with eyes like two holes burnt in a blanket, or two bullets fired into a stump.” A typical story began:

  I was laying asleep on the Mississippi one day, with a piece of river scum for a pillow, and floating downstream in a rail free and easy style …

  Crockett had a friend named Ben Harding, who could blast enemies away by the stench of his breath, and he also had a woman—a vague shape-shifter who was sometimes his mother, sometimes his sister, and sometimes his wife. She could “jump a seven rail fence backwards, dance a hole through a double oak floor, spin more wool than one of your steam mills, and smoke up a ton of Kentucky weed in a week.” On the day of her marriage, she chased a crocodile half a mile. Her sneezing “lifts the roof of the house about one foot, and breaks the crockery.” She wore clothes made of the skins of the bears she’d wrestled to death, and a necklace made of the eyes she’d gouged out of the skulls of her rivals. She went by a variety of extravagant names—usually she was called Florinda Fury—but her grandest incarnation is as Sally Ann Thunder Ann Whirlwind.

  This was another given of the frontier imagination: in the tall tales, the women were just as exuberantly powerful as the men. The wild men of the valley were “ring-tailed roarers”; the women were “riproarious she-males.” “She-male” wasn’t meant as an insult. The implication was that their strength and their appetites were the equal of any man’s.

  The wildest stories of these appetites weren’t in the Crockett almanacs. They showed up in print only in fugitive pamphlets and broadsheets, and many of them weren’t written down at all until they were collected by the folklorists of a later century. These were the stories of the valley’s prostitutes. Some of the folklorists invented a female version of Crockett to hang these stories on. They called her Annie Christmas, and her stories were all about prostitutes so skilled and so voracious they could intimidate Crockett himself. One Annie Christmas story told of a prostitute traveling up and down the river with a bucket of gold; she would bring it with her into the brothels and the gunboats and offer to bet the bucket against the house till that she could take on more men in a night than any woman there. It was said that she never lost.

  There was one simple explanation for the wildness of the river culture: everybody was drunk. The great temperance movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which ultimately resulted in Prohibition, weren’t outbursts of foolish moralism, or not only that: they were legitimate responses to the astonishing volume of alcohol consumed on the frontier. New arrivals were routinely horrified by it. One writer observed that a typical inhabitant put away “a whiskey keg in the morning, and a keg of whiskey at night; stupid and gruff in the morning, by noon could talk politics and abuse the Yankees, and by sundown was brave for a fight.” Another recorded the alcohol consumed at one picnic attended by only two people: two bottles of claret, one bottle of champagne, one large bottle of anisette, one small bottle of muscat, and a bottle of honey brandy.

  It was taken for granted that people had alcohol at every meal. On the steamboats, travelers were at least a little tipsy from the moment they woke up—their custom was to stop off at the bar and down a glass of wine and bitters on the way to breakfast. There would be no slowdown in the bar service till long after midnight. Steamboat meals were famously lavish; the drink menus just as much so. The British traveler Alexander Marjoribanks recorded some of what was offered: mint juleps; spiked eggnog; rum punch with milk and nutmeg; sherry cobbler made with lemon, strawberries, and sugar; gin sling with rum; a brandy cocktail with bitters and lemon peel; and a drink of brandy, mint, and ice called a brandy smash.

  The voyageurs and the other river people didn’t have that kind of variety available to them. Their drink of choice was Monongahela rye, which was distilled in Pennsylvania, brought down the Ohio, and distributed all through the river valley. It was rough and it was potent, and the custom was to drink it three times a day. (The menu didn’t vary, either—on most flatboats and rafts, it was beef or pork at each meal, fried in a skillet with bread dough and a lot of grease; the voyageurs as a rule disdained fish.) The result was predictable: the crew was drunk all day, every day. Drunken fights on the boats were almost an hourly occurrence. Drunken riots in the river districts at night were routine. The captains on the boats would use any means necessary to restore order. In one celebrated incident in the 1810s, a keelboat captain broke up a fight on deck by beating an oar repeatedly over the head of the most drunken and abusive crewman, until the man fell to the deck unconscious and then slithered overboard and drowned. The case became famous only because the captain was conscientious enough to turn himself in to the authorities at the next port. There a hasty inquest was held, and the verdict was “accidental death.”

  But there seemed to be something other than mere drunkenness at work in the valley. The wildest passions of the frontier legends—the rages of Fink, the lunatic exuberance of Crockett and his cohorts, the extravagant energies of Annie Christmas—all had a basis in daily life; they all shared in that mysterious upwelling of outsize exuberance that inspired the shout-boasting and Audubon’s dabblings in imaginary natural history. Maybe nobody ever rode alligators around the river, but they really did keep alligators as pets. They also made pets of mountain lions, pumas, and bears.

  There was one regular occasion where the collective energies of the valley found a natural outlet: the religious gathering known as the camp meeting. Camp meetings were a routine fixture of life in the valley from the beginning of the nineteenth century until sometime in the 1840s. They were wild and disorienting events. One witness, the minister James Finley, wrote that they “exhibited nothing to the spectator … but a scene of confusion, such as scarcely could be put into human language.” The British traveler William Newnham Blane said: “One of these meetings, at which many thousands are often assembled, and which commonly last for several days, fills the spectator with the utmost alarm and wonder. An Indian war-dance is a bagatelle to it, and I verily believe that it exceeds the wildest orgies of the Bacchanalians or the Corybantes.”

  Camp meetings were usually held somewhere deep in the wilderness, typically in a large forest glade or clearing. They tended to last for around a week. They were almost always held in high summer, when farmers could afford to take that much time off from their fields. During the meeting, the grounds were transformed into a kind of tent city (which is why they were sometimes also known as tent meetings). There were large tents serving as makeshift hostels, taverns, and hospitals, and open-air kitchens were everywhere. Around the central meeting grounds was a ring of smaller tents where families set up housekeeping and where hawkers and peddlers put their wares on display. People who couldn’t get a place to sleep in one of the tents, which were invariably overcrowded, would find what shelter they could in the surrounding forest—this was not seen as a big hardship because the summer nights in the valley were usually sultry, and anyway these events were supposed to be about something other than material comfort. Some of the meetin
gs were remarkably large. There was one at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in the summer of 1804 that drew more than twenty thousand people—at a time when New Orleans, the biggest city in the river valley, had a population of around ten thousand.

  A typical meeting began in a low-key, almost solemn way. A preacher gave a sermon of welcome and led a prayer for peace and community. This was followed by the singing of several hymns. Then there would be more sermons. Gradually, as the hours went by, the atmosphere changed. The preachers became more lively; the audience grew more excited. One attendee recalled that “the order of preaching was for the first speaker to be somewhat logical, and to show forth to the listening audience his great learning and wisdom; for the last speaker was left the sensational. He would ‘get happy,’ clap his hands, froth at the mouth; the congregation responding, some groaning, some crying loudly, ‘Amen,’ some calling ‘glory, glory, glory to God!’ ” The sermonizing went on past sunset, and when it ended, everyone broke off with the sense of a day well spent.

  The next day, and the day following, the sermons grew increasingly sensational and impassioned, and the excited response of the crowd grew more prolonged. By the second or third day, people were crying out during the sermons, and shouting prayers, and bursting into loud lamentations; they began grabbing at their neighbors and desperately pleading with them to repent; they sobbed uncontrollably and ran in terror through the crowd, shoving aside everybody in their path. Many of the preachers were famous for their hysterical intensity—none more so than the Reverend James McGready, who gave at tent meetings a sermon called “The Character, History, and End of the Fool” (the fool being the one who said in his heart that there was no God). The character and history of the fool were scanted; all of the reverend’s fury was devoted to evoking the fool’s end: