Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [51]
Phelps’s manuscript was never published. In Foote’s own memoirs, written after the Civil War, he was vague about what happened to it. At one point he claims he no longer had it because he did send it out for publication, but this may be his memory failing him, because there’s no record now of such a book existing. Another passage implies that he destroyed it. This is more likely. Not only was Phelps’s memoir unpublishable—publicly advocating abolition was a felony in Mississippi—but if Foote had been found in possession of such an incendiary manuscript, it’s likely he himself would have gone to prison.
The Phelps incident did have one positive consequence for Foote. After it was over, he and Prentiss reconciled. They remained close friends for another fifteen years, until Prentiss’s death. They never fought another duel—at least not with each other. Prentiss had a long career as a prosecutor. Foote went into politics: he became governor of Mississippi and a U.S. senator. He was one of the authors of the Compromise of 1850, legislating the spread of slavery into the new states of the Union, which was sometimes said to have staved off for a decade the outbreak of the Civil War.
7
The Roar of Niagara
THE MOST CELEBRATED PHRASE to describe the typical river man was “half horse, half alligator.” There’s no record of who coined the phrase or who was first called it—sooner or later it was used about every prominent man on the river, up to and including Abraham Lincoln. But the figure it was most associated with was a voyageur named Mike Fink. Stories about Mike Fink were told all over the valley. He was famous for what one writer described as “his wild freaks and daredevil sprees.” “He war,” as one story in frontier dialect put it, “a helliferocious fellow, and made an awful fine shot.… There ar’nt a man from Pittsburgh to New Orleans but what’s heard of Mike Fink, and there aint a boatman on the river, to this day, but what strives to imitate him.”
The Mike Fink stories were a kind of primordial example of literary realism. At least, they weren’t set in the absurdist universe where most tall tales unfold; they took place in what was recognizably the real Mississippi River valley, the world of keelboats and flatboats, of frontiersmen and Native Americans, of bluffs and points and chutes and levees. The only fantastic element in them was Fink himself. In the archetypical Fink story, he was floating down the Mississippi in a keelboat when he picked up his rifle for no reason at all and shot at somebody onshore. His target might be an Indian brave on a hilltop, or a slave boy carrying a bucket along a plantation road. In an instant, the victim would have his earlobe sliced off by the bullet, or a spur on his heel blasted away with surgical precision. Fink’s boat glided on; before the victim or the bystanders could react, Fink was around the river bend, leaving nothing behind but the sound of his laughter.
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