Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [52]
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