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By Root 725 0

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 literature 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