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By Root 780 0

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