Life on The Mississippi Read Free Page B

Westerners with literary ambitions, who celebrated the exploits of the most famous of Western boatmen, the boasting, vainglorious, and violent Mike Fink, who by 1825 had already retreated westward up the Missouri and been shot dead in an argument, to be made a legend in increasingly improbable tales.
    Within a decade, however, Fink had become overshadowed by another figure associated with the wildest aspects of Mississippi River life, Davy Crockett. A Tennessee politician who encouraged the public perception of himself as incarnating the rambunctious spirit of the Western frontier, Crockett gained literary fame in the last five years of his life through his efforts and those of others. His death at the Alamo in 1836 considerably liberated the association, allowing Eastern hack writers to invent improbable deeds and widen Crockett’s comic range, transplanting him from the wilds of Tennessee to the great river, and imposing upon him the fabulous outlines of that folkloric amphibian combining the features of horse and alligator. This was the Davy Crockett of yearly comic almanacs, virtually all of which were published in Eastern cities during the fifteen years following the death of the historical Crockett.
    Where Fink was associated with keelboat life, Crockett became a virtual incarnation of the steamboat, a transformation licensed by his famous political slogan, “Go Ahead!”—the steamboat pilot’s order once the paddlewheels had reached open water. Crockett and his cry were exploited by Whig politicians eager to convert him into a folk hero with which to do battle against Andrew Jackson, for “Go Ahead!” perfectly expressed the buoyant optimism of the Whigs, who were champions of progress in its many commercial forms, including internal improvements like the building of canals, the widening of natural waterways, and the removal of impediments to navigation.
    In 1835, the year that Crockett headed west for his apotheosis at the Alamo, there was born in Florida, Missouri, an infant who would emerge as the spiritual child of the famous Tennessean, becoming for the last third of the nineteenth century what Crockett became soon after he died: the premier riverman of the United States. Born of parents with Southern (Virginia and Kentucky) origins, young Samuel Langhorne Clemens was also born a Whig, a political patrimony that links him not only to Henry Clay but to Abraham Lincoln, with whom he has often been compared. Both men, in quite different ways, inherited the mantle of Davy Crockett, sharing the Whig faith in American progress while leavening it by means of humor, the rough backwoods variety that comes with leaves, branches, and bark still attached and plenty of earthiness stuck to its roots.
    Both men are associated with life on the Mississippi, Lincoln early on having built a flatboat and guided it down to New Orleans. In this, however, it is Clemens who enjoys the preminence, not so much because of his actual experience—he spent a scant five years as a steamboat pilot on the river—but because he so successfully exploited the association, commenting with his pen name taken from the leadsman’s cry, “Mark Twain!” (indicating safe water, it somewhat resembles Crockett’s “Go Ahead!” in implication). However, not only did Lincoln become a lawyer and politician, but even before Sam Clemens began his apprenticeship as a river pilot, Lincoln was representing railroads in decisive court cases that would signal the doom of the riverboat as the primary mode of transportation in the great central valley. Whigs may have championed the removal of obstructions to navigation, but Lincoln made sure that railroad bridges were not counted as such.
    By the time Sam Clemens had set up shop as Mark Twain, the steamboat man had followed the keelboat man down the stream of time and the paddlewheel steamboat had become a symbol of past glories, not modern triumphs of technology. In Mark Twain’s famous novels featuring