Folktales and Legends of the Middle West Read online

  The party rose before dawn and reloaded the bateaux. Birch bark is an excellent surface for painting, so the lead bateau was a colorful vessel. The gunwales were striped red, white and green, the bow emblazoned with the dark specked head of a loon. The name Trois-Rivieries—the Quebec village where the boat had been constructed—was lettered on both sides. As the boats neared Keweenaw Point, a treacherous cape where surf smashed against copper-filled ochre rocks, the voyageurs began singing. To keep the paddles in time, and to distract themselves for their drudgery, voyageurs sang of women, of nature, of life in the canoes, of the French motherland most of them had never seen, and never would. That morning, they sang “A La Claire Fontaine.” In English, it means “At the Clear Running Fountain.” It goes like this:

  A la claire fontaine

  M’en allant promener

  J’ai trouve l’ean si belle

  Qui je m’y suis baigne

  Lui ya longtemps que je t’aime

  Jamais je ne t’oublierai

  At the clear running fountain

  Sauntering by one day

  I found it so compelling

  I bathed without delay

  Your love long since overcame me

  Ever in my heart you’ll stay

  Keweenaw Point was considered such a navigational hazard that some crews portaged across the peninsula rather than risk its rocky outcroppings. But the men of the Trois-Rivieres were in a hurry to reach Grand Portage, and thus not eager to hump their cargo across twenty miles of stony ground.

  That morning was so windy that one Denis joked, “Someone must have sacrificed an entire pouch to La Vielle.”

  “Perhaps if we sprinkle some on the water, we can persuade her to calm the winds,” Armand suggested.

  This he did, but the winds grew stronger and stronger, until not even the exertions of eight men could control Trois-Riviere’s course. The bateau climbed and dove on the swelling waves, until finally its hull smashed into the granite ledge that would later be identified on nautical charts as Stanard’s Point. The granite rent such a breach in the boat’s bark skin that not even a sponge kept on board could soak up all the water gushing through it. The Trois-Rivieres sank, carrying its cargo and crew to the bottom of Lake Superior.

  Stanard’s Point is almost entirely submerged, except for a shelf of rock just large enough for a man to pace back and forth. Only one member of the Trois-Riviere’s crew was a strong enough swimmer to attain this refuge: Honore. Finding a handhold on the granite, he lifted himself onto the exposed rock and stood up, even as the waves washed across his waterlogged moccasins. And then he began to do the only thing a shipwrecked mariner can do in this situation: he prayed. To the Father. To the Son. To the Holy Mother. To the Holy Mother’s mother, Sainte Anne. To St. Brendan the Navigator, patron saint of sailors. Honore prayed only that he be spared long enough to confess to a priest, so he could ascend to heaven unencumbered by his sins. Perhaps God or a saint would guide another bateau in the caravan back to this rock. But none came. Honore was surrounded by all the water he could ever drink, so he didn’t go thirsty. He was also surrounded by all the fish he could eat, but he had no way to catch them. A week passed under the July sun. Honore grew weaker and weaker. When he finally passed from hope to resignation, he stopped praying for his own salvation, and prayed instead for the safety of other voyageurs who might pass this spot.

  On the journey back from Grand Portage, only one bateau full of foolhardy voyageurs decided to risk a trip around Keweenaw Point. The wreck of the Trois-Rivieres had turned the rendezvous into a solemn memorial. Instead of dance tunes, the fiddlers played dirges. In addition to performing weddings between Frenchmen and Native girls, the Black Robes said masses for the drowned voyageurs. Almost all the crews agreed that from now on, it would be safer to portage across the Keweenaw, no matter the effort, rather than risk another disaster. The one crew that disagreed argued that the storm, not the rocks, had sunk the Trois-Rivieres. As they paddled toward Stanard’s Point, they saw a light, bright enough to assert itself on a cloudless noon. Even across miles of water, they could see it formed the shape of a man, with a cap, a sash, a pouch, leather leggings and moccasins.

  “Boys, I think we need to steer clear of that beacon,” declared the bowsman. The bowsman was the voyageur who guided the craft’s progress, and carried it during portages, along with the steersman, who sat in the back.

  Never again did a bateau or a ship crash against Stanard’s Point. The beacon shone for over a century, until a lighthouse was built on the rock where Honore had spent the final days of his life. Then, his service to his fellow mariners completed, his light went out.

  MIKE FINK AND THE PIRATES OF THE OHIO

  ’m the Salt River Roarer!” Mike Fink liked to bellow to any man or woman he met. “I can out-run, out-jump, out-shoot and lick any man in the river. I’m half seadog, and the rest of me is Kentucky war horse, Ohio snapping turtle, and Mississippi gator.”

  Mike Fink was the biggest, toughest, brawlingest, straight-shootingest keelboatman who ever sank a pole into the Ohio or the Mississippi. When Mike bragged—which was whenever he opened his mouth, except when he was pouring whiskey down his throat—he bragged in a voice so deep and loud that a man standing on the Cincinnati docks could hear him from all the way across the river, in Kentucky. Everyone in the Ohio Valley knew about Mike Fink’s exploits, and if they didn’t, he told them.

  “I can shoot a whisker off a sleeping cat at fifty yards without waking him up,” he boasted. “I love women and I love a good fight.”

  Mike was born at Fort Pitt, a few years after the English took it over from the French. In his youth, he was a market hunter, killing deer for the Pittsburgh butchers. Then he was an Indian scout, patrolling the wilderness for threats to the settlement, spending weeks in the woods with no provisions but jerked venison, corn meal, and a rifle for hunting his own meat. The Battle of Fallen Timbers pushed the Indians westward in 1793, so they no longer menaced Pittsburgh, but Mike was by then too wild a character to settle down as a farmer or a merchant. Like other restless men who couldn’t stand to live less than a rifle shot from their nearest neighbor, Mike followed the frontier westward, hiring on as a keelboatman on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, which then formed the edges of American civilization. Rivers were the superhighways of that era. A keelboat—a long, low, wooden vessel with a cabin in the middle of the deck—was the fastest means of carrying a load of cargo from Pittsburgh to New Orleans. To get back upstream, the crew would sink long poles into the mud and walk from bow to stern, outmuscling the current. No one could travel more miles in a day than Mike, who was six feet tall, weighed 180 pounds, and within those dimensions was built like an American Hercules.

  When rival boats met on the river, or tied up in the same port, it was customary for the crews to repair to the shore for a good-natured fight, either in a tavern, or, if they’d washed up in a dry county, a clearing in the woods. During those brawls, which sometimes went on for hours, men would have their eyes gouged out, then crawl along the floor to find the missing orbs and pop them back in their sockets, so they could see clearly to continue the battle. The winner of these fights was rewarded with a red turkey feather. No one had more feathers bristling from the band of his beaver hat than Mike Fink.

  After an enjoyable afternoon of punching, kicking, and gouging his fellow boatmen, Mike would seek out his favorite refreshment: Kentucky bourbon.

  “I can drink a gallon of whiskey in twenty-four hours and still walk a straight line and recite the Declaration of Independence from top to bottom,” was another of his boasts.

  But not even a man who could hold his whiskey was immune to the corrosive effects of alcohol. Mike drank so much bourbon it ate away the lining of his stomach.

  “Unless your stomach grows a new lining,” a frontier doctor told him, “you won’t be able to drink another drop without killing yourself.”

  Never drinking another drop sounded worse to Mike than k
illing himself. So he shot a buffalo, skinned it, and swallowed its wooly hide, which from then on soaked up all the whiskey he drank.

  Even beyond his renown as a tippler, Mike was most famous for his shooting. His six-foot-long rifle, Bang-All, was adorned with brass and silver inlays in the shapes of Indians, dogs, hearts, eagles, and a sheriff’s star. His best-known trick was shooting a cup of whiskey off a man’s head at forty paces, which he would perform for a silver dollar wager.

  In the nineteenth century, with the frontier still a living memory, Mike Fink was a household name. He was a hero of dime novels, and showed up as a character in Davy Crockett’s Almanack, an annual publication that kept the King of the Wild Frontier’s name and exploits alive after he was killed at the Alamo. According to the almanac, Mike was the only man ever to outshoot Davy. The Kentucky frontiersman once spent a night with Mike at his cabin on the Cumberland River.

  “I’ve got the handsomest wife, and the fastest horse, and the sharpest shooting in all Kentucky,” Mike bragged to Davy. “Do you see that cat sleeping on the top rail of that fence, a hundred and fifty yards yonder? I’ll trim its whiskers, and it won’t stir a muscle.”

  Mike’s aim was so true that he shot off every whisker without waking the cat.

  “You left a half-inch off that last one,” Davy pointed out, and shot it off cleanly.

  Desperate to outdo the great Davy Crockett, Fink spotted his own handsome wife, Peg, walking to the spring with a gourd to collect water. Raising Bang-All to his shoulder, he shot half the comb off her head. Not a hair stirred, and Peg never looked up.

  “Now you shoot off the rest,” he challenged Davy.

  “Mike, you’ve got me beat,” his guest conceded. “I couldn’t hold my hand still if I pointed this rifle anywhere near a woman. Let’s have ourselves a dram of whiskey and I’ll be on my way.”

  Mike had to be tough with his fists and sure with a bullet, because in the early nineteenth century, the lawless years before statehood, the lower Ohio River was bedeviled by pirates who would hijack a boat, kidnap or kill its crew, and pilot the trophy downriver to New Orleans, where they sold the cargo for an enormous profit before news of their treachery reached civilization. The pirates’ favorite hide out was Cave-in-Rock, a deep, low shelter that looked out on the Ohio from the southern tip of the Illinois Territory. A freebooter named Samuel Mason set up his headquarters there, enticing boatmen ashore with a sign advertising “Liquor Vault and House of Entertainment.” If that didn’t bring ’em in, Mason dispatched a confederate to pose as a pilot who could guide the boat through the treacherous channel. Instead, the pilot ran it aground near the cave, where Mason and his pirates overwhelmed the gullible crew and looted their cargo. The story of Mike’s tangle with the pirates was told in Mike Fink: Legend of the Ohio, a dime novel by Emerson Bennett, one of the best-selling authors of the pre-Civil War era. It was also portrayed in the Walt Disney movie Davy Crockett and the River Pirates, the one and only time Mike has been portrayed onscreen.

  The pirate-infested Lower Ohio was so feared by keelboatmen that when Mike was loading his keelboat, Light-foot, at the Cincinnati docks, he and his crew took time out to visit a soothsayer named Mother Deb, “to find out whether we’re going to be hanged or drown.” The Light-foot was carrying a shipment of gold to a bank in St. Louis. Pirates would kill for that kind of plunder.

  A ragged crone who lived in a rickety cabin atop one of the Seven Hills overlooking the Ohio, Mother Deb always leaned on a hickory staff with a horseshoe nailed to the head as a defense against witches. Reading from playing cards spread across her wobbly table, Mother Deb forecast a bloody end for Mike Fink. Beware, she warned him, of a heavy, swarthy man with a black beard.

  “Even if you survive your coming ordeal, you will have many years and many dangers ahead of you,” she told Mike.

  “Well, boys, you heard the old woman,” Mike addressed his crew as they headed back to the docks. “If you didn’t want a little danger, you should have gotten a job in a counting house. I can lick five times my weight in wildcats, so if a little danger keeps me onshore, my name’s not Mike Fink!”

  Light-foot set out with four passengers, including Aurelia Fontaine, a young woman from Mexico who was seeking to return to Vera Cruz by way of New Orleans. Also on board was a stranger who had paid for passage as far as Shawneetown, a trading post on the north bank of the river in Illinois.

  The first trial of any keelboat journey was the Falls of the Ohio, at Louisville, a rapids that carried a boat on a switchback descent, threatening to dash it against the rocks over which the river spilled. Mike stood in the bow of Light-foot and guided his crew toward the one safe channel through the Falls.

  “Steady, all, steady!” he cried. “Give her the chute, then.”

  When Light-foot was safely past the Falls, and again floating on smooth waters, Mike opened the whiskey keg. The crew drank its daily dram and sang a tune known to all who traveled the river:

  “Some rows up, but we floats down

  Way down the Ohio to Shawneetown

  Haul on the beech oar, she moves too slow

  Way down to Shawneetown on the Ohio

  I’ve got a gal in Louisville, a wife in New Orleans

  When I get to Shawneetown I’ll see my Indian queen.

  Now them good ol’ boys, they talk loud and long.

  They wide as a barrel and their twice as strong

  The water’s might warm, boys, the air is cold and dank,

  And the cursed fog it gets so thick you cannot see the bank.

  Now the current’s got her and we’ll take up the slack.

  Float her down to Shawneetown and we’ll bushwack her back.

  Some rows up, but we floats down,

  Way down the Ohio to Shawneetown.”

  The next afternoon, the stranger got off the boat at Shawneetown — only twenty-five miles upriver from Cave-in-Rock.

  “We’re going to tie up here for the night,” Mike ordered. “I’m not floating past that nest of pirates in the pitch darkness. That’s the only way they can win a fight. I’ll lick a hundred pirates with my bare hands in broad daylight.”

  Mike and his men were playing cards below decks when they felt Light-foot shake and heard footsteps up above. Mike grabbed a pistol off the wall and raced up the ladder, where he confronted a man dressed in the pirate’s costume of red skull cap, black-and-red striped shirt, linsey-woolsey trousers, and leather boots. The stranger wore every accoutrement of the desperado save a gun and a knife hanging from his belt. He held his hands above his head to show he carried neither.

  “Who goes there?” Mike demanded.

  “Ned Groth,” the man replied. “I’m a member of Samuel Mason’s gang—or was, until a few hours ago, when I got into a donnybrook with another fella over my share from our last raid. Mason told his henchmen to take me out to the rocks and shoot me, because he didn’t want no malcontents in his gang. But I overpowered ’em and threw their guns in the river. Then I jumped in myself.”

  “And what are you doing on my boat?”

  “That fella who got off in Shawneetown was one of Mason’s confederates. He let the boss know you got valuable cargo, and there’s two boatloads of pirates headed this way right now.”

  Before Mike could call an alarm to his crew, he heard the sound of oars stirring the water and saw the silhouettes of a pair of rowboats, still far enough away that they were darker than the surface. Mike ran to the head of the ladder and shouted down into the cabin.

  “Boys, we got a good old fight coming! Every one of you grab a pistol, because there’s two boatloads of pirates a-headed this way!”

  When Mike Fink shouted a warning, it could be heard by boats for miles up and down the river. But even before his crew could arm themselves and scramble up the ladder, Mason and his pirates were tumbling over Light-foot’s gunwales. Mike’s first mate, a young man named Fontaine, shot one of the bandits and tossed him in the river. Mason returned fire, putting
a bullet through the boy’s neck. In the on-deck confusion of gun smoke, fists, and knives, Mason and two fellow pirates slipped down into the cabin. They emerged with all three passengers, holding a gun to each captive’s back.

  “Now everyone just stop shooting, and this young lady and these two gentlemen won’t be harmed,” Mason commanded, as he edged across the deck with his prisoners. “And once we get the ransom they’re worth, they can continue on their journey.”

  Mason forced the terrified passengers into a waiting rowboat. Before it began the journey back to Cave-in-Rock, he shouted orders to the pirates still aboard the Light-foot.

  “Now you boys bring me back the entire boat, and there’ll be a reward for everyone.”

  The fight resumed, but without their leader, the pirates were no match for Mike Fink. With his hairy, callused fist, he hit one pirate so hard the man landed on the rocks in Kentucky, bounced once, and landed again in Tennessee. The wounded and the survivors finally leaped off Light-foot’s deck and swam frantically back to the rowboat Mason had left them.

  “I shook them more than an earthquake,” Mike boomed, as he watched the overloaded boat wallow back to Illinois. “I’m stronger than the current of the Mississippi, more dangerous than lightning, and more terrifying than waking up with a wildcat in your bed.”

  The next morning, after sleeping off a day of drinking and a night of fighting, Mike told his crew that he wanted to attack the pirates’ hideout, and that any man who wasn’t with him was welcome to swim back to Cincinnati with a yellow stripe on his back.

  “We promised to bring them folks to New Orleans, and by God, we will, without paying a penny in ransom to those ragged, skulking river pirates. We’ll lick them or die!” Every man went with Fink. The turncoat, Ned Groth, explained that the opening to the cave was hidden by rocks, to blend in with the rest of the bank, but that he could lead them to a landward entrance. The cave was likely to be guarded by a dozen pirates, but if they attacked after dark, when the drinking began, they could overcome the watchmen.