Folktales and Legends of the Middle West Page 5

  At sunset, Mike unmoored Light-foot. The current carried it unnoticed past the pirates’ lair and up a creek just beyond the cave. Ned Groth led the crew down a woodland path that his boots knew even in the darkness. A hundred yards from the cave, they encountered a sentry.

  “It’s Ned Groth’s ghost!” exclaimed the frightened pirate, unaware that Groth had escaped Mason’s death sentence and joined Mike Fink’s crew.

  Mike pushed past Groth and confronted the man.

  “It’s not Ned Groth’s ghost, it’s Ned Groth in the flesh,” he boomed, in that voice loud enough to cross rivers. “And I’m Mike Fink in the flesh. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll step aside and give me back my passengers. Otherwise, my men and I will run you out of this cave like we ran you off my boat.”

  Mike Fink, God bless him, could never resist an opportunity to boast. This time, his boasts were an alarm to the pirates, who poured out of the cave with pistols cocked. All except their chieftain, Samuel Mason. Mason was clambering down the rocks with his prisoners, who he forced into a rowboat at the point of a gun.

  Once again, Mike Fink’s men routed the pirates, in a skirmish that briefly disturbed the dark, silent night with muzzle flashes, explosions of gunpowder, cursing, the crack of man’s fist against another man’s head, and finally, the terrified wails of the pirates as they scattered into the countryside, where they hid among the trees, each hoping to save his own life. The crew entered the cave, which was filled with the booty from half-a-dozen doomed boats that had been captured or run aground at Cave-in-Rock: barrels of flour and molasses, bags full of hard money, guns, knives, and, of course, casks of whiskey. But no sign of the captives. As the men began searching deeper into the low-ceilinged cave, they heard, from the river, a woman’s cry for help. Mike raced onto the rocks, pistol in hand, and saw a rowboat with three figures receding into the gloaming. Few marksmen would dare to take a shot at a moving target in the darkness, especially when there was a risk of hitting an innocent young lady. But Mike Fink never lacked confidence in his shooting. Or anything else, for that matter. He raised the pistol, drew a bead on Samuel Mason, and fired one shot, just before the darkness rendered his quarry invisible. He knew by the sounds of celebration on the boat that the bullet had struck home.

  “Come on, boys,” he ordered two boatmen standing on the rocks with him. “Let’s bring ’em back to shore.”

  They jumped in the water, swam to the middle of the channel, and rowed the boat back to safety. After that, keelboatmen never had to fear Cave-in-Rock. With their leader gone, the pirates never returned to the cave, or harassed river traffic.

  Instead, the keelboats had a new enemy. In 1807, a man named Robert Fulton designed a boat with a steam engine that turned a paddlewheel. It traveled the 150 miles up the Hudson River from New York City to Albany in just 32 hours. Within a decade of that maiden voyage, steamboats were plying the Ohio and the Mississippi. The first time Mike Fink saw one, on a cold October morning, he thought it was Noah’s Ark, and the steam unfurling from its pipe was the breath of every animal God had ordered Noah to gather. Mike came to despise any boat that was powered by a mechanical engine, rather than a strong man’s muscles. One day in 1822, Light-foot was headed up the Mississippi, just south of St. Louis, when it encountered a steamboat traveling downstream.

  “Captain Mike, she wants the channel,” the steersman said.

  “Well, then let her try for it,” Mike growled. “I’ll be damned if I yield to any steamboat.”

  Mike stood in the prow of his beloved boat, staring impassively as the steamboat grew larger and larger in his vision, until the vessels collided with a splintering crash. The steamboat’s boiler exploded. Its chimney collapsed. Its wooden planked sides caved in. The crew and passengers leapt overboard, swimming frantically to shore. The crash sank Light-foot as well, and Mike found himself stranded in St. Louis, without a boat to command.

  The steamboat, he understood, was not only making his livelihood obsolete, it was bringing settlers to the Northwest, and with settlers came civilization—that way of life to which the Salt River Roarer had never been able to reconcile himself. Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri had all joined the Union since Mike became a keelboatman. The frontier was moving westward, and Mike felt compelled to follow it. So he became a fur trapper, joining General William Ashby’s expedition to the Missouri River country. His marksmanship made him one of the most valuable members of Ashby’s company. At Fort William, on the Yellowstone River, Mike purchased a hundred bullets at the commissary, and predicted, “I’ll feed the fort all winter with these.” With a hundred shots, he killed a hundred bison. The trappers and the Shoshone Indians feasted for weeks, while Mike sold the hides for fifty cents apiece.

  But Mike was in his fifties—an advanced age then, especially for one who had led such a rough, vigorous life—and finally his shooting hand and marksman’s eye failed him. This had fatal consequences, both for himself and one of his companions. Every year, the trappers threw a frolic to celebrate the arrival of spring, and their release from the snowbound isolation of winter. They drank whiskey, fiddled, danced, and tried to one-up each other by telling the most outrageous tall tales. Of course, Mike had to show off his famous shooting trick.

  “Carpenter,” he challenged a young man who had wintered out with him in a cave, “I’m going to set a cup of whiskey on my head. I want you to walk off forty paces and see if you can knock it off my head.”

  Carpenter did so, but his shot grazed Mike’s scalp, singeing off a lock of graying hair and bloodying a strip of skin.

  “Son, I thought I taught you how to shoot,” Mike taunted.

  “Well, let’s see you do it, old man,” Carpenter said, setting a cup on his own head.

  Mike paced off the proper distance, turned and raised Bang-All to his shoulder for the final time. He pulled the trigger, and for the first time ever, his shot missed. It struck Carpenter in the forehead, killing him instantly.

  It so happened that Carpenter’s brother—a swarthy, bearded man—was also on the expedition and had witnessed the shooting contest. Seeing his kin collapse in the dirt, he rushed toward Mike Fink, crying “Murderer!” Mike turned on him, full of rage.

  “I was as close to that boy as I am to anyone in this company,” Mike shouted. “If you think I put a bullet through him on purpose, why, there’ll be a real murder.”

  And there was. Carpenter’s brother pulled two pistols from his belt and fired both into Mike Fink’s heart. It was just as the soothsayer in Cincinnati had predicted: after many years, many dangers and many ordeals, Mike Fink had come to a bloody end.

  FEBOLD FEBOLDSON: NEBRASKA’S PRAIRIE GENIUS

  uring the pioneer days, tens of thousands of prairie schooners—horse-drawn covered wagons—crossed the plains of Nebraska on their westward journey along the Oregon Trail. Most were just passing through. Some were on their way to California, where the rivers ran with gold and the trees dripped with fruit. Others were headed to Oregon, whose lush grasses fattened dairy cows. Very few stopped in Nebraska, a treeless, dusty land nicknamed the Great American Desert.

  The Nebraska summers were so hot that birds wouldn’t lay their eggs, because they came out poached. The winters were so cold that words froze as soon as they left a man’s mouth. They had to be carried inside and thawed out on the stove so people could hear what they’d said to one another. During droughts, the air was so thick with dust that Nebraskans cut it into squares, packed it in boxes, and sold it as fill dirt to landscapers in New York.

  Only the most resourceful pioneer could survive in a landscape so harsh, and no pioneer was more resourceful than Swedish immigrant Febold Feboldson. According to his grand-nephew, Bergstrom Stromberg, if Febold had filed all his inventions with the patent office in Washington, DC, he would be remembered as a more prolific tinkerer than Thomas Edison or Henry Ford.

  Febold and his cousin Hjalmar sailed to America from Sweden some time between the opening of
the Oregon Trail and the beginning of the California Gold Rush. They headed west across the continent, hoping to reach the Pacific Ocean. But in the middle of Nebraska, on a hot, arid summer day, Hjalmar was overcome by homesickness for the cool streams of Scandinavia. In a delirium, he dove headfirst into a muddy trickle of water.

  “This is about the most dismal river I’ve ever seen,” Febold remarked, as he pulled his cousin’s head out of the silt. It turned out Hjalmar had broken his neck, which would take months to heal, so on the Dismal River they stayed. Their first year in Nebraska, the cousins lived in a “soddie,” a hut constructed of chunks of sod, the only building material available in that treeless country. Since they had arrived too late to plant a crop, Febold survived by hunting the mugwump, a bird whose head and tail looked exactly the same. The mugwump itself couldn’t tell the difference, and flew around in circles because it didn’t know which way it was headed. The bird’s confusion made it easy prey, and the settlers hunted it to extinction before Audubon could arrive to paint its portrait, which is why the mugwump is never found in ornithology textbooks.

  The fiercest threats to Febold’s survival were not the wolves, or the coyotes, or even the Pawnee. No, the fiercest predators on the prairie were the mosquitoes. Prairie mosquitoes were so big they could they could drink all a man’s blood even faster than a cowboy could empty a bottle of whiskey. When a flock of mosquitoes attacked his soddie, Febold hid inside an iron boiler he had brought west in his prairie schooner. The mosquitoes stuck their needles through the iron, so Febold bent them with a hammer, making it impossible for the furious insects to pull them out. When the entire flock was trapped, Febold walked outside and sliced their stingers off with a knife, so they could never drink blood again. After that, he covered his soddie with a mosquito net fashioned from four-inch-thick steel cables.

  Hjalmar’s neck never healed properly. His head was bent at a right angle to his body, which meant Febold had to carry him around sideways so he could see straight. A man can’t travel long distances in that condition, so the cousins settled down in Nebraska. Febold thought they deserved a log cabin, like the one they’d left behind in Sweden, so he walked all the way to California, cut down a dozen redwoods, and dragged them back to Nebraska on a logging chain. Febold then raised a two-story cabin and had enough wood left over so that when a ten-foot blizzard fell the next winter, he built a giant plow. Febold harnessed the plow to a herd of buffalo he had pulled from the snow with his lariat. He plowed a path to his cabin, but when a tribe of Pawnee Indians arrived to examine his creation, the buffalo mistook them for hunters and stampeded. The herd dragged that plow all the way to the Missouri River, on the eastern edge of the territory, digging a ditch so deep it filled with water after the snow melted. That ditch is now known as the Platte River.

  That was in the winter of 1848, which became known as the Year of the Petrified Snow, because the blizzards were so deep they remained on the ground all summer. This was the same winter that gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill, near Sacramento, setting off the Gold Rush. The snow was an impediment to the gold-crazed men headed west: in fact, it delayed them for a year, so they became ’49ers instead of ’48ers. After retrieving his enormous plow, Febold ran an ox train carrying would-be miners between Kansas City and San Francisco. On one of his trips to California, he made a detour to Death Valley, where he loaded his wagon with desert sand. The sands of Death Valley have been absorbing the 110-degree sun for thousands of years. After all that time, the heat is baked in. No matter where you take Death Valley sand—to the South Pole, to the Yukon—it remains scorching hot. Febold took it back to Nebraska and sold it to the stranded Gold Rushers for fifty dollars a bushel. They sprinkled it ahead of their wagons, melting the petrified snow and clearing the way to California.

  Word of Febold’s inventiveness reached the Interior Secretary in Washington, who hired him to redraw the border between Kansas and Nebraska. It’s a little-known fact that Kansas and Nebraska were once our most mountainous states, but an infestation of moles had overturned all the mountains, exposing their flat bottoms and erasing the territorial line in the process. Febold plowed a furrow the entire length of the territory, from the Missouri line to the Colorado line. Without a surveyor’s training or equipment, Febold couldn’t draw a straight line, so his attempted border was crooked, and too far north; it eventually filled up with water and was named the Republican River by President Lincoln. To make up for his lack of surveying experience, Febold found a beehive and poured barrels and barrels of honey into it. The bees inside grew so large that Febold was able to hitch them to a plow, and draw a bee-line between the territories.

  In treeless Nebraska, the winds blow freely and fiercely. To amuse himself, Febold built the world’s largest kite, which was made from enough fabric to cover one of Nebraska’s patchwork counties. The kite was so big it could only be tethered to the Earth with a steel cable. Febold tied it to a cottonwood he had planted on his homestead, but a powerful prairie wind uprooted the tree. Grabbing at the cable, Febold was carried away as well. Just as he began to fear he would never see Nebraska again, Febold had another of his clever ideas. Pulling a slingshot and a handful of birdshot from his pocket, he poked holes in the kite. It began descending toward the prairie, but soon it was falling so fast Febold feared he would make a crash landing. He took off his shirt, and covered half the holes. The kite continued to hurtle earthward, so he took off his pants, too. The kite slowed down enough for Febold to drop into a gully—safely, but stark naked. On his way back to his cabin, Febold had a number of embarrassing encounters with the Pawnee, until one finally took pity on the naked white man and outfitted him with a loincloth. The kite, meanwhile, flew all the way to North Dakota, where it was snagged by a sodbuster whose wife used the fabric to sew garments for all ten of her children, from the swaddling in their cradles to the dresses and morning coats in which they were married.

  The winds were not always a source of amusement in Nebraska. Quite often, they gathered themselves into tornadoes. But when the territorial governor learned of Febold’s success in ridding his land of mosquitoes, he figured he could do the same to tornadoes. So Febold was hired as Nebraska’s first official twister stopper. This was his technique: when he heard a report of an approaching tornado, he jumped on his horse, rode after the twister, lassoed it with his lariat, and tied it up until it ran out of energy and stopped spinning. If the twister tried to escape, Febold chased it into Kansas, where it was no longer his business.

  Febold Feboldson was a force of nature, but not even he was stronger than nature itself. He finally met his match against the tornado that destroyed the Bohemian settlement of Cestomihailovich (which is why you’ve never heard of it). Febold ran the twister down, lassoed it, and took it back home to let it calm down. While Febold slept, the twister busted through the ropes, tore up the Bohemians’ cottages, then bound Febold in his own lariat and pushed him down a sand hill. Spinning as fast as a tornado himself, Febold collected so much sand and water he became encased in the mixture, with only his head sticking out. A colony of friendly prairie dogs brought Febold food and water for a week until the Pawnee discovered him and pried him out of his living sarcophagus.

  Like most Nebraskans, Febold had rebuilt his cabin numerous times after it was flattened by tornadoes. After the cabin was destroyed for the fourteenth time, Febold built a new one with springs and hinges in every corner. When he saw a tornado coming, he pushed a button and collapsed the entire structure into a flat board. After the tornado was gone, he pushed the button again, and the cabin sprang back into shape. This was such an effective defense against tornadoes it was adopted by every homesteader in the territory, even those who lived in soddies. Pioneers passing through Nebraska were mystified by the sight of entire towns disappearing, then suddenly reappearing again a few hours later. They assumed it was a mirage caused by Prairie Fever, the condition of staring at a flat, monotonous landscape for days on end. Febold’s tornado-proofi
ng method is still in use today. The thirty-story headquarters of the Woodmen of the World insurance company, for many years the tallest building in Omaha, was built with springs and hinges, so the entire structure flattens at the push of a button, or so say longtime employees who have ridden out tornadoes there.

  There finally came a time when Nebraska became too harsh for even the resourceful Febold Feboldson. That time was the Year of the Endless Drought. We don’t know much about the Endless Drought, because there are no records: when the settlers tried to write about it, their ink dried up before it could soak into the paper. Snow flurries turned into dust storms. The drought leached the moisture out of the logs in Febold’s cabin, until it shrunk to the size of a doghouse, so he had to crawl through the front door. Febold’s cattle grew so thin that he tied sandbags to their tails to prevent them from blowing away. They would have starved to death, if not for another of Febold’s brainstorms: he wrote away to an office supply company for a hundred green eyeshades, the kind that telegraph operators wore, and fitted them onto his horses and cows. The eyeshades made the cactus and thistles look like grass, and the herd quickly devoured the spiky plants. Unfortunately, the cactus spikes worked their way out through the animals’ skins. When Febold mounted his horse, a cactus needle protruding from the saddle pierced his rump. Needing a new way to get around, Febold captured a pair of hoop snakes, filled them up with whiskey, and put their tails in their mouths. The hooch froze the snakes, so they could function as wheels. Febold attached a seat to the snakes, thus inventing a prairie bicycle he could propel with his feet.

  The aftermath of the Year of the Endless Drought was the Great Cactus War. The drought killed off all the foliage in Nebraska except the cactus. After the rains returned, that hardy plant grew to occupy all the empty spaces. When a United States cavalry detachment camped out in a clearing, it was overwhelmed by the swiftly multiplying cacti, which pierced the soldiers to death with their needles. So the army hired Febold to beat back the cactus. After Febold’s horses had passed all their cactus needles, and he could ride them again, he released the hoop snakes. One of the snakes didn’t want to leave Febold, so he adopted her as a pet, naming her Arabella, after an actress he had taken a fancy to in San Francisco. Arabella’s venom was fatal to cacti, so Febold dripped it into a spray gun and killed off the plants so thoroughly they now only grow in the Sand Hills. Arabella donated so much venom for the Great Cactus War she died of exhaustion, and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery with a seven-gun salute.