proud, carried with it a suggestion of amphibious strength that
made it both apt and figuratively accurate
The title ‘alligator-horse,’ of which Western rivermen were very
proud, carried with it a suggestion of amphibious strength that
made it both apt and figuratively accurate. On all the American
rivers, east and west, a lusty crew, collected from the waning
Indian trade and the disbanded pioneer armies, found work to its
taste in poling the long keel boats, ‘corralling’ the bulky
barges–that is, towing them by pulling on a line attached to the
shore–or steering the ‘broadhorns’ or flatboats that transported
the first heavy inland river cargoes. Like longshoremen of all
ages, the American riverman was as rough as the work which
calloused his hands and transformed his muscles into bands of
tempered steel. Like all men given to hard but intermittent
labor, he employed his intervals of leisure in coarse and brutal
recreation. Their roistering exploits, indeed, have made these
rivermen almost better known at play than at work. One of them,
the notorious Mike Fink, known as ‘the Snag’ on the Mississippi
and as the ‘Snapping Turtle’ on the Ohio, has left the record,
not that he could load a keel boat in a certain length of time,
or lift a barrel of whiskey with one arm, or that no tumultuous
current had ever compelled him to back water, but that he could
‘out-run, out-hop, out-jump, throw down, drag out, and lick any
man in the country,’ and that he was ‘a Salt River roarer.’