“River Roarer”

The Mississippi and the Missouri rivers are usually pretty quiet these days. It was a lot different when Mike Fink was whooping up and down them in his keelboat. But then, Mike was about the noisiest thing next to thunder that this country has ever heard.

Mike was born to be a river man, although he didn‘t know it until he was old enough to find out. Until then he spent his time in the woods around Pittsburgh, where he was born, shooting at wolves, bobcats, mosquitoes, or anything else that could be shot at. He wasn‘t especially big, but he was as tough as a bale of barbed wire and as touchy as dynamite.

Even the wild Indians took a different path when they saw young Mike coming. He could flip a tomahawk through the air and hit a fly, even if the fly was in a hurry. With his rifle, called Bang-All, he could straighten out the curl in a pig’s tail from fifty feet away.

Mike was as good at bragging as he was at shooting and fighting. "I can shoot faster than greased lightening going through a slippery thundercloud," Mike boasted when he was still only ten years old. "I can shoot all the scales off a leaping trout with one bullet."

People, who didn‘t know Mike too well, laughed. " “I’ll prove it!" Mike said. He jumped into the air, clapped his heels together, yelled "Cock-a-doodle-doo!" and loaded his long flintlock rifle at the same time. "Hold on to your hats and beards while I find something worth shooting at," he said.

"Farmer Neal‘s having a big shooting contest next Sunday," a townsman told him. "If you can shoot as well as you claim, you‘ll win a nice hunk of fresh beef. But you‘ll have to pay a quarter for each shot you try."