Mike Fink: King of the River

Folk Hero and Frontiersman

Listen to the thunder
Hear the winds roar
Hurricane’s a-coming
Board up the door

Load up the cannon
Call up the law
Worstest calamity
That folks never saw

Girls run and hide
Brave men shiver
I’m Mike Fink
King of the River

Jeff York, “King of the River,” 1956

In an age of asphalt roads, instant messaging, and stultifying, effeminate corporate micromanagement, one can look to the age of the American Frontier with rose-tinted glasses. In a modern landscape overlaid with concrete and housing projects, one can’t help but indulge in fantasies of earthy escapism, mythologizing the old country as an untamed land of freedom and fun inhabited by wild men unencumbered by baggage. In nineteenth-century America, this was no different. There were many dime store novels and magazines for city-slickers along the settled Atlantic Coast to quench their hungry imaginations. Tall tales of brave and immoral frontiersmen abounded, often straddling the line between complete fiction and “trust me, bro” second-hand stories of backwoods shenanigans.

Mike Fink