Western Rivermen, 1763-1861: Ohio and the Mississippi Boatmen and the Myth of the Alligator Horse (review)

BOOK REVIEWS279 Western Rivermen, 1763-1861: Ohio and the Mississippi Boatmen and the Myth of the Alligator Horse. By Michael Allen. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990. Pp. xiii, 261. $25.00.) This is an extraordinarily good book about a neglected group in American history—the flatboatmen who once constituted fully ninety percent of America's rivermen. Frankly patterned after the well-known studies of John William Ward and Henry Nash Smith, which probed the mythological as well as the factual aspects of their subjects, Allen has written a powerful and engaging study. He begins, quite properly, with the myth of rivermen as wild "half-horse, half-alligator" figures who excel in everything. Mike Fink became the larger-than-life symbol of this mythological boatman, and Allen performs a valuable service in penetrating the fog regarding him, convincingly explaining the origins of the legend in the Jacksonian period and its Walt Disney-Hollywood revival. Many writers inbetween contributed to the legend, ranging from Mark Twain and Theodore Roosevelt to Frederick Jackson Turner and Archer D. Hulbert. In their adulation of the Alligator Horse, historians have overlooked his real-life counterpart. Mike Fink did, indeed, exist, leading a difficult, violent, and decidedly unglamorous life on the river for some twenty years prior to his murder in 1823. This event, moreover, serves to mark the dividing line between the age of the preindustrial flatboatmen and, perhaps ironically, the heyday of flatboating during the early steamboat period, when boatmen could more quickly and safely return from their downriver destinations. The weakest portion of the book is the imaginary tour of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers in 1803. This section contains, however, much useful geographic and demographic information, including an account of the soon-to-be notorious Natchez-Under-the-Hill settlement replete with saloons, whorehouses, and gambling dens. Most valuable, however, is the carefully drawn social profile of the boatmen, based upon the author's brilliant use of his scattered sources (including some eighty previously unused primary accounts) and revelatory of flatboatmen diet, dress, work routine, pay scales, recreation, even speech patterns. Allen plausibly suggests that the typical boatman is impossible to describe, because there were all kinds, ranging from, as a traveler in 1818 commented , "real gentlemen" to "the perfect boor" (135). Allen admits, however, that the part of the Alligator Horse legend depicting the boatmen as rude and vulgar young men known for "swearing, smoking, gambling, drinking, fighting, and promiscuity" (111) was based on reality. He also provides good technical descriptions of the boats themselves, the techniques involved in their navigation, and the economics of flatboating. He has even included a glossary that, for example, clarifies the distinctions between cordelling and warping, between planters and sawyers. Civil 280CIVIL WAR HISTORY War historians may want to take note of the boatmen's definition of gunboat as "a floating house of prostitution" (238). Allen, who conducted some of his research in the wheelhouses of the Mississippi River towboats on which he worked for three years, has a great eye for the apt illustration, a good ear for the telling quotation, and a refreshingly mature skepticism toward his multiple sources. Iconoclastic in the best sense, this book was more than ten years in the making, and the end product justifies the extraordinary labors that have gone into it. Allen makes only an occasional slip, misstating the length of the Ohio River and mislocating the state capital of Ohio, but Western Rivermen is an outstanding first book. It belongs in the library of all who would better understand the social history of antebellum America. Ralph D. Gray Indiana University-Indianapolis River Towns in the Great West: The Structure ofProvincial Urbanization in the American Midwest, 1820-1870. By Timothy R. Mahoney. (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1990. Pp. 319. $39.50.) A generation ago scholars as different as George Rogers Taylor, Allen Pred, and Richard Wade introduced historians to the possibilities of thinking in terms of regional systems of trade, communication, and town building. Most work since has nonetheless focused on individual towns or single economic activities, providing broader contexts, of course, but giving readers very particularistic views of nineteenth-century American history. Timothy R. Mahoney...