In order to understand where the Gator Horse comes from, it’s important to understand powerful impact the region has had on America. The earliest maps of the region date back to 1752 (Butler). French traders, trappers, and later, commerce and settlers came down river. Even after the Louisiana Purchase and the California Goldrush, the Ohio River was fundamental commerce and travel until the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad in 1869. The Ohio was the primary route for chattel slave trade, with markets in Louisville and in Cairo, Illinois. People who only know the Ohio River as it is now – flood plains regulated by locks, widened for barge traffic, and as much as a river can be, civilized – don’t understand what the river was like. Journals from the Lewis and Clark expedition (1804-1806) describe a river with dangerously rocky rapids, long stretches of riverbeds so shallow the crew had to carry their boats through, places so narrow that it was easier to carry the boats over a nearby horse path, and equally as wide.
Understanding the legend of Mike Fink is crucial to understanding what makes literature from the Ohio River Valley Regionally distinct. Before Jeff York’s Fink was given short shrift against Fess Parker in Davey Crockett and The River Pirates (1965) Mike Fink was a legend on par with Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, and Wild Bill Hickock. Stories of the keel boat captains who traversed the wilds of the Ohio River, moving French trappers up, moving goods from what was then the Wild West back east to be sold, and eventually passengers.
In Mike Fink’s heyday, the river was more than a way to travel and move goods. It was a myth, a mystery, an adventure. And the men who wrestled with it were more than just men. They were Gator Horses: men so strong and so fierce that they were as wild as river itself. And Mike Fink was King of River – the fiercest of the Gator Horses. Bernard DeVoto summarized him as “the marksman who could not miss, the bully-boy who could not be felled, unmatched in drink, invincible to wenches.” (Blair and Meine, 26). Fink stories fit into the stories of ancient heroes like Beowulf, Paul Bunyan, and Thor. DeVoto called Fink “a demigod of the rivers even before he dies – the boatman immortally violent, heroic, unconquerable.” (26) These traits – both heroic and ill-tempered – make Fink a blueprint for the writing that would come.
Prior to the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the Ohio River Valley – which includes parts of what we now consider Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois – was the stuff of literary and pop cultural imagination. This sense of the heroic, which Ohio River Valley writing inherited from literary traditions dating back to Gilgamesh, was infused with the anti-heroic and with rugged individualism created by the stories of Mike Fink, Daniel Boone, and the Lewis and Clark expedition. These things would eventually be passed on to the literature of the Wild West and to America’s collective cultural imagination.
According to her preface to Interior States, Meghan O’Gieblyn claims that economic recession and the resulting loss of what she calls telos – an object or aim – are what ties the Midwest together. (xiv). She claims an “abiding interest in this loss is what ties the essays in her book together. She goes on to tie this to the decline of the Christian narrative.
The thing that makes literature from the Ohio River Valley distinct from Midwestern literature – and indeed makes it geographically distinct from the Midwest – our telos is the ebb and tide of commerce and things that move. That the river is always in flux is what gives the Ohio River Valley it’s unique and complex history, culture, and art. At it’s core, there’s a stubbornness, a caution when it comes to change; but there’s also an inherent ability to embrace what the river brings. It’s as natural as the ebb and flow of the river. The South, the Midwest, and even Appalachia — culturally, they are built on a resistance to change, that can border on a dangerous nostalgia. The Ohio River Valley, with our deep-rooted tradition kept in the stories like those of Mike Fink and the Gator Horse Keel Boat Captains, takes whatever comes, keeps what is useful, and lets the river carry the rest away.
