building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

The image of an old and a new world that clash appears even more clearly in the
allegory described by Mark Twain in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published
in 1884, but set at least thirty or forty years before. In their journey in search of
freedom on board their raft, Huck and Jim actually crash with a steamboat. The
machine shatters and drags with it the impossible dream of an independent life for
Huck and Jim. It will be possible to continue the journey, but as the raft gradually
continues southwards, further into slave territory, it becomes clearer that this
fuggitive existence is intollerable. Just as Thoreau’s cabin or Melville’s ship, the raft
represents a flight from society, a race for freedom beginning with restriction.
The alliance, which is established between the old Arcadia and the transformations
caused by the advancing frontier, shapes the man of the West with the typical
humour of transitory, unstable situations. If the West lacked a heroic tradition, the
natural reaction had been to create highly detailed stories, far from the truth but
capable of imparting a certain eccentricity to the environment of life at the frontier.
The landscape, animated by Kit Carson (1809‐1868), Buffalo Bill (1846‐1917), Wild
Bill Hickock (1837‐1876) and by Calamity Jane (1852‐1903), people famous for their
adventures in the wild West and for their loose living, originated in the improbable
stories of men, such as Mike Fink (1770?‐1823?), an American semi‐legendary, antiheroe.
Fink was the prototype of a man coming from the old world, travelling on a
raft, who nowadays would just make us smile. Nicknamed the “king of the
keelboaters”, he was a “brawler”, a hard‐drinking man, famous for his extraordinary
aim with a shotgun. Travellers like him, on the river and on horseback, soon fired
the imagination in this part of America. A pioneer, such as Davy Crockett (1786‐
1836), a popular hero and American politician owes his description as a “half‐horse,
half‐alligator” man to stories such as the one about Fink. Many men of the West
were given similar nicknames, which became a contradiction in terms as they later
went on to give their services to the civilisation of technology, although they lived in
the wild.
Boasting and fraud soon became so typical of the frontier, as to inspire the
literature of the Dime Novels, which became the folk culture of the West [Figure
129]. Public imagination created not only improbable men and situations, but also
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