Sal Fink

Also Known As: called the Mississippi Screamer; also given in her sketch as “one o’ the gals”, the almanac’s highest compliment
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Urban Legends & Contemporary Folklore
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: A frontier woman of absurd strength who beat a thunderbolt in a duel, rode alligators downriver and snapped river snags like kindling.
Role in Mythos: She is one of the Crockett almanacs’ “riproarious shemales”, comic heroines who turned every polite ideal of nineteenth-century womanhood upside down.
Relation to Humans: She is a human being, not a spirit, and her whole appeal is that she needs rescuing by nobody. Her one full story is a captivity tale in which she frees herself and burns her captors, and its comedy runs on the almanacs’ open contempt for Native Americans.

The fire in the hollow has burned down to a red bed, and fifty men are asleep around it with their feet toward the coals. Tied to a tree at the edge of the light, a young woman who went out that afternoon to collect wildcat skins for the family’s winter bedding is waiting for morning, when she is supposed to be skinned, salted and eaten. She is not waiting patiently. Her temper is climbing, and the ropes are about to discover what that means.

Sal Fink, the Mississippi Screamer, lives almost entirely on one page. The whole record is a short anonymous sketch in a Crockett almanac dated 1854, one of the cheap comic annuals that ran from 1835 to 1856 under Davy Crockett’s name long after the real Crockett had died at the Alamo. Nobody signed it. Nobody knows who wrote it. Everything later written about her, from folklore essays in the 1940s to modern classroom scripts, goes back to that sketch, and a fair amount of what gets repeated about her is not in it.

The narrator opens by insisting that however often his readers have heard some woman praised as “one o’ the gals”, they have never seen the real thing until they have seen Sal. Then he lists the evidence. She once fought a duel with a thunderbolt, came away without a singe, split the bolt to pieces with her first shot and handed the fragments to the United States artillery to light their cannon with. At six years old she played see-saw on the snags in the Mississippi, the dead trees sunk in the riverbed that riverboats dreaded, and when she had finished playing she snapped them off, which cleared a large stretch of the river. She rode downstream standing upright on an alligator’s back, dancing Yankee Doodle, and left every steamboat behind.

Then comes the story the page was really printed to tell. Out in the forest, she is taken by about fifty Native men and carried to a place the sketch calls Roast-flesh Hollow. They tie her to a tree to keep until morning, when the rest of their people will arrive for the feast, build up a large fire, and go to sleep with their soles to the blaze. Once they are snoring, Sal loses her temper and bursts the ropes as easily as an apron string. She finds more rope, ties all their heels together around the fire, fixes a cord to their shins, and with one jerk that shakes the whole wood she drags every sleeper into the flames. Then she is gone into the dark like a panther while the hollow fills with screaming.

That is the whole of her myth. There is no birth story, no death, no second adventure, no sweetheart and no rival. The sketch does not even say where on the Mississippi she lived.

It also never says she is Mike Fink’s daughter. Fink was a real keelboatman, born around Fort Pitt about 1770 and killed around 1823, who became the loudest brawler in the river legends while he was still alive, and he does appear in the Crockett almanacs, once hiding inside an alligator hide to frighten Mrs. Crockett and getting beaten senseless for it. Sal shares his surname and his river, and later retellings have made her his child. The 1854 page leaves that to the reader.

She has plenty of company. The folklorist Mody C. Boatright, reading the American Antiquarian Society’s run of the almanacs on microfilm, published a survey of their women in 1943 under the title “Backwoods Belles”, and set Sal among a crowd of them: Nance Bowers, who could outscream a thunderbolt; Judy Coon, who stamped a nest of wildcats to death for fun; Katy Goodgrit, who could grin a wildcat out of countenance. Boatright read the whole genre as the backwoods answering its critics. Genteel travellers such as Frances Trollope had found frontier women coarse and alarming, and the almanac writers replied by exaggerating that coarseness until it could not be taken seriously, laughing at the leisure-class ideal of the fainting, rescued lady. Sal never faints. Nobody rescues her. That was the joke, and it was also, a little, the point. Michael A. Lofaro, who edited the almanacs’ women’s tales in 2001, named the whole cast “riproarious shemales” and called them an inversion of the femininity of their day.

The inversion has a hard limit, and it sits in the middle of her one story. The almanacs were written for white readers in the decades of Indian Removal, and their anti-Indian violence is played for laughs; the sketch’s own headline promises, in slurs this entry will not repeat, that it will show how she cooked her captors. The cannibal feast she escapes is the almanac’s invention about the people it was cheering the destruction of. The heroine is new. The villains are the oldest stock on the frontier stage.

Her powers are all of one kind: strength without limit and a temper that works faster than lightning. She outfights weather, outruns steam and snaps timber that sank boats. Her weaknesses are harder to find, because the form does not allow them. She can be caught by surprise and tied up, which is the only reason her story has a plot, and she is bounded by the page itself. One sketch, one portrait, no sequel. The Mississippi Screamer was loud for exactly as long as it took to read her.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Sal Fink?

Sal Fink, known as the Mississippi Screamer, is a comic heroine of American frontier tall tales. She appears in an anonymous sketch in a Crockett almanac dated 1854, where she duels a thunderbolt, rides an alligator down the Mississippi and escapes from captivity by dragging her sleeping captors into their own fire.

Is Sal Fink the daughter of Mike Fink?

The 1854 almanac sketch never says so. It gives her the surname Fink and places her on the Mississippi, the river of the legendary keelboatman Mike Fink, and later retellings have made her his daughter. Mike Fink himself does appear elsewhere in the Crockett almanacs.

What is the story of Sal Fink?

Sal Fink’s one full story is a captivity tale. Captured while collecting wildcat skins, she is tied to a tree overnight to be eaten in the morning, but she bursts the ropes, ties her sleeping captors’ heels together and pulls them all into the fire before escaping. The tale’s humour depends on the almanacs’ open hostility toward Native Americans.

What were the Crockett almanacs?

The Crockett almanacs were cheap comic annuals published from 1835 to 1856 under Davy Crockett’s name, mostly by anonymous writers. They were full of tall tales about Crockett, Mike Fink and a cast of outrageous frontier women that the editor Michael A. Lofaro called “riproarious shemales”, of whom Sal Fink is one of the best remembered.

Why is Sal Fink called the Mississippi Screamer?

Screamer was a boast-word of the Mississippi river legends: Mike Fink’s famous brag calls himself a regular screamer from the Mississippi. The almanac gives the same title to Sal Fink, and her sketch backs it up with a list of impossible feats on and beside the Mississippi, including clearing the river of snags as a six-year-old child.