Though he has developed a mythology to rival that of Paul
Bunyan, Fink was not a figment of anyone’s imagination. He was
the most famous of the keelboatmen who plied the Mississippi and
other rivers for two decades until they and their watercraft
were displaced by steamboats as the preferred means of moving
goods in the early 1800s.  The keelboatmen were the original
American anti-heroes -- hard-living, hard-drinking hulks who
used their tremendous strength to pole and pull their boats
upriver against the current before floating back down.  Born in
a log cabin near Pittsburgh around 1780, Miche Phinck, as he
learned to spell it from his French Canadian parents, gained
notoriety as an Indian scout in the Ohio River Valley and a
marksman before settling into keelboating.  His superior
physique -– he stood 6-foot, 3 and weighed 180 pounds -– and
flair for self-aggrandizement -– he claimed he could “outrun,
outshoot, throw down, drag out and lick any man in the country”
-- transformed him into an icon for storyte