“I’m a Salt River roarer!  I’m a ring-tailed squealer!  I’m a reg’lar screamer from the ol’ Massassip’!  WHOOP!  I’m the very infant that refused his milk before its eyes were open, and called out for a bottle of old Rye!  I love the women an’ I’m chockful o’ fight!  I’m half wild horse and half cock-eyed alligator and the rest o’ me is crooked snags an’ red-hot snappin’ turtle.  I can hit like fourth-proof lightnin’ an’ every lick I make in the woods lets in an acre o’ sunshine.  I can out-run, out-jump, out-shoot, out-brag, out-drink, an’ out-fight, rough-an’-tumble, no holts barred, ary man on both sides the river from Pittsburgh to New Orleans an’ back agin to St. Louiee.  Come on you flatters, you bargers, you milk-white mechanics, an’ see how tough I am to chaw!  I ain’t had a fight for two days an’ I’m spilein’ for exercise.  Cock-a-doodle-do!”   

— From Mike Fink, King of Mississippi Keelboatmen, by Walter Blair and Franklin J. Meine, pp. 105-106.  Copy 1933 by Henry Holt & Company, Inc.  New York.