Quoting from an article titled "Autobiography as Property: Mark Twain and His Legend," in THE MYTHOLOGIZING OF MARK TWAIN, ed. Sara deSaussure Davis and Philip D. Beidler (U of Alabama P, 1984), pp. 42-43: "His unparalleled success [at creating his own legend] can partly be gauged by the reluctance of the popular mind nowadays to accept Samuel Clemens' physical measurements: his diminutive height and weight have gained robustness with each decade, along with his literary reputation. A more hilarious evolution can be witnessed in our electronic-media equivalent of the oral tradition, the made-for-television movie, which produced in 1977 an absurdity titled THE INCREDIBLE ROCKY MOUNTAIN RACE, starring Chris Connelly as young Mark Twain and Forrest Tucker as Mike Fink. In this travesty of folklore and history, the reporter Twain and the river boatman Fink race each other from Missouri to California, a competition encouraged by the townspeople of St. Joseph(!), Missouri, wh! o are eager to rid themselves of two cantankerous frontiersmen. The winner is to be declared 'King of the West.' The entertainment specialists responsible for contriving such fabrications evidently sense that the outlines of Twain's actual biographical existence are loosening, that he can be conveniently utilized in any situation involving settings in the American Far West. In their story, Twain encounters Jim Bridger and William F. Cody along the route of his race, and Twain proves to be nearly as much of a roughneck, daredevil, and talltalker as the bragging Mike Fink. For the popular imagination, it would seem, Twain represents almost anything favorable or amusing about our heritage." Alan Gribben Auburn Montgomery