Mark Twain is Larger Than Life

I noticed while reading the section of "When the Buffalo Climbed a Tree from Roughing It and Life on the Mississippi that Mark Twain makes his protagonists a little larger that life. The man who was up the tree built suspense of the buffalo coming after him. The man though built himself up from a little cowardly person to cunning and being able to defeat the animal. It gives a emboldening statement of the man being a conqueror. It gave the buffalo a superior stature even though he died in the end. His fictitious ability to climb a tree combined with his factual rage made the buffalo a more realistic fake than the man making himself emboldened by his story (that might have been skewed a little to make his story seem good). The other character that I feel seems larger than life is Mr. Bixby. In his view, Mark Twain looked up to Mr. Bixby and in turn makes him bigger than maybe he really was. He noted Mr. Bixby's great attributes of memorizing the river and knowing exactly where to go in the dark on the river. Back then that was probably real and not made-up but the part where Mr. Bixby got past Hat Island definitely made Mr. Bixby in Twain's eyes and the other pilots as great. Twain made these characters from real life experiences and in my opinion might have given a little twist to them in order to make them and the story larger than life.