SOURCE: Oriard, Michael. “Shifty in a New Country: Games in Southwestern Humor.” Southern Literary Journal 12, no. 2 (spring 1980): 3-28.

[In the following essay, Oriard explores the role of games in Southwestern humor literature.]

Writing a half-century ago, Dorothy Dondore remarked on the similarities between the heroic age of Europe and the frontier period in America:

The existence of a dominantly masculine society, primitively simple in its standards; contempt for an alien and effete civilization; prime emphasis upon physical courage, brute strength, and mastery of the wild; featuring of the virtues of hospitality, generosity, loyalty to one's friends; arrogant rivalries settled by individual combats; a rude but effectual code of justice; a zest in horse-play, the labors of trencher and beaker, as gargantuan as zest in the thrill of the chase, whether it be wolf, bison, bear or fleeing foe—all of these and more parallel each other in the eastern and western hemisphere.¹

This recognition that the period of Western expansion was America's heroic age is important, for it places in the proper context a body of writing that emerged from that period—Old Southwestern humor. The writings of A. B. Longstreet, Joseph G. Baldwin, Johnson Jones Hooper, T. B. Thorpe, George Washington Harris, and dozens of others, many of whom contributed to William T. Porter's Spirit of the Times, can be seen to create collectively an American epic that chronicles the development of a new social order and the evolution of a national character defined by the virtues and values most cherished by the new nation.

Of course, the similarities of this writing to more traditional epics cannot be pressed too far. Southwestern humor after all is humorous, in contrast to the highly serious nature of the epic genre, and the “heroes” of these comic tales and sketches are folk of the most common sort, not well-born, all-conquering demi-gods. But the writing of the Southwestern humorists is the epic of a democratic, not an aristocratic people; the heroes of this writing could only be who they are, and the humor with which their stories are told is simply a trait highly valued by the people they represent.

What is most distinctive about this democratic epic, however, is the prevalence of games. Contests and competition are basic to any heroic age, but war is the great subject of traditional epic poems; in Southwestern humor the center appears to be play and games. Horse races, cockfights, gander pullings, shooting matches, and poker games figure prominently in the tales, but more significantly, as these stories repeatedly attest, virtually any activity on the frontier could become the occasion for a game-like contest. In Georgia Scenes, Longstreet describes a horse-swap and the students' “turning out” a teacher for a holiday as game-like contests; Simon Suggs competes with the preacher at a camp meeting in a battle of wits; the genteel narrator of “A Day at Sol. Slice's,” a sketch from Porter's Spirit of the Times, finds himself at a dance competing with the locals for acclaim as the most accomplished dancer; and in several tales such as “The Steamboat Captain Who Was Averse to Racing,” also in the Spirit, steamboats conducting passengers along the West's great rivers race one another for the status of best boat. The tall tale, a staple of Southwestern fiction, is by nature a “verbal poker game,” according to one commentator on this literature, a contest between the teller and his audience with belief as the stake to be won.² In 1851, one of Porter's correspondents caricatured frontier life in a way that points out better than any other evidence the ubiquity of games:

“Out West” is certainly a great country … there is one little town in “them diggins” which … is “all sorts of a stirring place.” In one day, they recently had two street fights, hung a man, rode three men out of town on a rail, got up a quarter race, a turkey shooting, a gander pulling, a match dog fight, had preaching by a circus rider, who afterwards ran a footrace for apple jack all round, and, as if this was not enough, the judge of the court, after losing his year's salary at single-handed poker, and licking a person who said he didn't understand the game, went out and helped to lynch his grandfather for hog stealing.³

The writer's tone is facetious, but in his hyperbole he portrays not only the variety of frontier games, but the game-quality of the rest of frontier life as well. All of these “games” share a few essential common traits; they are contests between individuals conducted according to rules at least implicitly agreed upon for some identifiable stake, and are marked by at least some element of playfulness. What these games collectively reveal is the fact that game-playing was virtually a mode of existence for many of the frontier denizens described in hundreds of humorous tales, a mode that captured the imaginations of the writers who recorded them. The question that must be posed is, why games?

Games can be seen to serve many purposes; in different contexts and by shifting definitions games have been identified as amusements, recreations, rhetorical strategies, petty strivings for one-upmanship, and methods of analysis. Play has been called the basis of all culture by anthropologists, the sign of true religion by theologians, and a primary means of social adjustment by psychologists. The games that concern us here, however, served a very specific and important function that was determined by the frontier conditions that generated them. As W. J. Cash observed, most of the South before the Civil War was essentially frontier, not a settled aristocracy as subsequent legends claimed.⁴ The region of the Old Southwest—Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Missouri—was the least settled section of the Old South, the one most clearly defined by frontier conditions. If we think of the frontier as the dividing line between civilization and wilderness, then we can think of these Southwestern states as the arena in which civilization and wilderness were contesting for dominance—and in this confrontation lay the essential conditions for the games the Southwestern humorists recorded.

Along the frontier, society is less settled; the legal, economic, and social orders are in transition; values are shifting; and community—and by extension individual—identity is uncertain. As Walter Blair points out, in the states of the Old Southwest “many peoples mingled” and “various stages of civilization naturally were juxtaposed in stretches between settled sections and frontiers.”⁵ In the striking contrasts which flourished in such conditions lay “excellent stuff for humor,” according to Blair, but here also lay excellent stuff for games. In the vernacular, everything was up for grabs along the frontier—not only were wealth and status there to be won by the most enterprising, rather than the best-born individuals, but the entire social order was to be determined by those who could most effectively impose their will on their fellows. Joseph G. Baldwin, chronicling the “flush times” in Alabama and Mississippi, pointed this out clearly:

And where can a man get this self-reliance so well as in a new country, where he is thrown upon his own resources; where his only friends are his talents; where he sees energy leap at once into prominence; where those only are above him whose talents are above his; where there is no prestige of rank, or ancestry, or wealth, or past reputation—and no family influence, or dependents, or patrons; where the stranger of yesterday is the man of to-day; where a single speech may win position, to be lost by a failure the day following; and where amidst a host of competitors in an open field of rivalry, every man of the same profession enters the course with a race-horse emulation, to win the prize which is glittering within sight of the rivals.

(FT [The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi], p. 167)⁶

Somewhat more crudely Simon Suggs says the same thing: “This here's a mighty hard world … to git along in. Ef a feller don't make every aidge cut, he's in the background directly. It's tile and strive and tussle every way, to make an honest livin'” (SS [Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs], pp. 75-76).

One may question whether the supposed best men are consistently the winners in such an environment, and one might wonder at Simon's definition of “honest livin',” but what both Baldwin and Suggs are saying is that in the sparsely settled regions along the frontier the absence of a fixed social order provides an arena for individualism and competition to flourish.⁷ Where the social order is fluid and civilization is in transition, individuals compete with one another for the prizes to be won. In the more settled regions of the North and East, individuals were not only dependent to a greater extent on the accidental conditions of their births, but they also came into much more contact with “systems” or social bodies than did those where the social order was more tentative. Urban workers as well as entrepreneurs and professional men were forced to interact with a fixed industrial, mercantile, or political order—there can be no fair competition between such unevenly matched contestants. Under frontier conditions where individualism is more able to thrive, the encounters which define the primary mode of social interaction tend more to be individual vs. individual, whether they be transactions of buying, selling, or trading; courting and marrying; or courtroom litigation. Only in these circumstances of personal interaction can there be games as I have described them—“fair” contests between individuals for attainable rewards.

There were many prizes to be won by rival competitors, foremost among which, of course, was wealth and power. The flush times, not just of Alabama and Mississippi, but of the whole Southwest, attracted sharp dealers, swindlers, and peddlers of all things imaginable. In fact, it is remarkable how rarely a specific sum of money or any other tangible object is the stake in the games in this fiction. Where civilization is in transition, where culture is in a process of formation, where order and value and identity are in question, the determination of personal and societal destiny becomes the implicit stake in game after game detailed by Longstreet, Baldwin, Hooper, Thorpe, Harris, and the other writers of Southwestern humor.

2.

The most basic stake in the games described by these writers is survival. In a sense “survival” is the stake of any game, from hopscotch to medieval jousts, though usually in subtle or refracted forms. But in a contest between civilization and wilderness, between a man and an agent of the wilderness, the reward is survival in its bluntest, most unambiguous form. An exemplary tale concerned with this primal contest is “Chunkey's Fight with the Panthers” by “The Turkey Runner” (Alexander B. McNutt), from Porter's Spirit of the Times. Chunkey on a hunt with his friend Jim finds himself alone—with no knife, and powder for only one shot—stalked by two panthers. He describes the beasts as “kittens playin,'” until they spring at him. Then, downing one with his remaining bullet, he engages the other in a “fair fight,” “sometimes one, and then yother on top” (BB [The Big Bear of Arkansas, and Other Tales], p. 137). As he feels victory nearing, Chunkey's allusions to the game they are playing become more explicit: “[I] had sich confidence in whippin' the fight, that I offered two to one on Chunkey, but no takers!” “O dam you,” he addresses the panther, “you are willin' to quit even and divide stakes, are you?” And having won, he exults, “Oh, you ain't dead yet, Chunkey! … If you are sorta wusted, and have whipped a panther in a fair fight, and no gougin'” (BB, p. 138). The struggle was literally for life or death, but Chunkey describes it rather as a successful game.

Panthers are infrequent contestants in these games; the most common form of the contest for survival is the bear hunt, popularized in numerous tales by the Southwestern humorists. Porter's Spirit of the Times published “Bob Herring, the Arkansas Bear Hunter” by T. B. Thorpe, “Pete Whetstone's Bear Hunt” by Charles F. M. Noland, and the greatest of them all, Thorpe's “The Big Bear of Arkansas,” as well as many others (QR [A Quarter Race in Kentucky, and Other Tales], 130-45; HOS [Humor of the Old Southwest], pp. 109-10; BB, 13-31). In all of these the hunter is pitted against a great bear in a contest for survival, and the game-quality of the struggle is explicitly noted. In “The Indefatigable Bear Hunter” by “Madison Tensas” (Henry Clay Lewis), another of the same type, the bear hunter, Mik-hoo-tah, after having been crippled in one bear fight, pits himself, wooden leg and all, against another bear because his only alternative to hunting is to waste away. In exulting that he “had whipped a bar in a fair hand to hand fight” (HOS, p. 354), Mik-hoo-tah asserts his superiority over the threatening wilderness—proclaims his ability to survive on its terms. It is essential to all of these tales that the struggle between man and beast be expressed as a game—a fair contest in which the antagonists meet on equal terms. The “no gougin'” claimed by Chunkey at the end of his fight with the panther is a wonderful comic touch, but it also signals the key to Chunkey's exultation. Only in the fairness of the game is there any assurance that the man has truly won his right to survive. To destroy the bear or panther by unfair means would be to invite the gods'—or more correctly nature's—reprisal. To engage the bear in a fair fight according to implicit rules is to gain a rightful place in the divine natural order.

The most famous of all the tales of bear hunts, of course, is T. B. Thorpe's “The Big Bear of Arkansas,” the source of what came to be called “the big bear school.” The tale is a simple one; it is Thorpe's telling that makes it the best of its type, and it is his greater awareness of the implications of the game that make it significant in our discussion. Like the lesser tales, it recounts a contest between two perfectly matched individuals: the greatest bear in Arkansas, a veritable “creation bar”; and Jim Doggett, the greatest bear hunter in the state, whose gun is “a perfect epidemic among bar.” Jim Doggett recognizes that he is in a game-like contest; not only does he hunt the bear, but “he hunted me,” he says of his opponent, and the contestants struggle to a standoff. What raises “The Big Bear of Arkansas” above the sketches of Lewis, Noland, and Thorpe himself in his lesser tales, is that Thorpe in his greatest story appears more aware of the real stake that is played for. As Doggett says, “It was in fact a creation bar, and if it had lived in Samson's time, and had met him, in a fair fight, it would have licked him in a twinkling of a dice-box” (BB, pp. 30-31). When Doggett finally kills the bear easily, he admits that it “was an unhuntable bar, and died when his time come.” The bear is clearly identified with the spirit of the wilderness; the death of one signals the inevitable demise of the other. Thorpe's story is tinged with melancholy and nostalgia despite the riotous tone of the narration. So long as Doggett and the bear are perfectly matched and locked in a victor-less contest, the wilderness and civilization in Arkansas coexist in perfect equilibrium. Arkansas can remain a land of legendary natural fertility, and Doggett and his kind can exist there as heroic natural men. The death of the bear disrupts that Edenic balance. Man has triumphed, has won the game, but not without great cost. His survival is assured, but in a diminished world.

Though told from the viewpoint of the victor in the contest, Thorpe's masterpiece is not unlike the tales of Mike Fink, the King of the Keelboatmen, who is whipped in a fight with a steamboat and forced to move West, or of John Henry, victorious in a “fair fight” against a steam hammer, but dying in his triumph. The contest these folk heroes engage in is the struggle of wilderness America against the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution. “Survival” in the tales of the Southwestern humorists invariably means the triumph of man and civilization over the wilderness, but the basic paradigm of this game-like contest is appropriate for any situation in which opposing social forces must struggle for the future course of history. It is not surprising that these struggles both in folklore and in folk literature like Southwestern humor are expressed in game-metaphors. Such turning points in the history of a people do not occur without loss or regret; by describing them as “fair fights” the tellers of these tales assure their listeners that not only fair play but virtually a divine Justice and Fate have been served. And the wrenching and loss that accompany such cultural transitions are cushioned for those who experience them by the playfulness and humor of the games.

After “survival” the next most basic value at stake in the games of the Southwestern humorists can be termed “order” in its many forms. The comments of Baldwin on Alabama and Mississippi during the “flush times” of the 1830's could apply to the entire region of the Old Southwest: “Society was wholly unorganized; there was no restraining public opinion; the law was well-night powerless, and religion scarcely was heard except as furnishing the oaths and technics of profanity.”⁸ In such an environment of disorder and lawlessness the inherent order of games can create a buffer against chaos. Lacking the established traditions of law and jurisprudence, the legal system during this period of Southwestern history appears in the sketches by Baldwin and others to be little more than a series of games lawyers play with one another with their clients' welfare at stake. The American legal system by its very nature suggests certain game-like qualities; a “fair trial” does not require that Truth be ascertained in the matter of guilt, but that both sides in the litigation be given fair and equal chances to win. The opposition of plaintiff and defendant in a civil suit, and of prosecution and defense in a criminal one are governed more by principles of fair play, termed “due process,” than of abstract, objective Justice. Rules governing admissible evidence, proper testimony, and courtroom procedure are designed more to exemplify a game-like notion of fairness than a conscientious pursuit of Truth. But if such game-qualities are part of the very nature of the legal system in this country, they are magnified and made much more obviously playful in Baldwin's tales of the bar in the Old Southwest. Baldwin describes in the third person his own motivations for emigrating from Virginia to Mississippi in quest of legal game: “To the South West he started because magnificent accounts came from that sunny land of most cheering and exhilarating prospects of fussing, quarreling, murdering, violation of contracts, and the whole catalogue of crimen falsi—in fine, of a flush tide of litigation in all of its departments, civil and criminal. It was extolled as a legal Utopia, peopled by a race of eager litigants, only waiting for the lawyers to come on and divide out to them the shells of a bountiful system of squabbling” (FT, p. 34). Baldwin then proceeds to relate in equally playful terms anecdotes of the legal games clients and lawyers played throughout the region. An aura of child's play permeates his descriptions of the legal profession: “Imagine thirty or forty young men collected together in a new country, armed with fresh licenses which they had got gratuitously, and a plentiful stock of brass which they had got in the natural way; and standing ready to supply any distressed citizen who wanted law, with their wares counterfeiting the article” (FT, p. 37). If he and his colleagues seemed to Baldwin to be merely playing at being attorneys, he was consoled by the fact that the poor “distressed citizens” seemed equally to be playing at being clients: “There was one consolation: the clients were generally as sham as the counsellors. For the most part, they were either broke or in rapid decline. They usually paid us the compliment of retaining us, but they usually retained the fee too, a double retainer we did not much fancy” (FT, p. 38). In such conditions it is not surprising that Baldwin often describes the confrontations of lawyers as contests for exalted status in the barristers' pecking order, determined by the individuals' skill in rhetoric, rather than for legal justice; and the cases of the litigants more often the occasion for betting by the spectators, than serious attempts to redress injury or wrong. Particularly notable trials offered the best spectator sport; in one suit brought for forty dollars due on a trade for a jackass, the spectators formed themselves into pro-ass and anti-ass parties, and while the judges deliberated, they did too: “The anxiety of the crowd and the parties was intense, and kept growing, the longer [the justices] staid out. A dozen bets were taken on the result; and fourteen fights were made up, to take place as soon as the case was decided. At least twenty men had deferred getting drunk, until they could hear the issue of this great suit” (FT, p. 205).

Baldwin is describing the chaos in the legal system in this period, but, implicit in his sketches is the possibility that formally established law and order in frontier communities derives, in part at least, from the pleasure men take in contests of oratorical skill and in wagering their property and even their lives against those of another in contests governed by rules of fair play. The importance of game-playing in the creation of meaningful order is even more apparent in the humorous sketches that describe frontier justice unaided by any legal system at all. For example, delicate relationships between individuals are treated by George Washington Harris in a tale published in the Spirit of the Times called “A Sleep-Walking Incident.” The narrator relates an experience of his youth when he stayed overnight at the home of a farmer with “three blooming daughters.” Instructed to sleep with the eighteen-year-old son, the narrator accidentally climbs into bed with the girls—to the inevitable outrage of their father. The next morning the old man informs the stranger he will shoot him for so outrageous a violation of propriety, but his conditions governing the shooting are distinctly game-like. Unwilling to violate the “law” of hospitality in his own house or on his own land, he tells the narrator that they will start from the house together, himself afoot and the unwelcome guest on his horse; when the farmer reaches the fence that marks the boundary of his property, he will shoot the interloper dead. Bound by the rules of fairness he has established, the old man is powerless when the stranger, having “ridden a few quarter races in [his] time” (HOS, p. 382), whips the horse with a hickory switch given him by the farmer's son, and races to safety.

A similar incident occurs in a sketch titled “Old Singletire, the Man That Was Not Annexed” by Robert Patterson. “Old Single,” a law-defying “bold frontiersman,” avoids arrest by building his cabin directly on the border between the United States and the territory of Texas, where he sleeps with one half of himself in the states and one half in Texas. The authorities of both sides cannot arrest half a man when their warrants are for the whole, but when Texas is annexed, Old Single appears doomed, until the authorities agree to a game that allows him a chance for freedom. They will race him a mile to the Red River; if he arrives first, he can swim to Arkansas and freedom—if not, he will be “rendered up a victim to the offended dignity of the laws.” The story ends in this way: “Agreed,” said Old Single, “it's a bargain. Boys, tha is a gallon in that barrel, let's finish it in a friendly way, and then travel.” The thing was done, the travel accomplished, and the race, fast and furious, was being done. The old fellow led the crowd, hallooing at his topmost voice as he gained the river—“HOOPEE!—HURRAH!—I aint annixated—I'm off—I aint nowhar—neither in the States nor Texas, BUT IN ARKANSAW!!!” swam to the opposite shore, fired a volley, gave three cheers, and retired victorious (QR, p. 67). In a land in which the status of its citizens is constantly in flux, where the difference between a state and a territory—in which separate laws prevail—can be an imaginary line drawn in the sand, the structure of games provides a more permanent order based not on arbitrary acts of legislation but on human instincts for fair play and sportsmanship. Both of these sketches suggest that men unhampered by legalities are naturally fair-minded in their dealings with one another. The nostalgia and sentimentalism that suffuses the bulk of Southwestern humor is very apparent here. Men require structure and order to govern their relationships, but left alone by legal systems, writers like Harris and Patterson seem to tell us, they devise superior principles that guarantee order without sacrificing individual freedom and dignity.

The most familiar of the Southwestern humorists' games that emphasize the ordering of human relations are found in tales of cheating the cheater, a local variation of the folklore tradition of tricking the trickster. Most involve horse-swaps or gambling games, and the best example of the former appears in Longstreet's Georgia Scenes. In “The Horse-Swap” a young man who calls himself the “Yellow Blossom” appears in town claiming “he could out-swap any live man that ever walked these hills, or that ever straddled horseflesh since the days of old daddy Adam” (GS [Georgia Scenes], pp. 14-15). One Peter Ketch decides he'd like to barter for Blossom's horse Bullet, and the two traders proceed through the carefully orchestrated steps of an elaborate game. They extol their horses' virtues, make them demonstrate their abilities, and then conclude with the actual dickering for price. Throughout the exchange the reader is aware of seemingly ritualistic conventions being observed. When Blossom asks Peter for his first bid, Peter responds, “No … you made the banter, now make your pass.” Blossom suggests a price and then says, “I've made my pass, now you make yours.” Each step is taken in its proper order. When the trade is finally consummated, Blossom exults that he has unloaded a horse whose purchaser was unaware of a great sore on its back, but he learns that he has acquired in return a horse both blind and deaf. The sharp trader has been outwitted, but what is won by Peter Ketch is not so much a slightly better horse, but stature in the eyes of the townspeople. An audience, whether simply readers like ourselves or bystanders at the scene, is essential to such contests—to virtually all the games we are discussing—because it provides the context in which the stake in the game is meaningful. What is won in these games is proof of the winner's possessing some quality that the audience values—in this case, shrewdness—the audience in turn confers value upon the game for the individual contestants.

The sketches of such horse-swaps and of poker games or other gambling contests in which one player cheats but the other does it better provide an ironic perspective on the lawlessness of frontier regions and on the creation of order through the principles of games. Elijah Shaddock, for example, in a sketch by an unnamed correspondent to the Spirit of the Times, finds himself in a poker game the winner of a disgruntled stranger's money. His opponent, attempting to recoup his losses, bets Shaddock fifty dollars that he can turn a Jack on the first trial. The bet made, the gambler throws the entire deck on the table face up. “No you don't,” says Shaddock. “Yes I do,” says the gambler, “it was fairly done” (BB, p. 176). Only apparently outwitted, Shaddock responds, “If there is a Jack in THAT pack, I'll be d—d!”—and of course there is none; Shaddock has “promiscuously” removed all four.

A similar tale is “Old Tuttle's Last Quarter Race” by “Buckeye,” also published in the Spirit, in which the old man, knowing his opponents in the upcoming quarter race will steal his horse to run against theirs at night, and so determine the winner in advance, substitutes a slower horse for his own. On the day of the race the overconfident opposition bets hugely on its horse and is soundly beaten. In both of these sketches, and in many more like them, the question of order receives ironic treatment. The writers of these tales are not glamorizing lawlessness or unethical behavior, but are observing that fairness can take strange forms. Were only one party to cheat, the contest would be unfair; but when both parties cheat, a new equilibrium or order is reached that is as satisfactory as more conventional fair play. Cheating merely adds an additional element of skill to the contest; the best players in such games are those who can both play conventionally and cheat with proficiency. Cheating, in fact, creates a superior game in which the mere relative speed of the horse or the luck of the deal plays a reduced role, and the players are allowed greater input of their own genius. In all cases the loser walks away convinced he was “fairly” beaten. The “rule” of the game, which both parties implicitly understand, is “no holds barred”; superior cheating is a sign of inventiveness and it deserves to win. In the immortal words of Simon Suggs, “It is good to be shifty in a new country” (SS, p. 8). Where values are shifting with the transition of the social order, adaptability becomes a positive virtue. Again the latent nostalgia and sentimentalism of Southwestern humor is apparent. In the absence of a fixed social order with its attendant conventional proprieties and decorum, the characters in these tales playfully create their own order that provides greater opportunity for human creativity than the more conventional legal system of civilization would allow.

The last, and most interesting, of the values at stake in the games of the Southwestern humorists may be named “identity”—a vague term with several significant specific meanings in this context. The problem of personal and national identity, of course, has been an American obsession since the beginning of the republic. A new people in a new land, without traditions or fixed social classes, inevitably asks itself the most basic of questions, “Who am I?” Countless writers have pondered the nature of the “American character” to an extent that has baffled and amused European observers who take their national identities for granted. Attempts to write the “Great American Novel” were not the only result; recurring themes of alienation and the quest for personal identity have marked much of our best fiction. These obsessions of our finest writers only reflected the concerns of the masses of Americans; the evolution of American society through the first two centuries of nationhood seems to have occurred to a large extent through continual efforts to create artificial social classes determined by wealth, longevity in the country, or other designators of status, to compensate for the absence of a natural aristocracy.

On the frontier, of course, the question of identity was most acute. The newest part of the new country, settled largely by the disenchanted and unsuccessful from previously civilized regions, offered its citizens even less assurance of their proper roles as individuals and in relation to one another. In the humorous sketches of Southwestern writers the question, “Who am I?” receives a number of emphatic responses: “Here I come! a screamer! yes d—n me, if I an't a proper screamer; JUST FROM BENGAL! HALF HORSE HALF ALLIGATOR, AND WITH A LITTLE TOUCH OF THE SNAPPING TURTLE,” yells one hardy frontiersman (HOS, p. 6). Another, the honorable Nimrod Wildfire, booms, “I'm the best man—if I ain't, I wish I may be tetotaciously exfluctified! I can whip my weight in wild cats and ride strait through a crab apple orchard on a flash of lightning. … When I'm good natured I weigh about a hundred and seventy, but when I'm mad I weigh a ton” (HOS, pp. 13-14). And our old friend Chunkey, after licking the panthers in a fair fight, is no more modest in his address to his dead foes: “Did you ever hearn tell of the man they calls ‘Chunkey?’ born in Kaintuck and raised in Mississippi? death on a bar, and smartly in a panter fight? If you diddent, look, for I'm he! I kills bar, whips panters in a fair fight; I walks the water, I out-bellars the thunder, and when I gets hot, the Mississippi hides itself” (BB, p. 139).

Frontier roaring or “Big Talk,” as it is termed by Dorothy Dondore, served many purposes. It was “whistling in the dark”—rendering the unknown and threatening elements of the wilderness less terrifying. Or, as Dondore claims, such boasting demonstrated “not only the power of its author's physique but of the fecundity and boldness of his fancy.”⁹ But the frontier boast at the most elemental level is simply a cry for recognition of the boaster's existence; it says, “Look at me, I occupy space on this planet and deserve to be acknowledged!” This most fundamental claim to personal identity is apparent in virtually every boasting match described by the Southwestern humorists. Boasts are most often preludes to fights, as is the one recorded by James Kirke Paulding between a batteauxman and a wagoner. The “contest,” as Paulding terms it, arises spontaneously by the accident of two such “combustible” individuals finding themselves in one another's presence. The wagoner happens upon a batteauxman peacefully singing a tune, and commences to whistle “The batteauxman robb'd the old woman's hen-roost.” The batteauxman cocks an eye; the wagoner responds with a leer. The batteauxman thrusts his tongue in his cheek; the wagoner flaps his hands and crows like a cock. The batteauxman neighs like a horse; the wagoner swears he has “the handsomest sweetheart of any man in all Greenbriar.” Subsequent claims to having “the finest horse of any man in a hundred miles” and “a better rifle than any man that ever wore a blue jacket” finally provoke the blue-jacketed batteauxman to violence—“to touch his rifle, was to touch his honor.” He pummels the wagoner, but is subsequently defended against charges of assault and battery on the claim that “to put up with disgrace, was to debase his nature,” and “to destroy every manly principle within him” (HOS, pp. 9-11). Paulding, the Northeasterner, finds this eccentric behavior amusing and far from admirable, but as an outsider he does not truly understand what he has witnessed. The physical violence, which results in the wagoner's loss of three teeth and gain of “diverse black and bloody bruises,” is only important as the culmination of the preceding stages of the ritualistic contest. The two antagonists are asserting in precisely orchestrated steps their rival claims to significant identity in this frontier world. The batteauxman redeems his honor, but the wagoner is not a loser in any serious way. For them to come together and merely fight would be meaningless, but by observing the game-like conventions of the ritual taunts and battle, they both successfully assert their dignity. The fight itself is merely part of the game; it is the game that is meaningful.

That this is the case is even clearer in a sketch by William C. Hall titled “How Mike Hooter Came Very Near ‘Walloping’ Arch Coony.” From a distance through intermediaries the two countrymen trade insults and taunts that gradually build up towards an exchange of blows. When they finally meet, they continue cursing until soon they are “sidelin' up” to one another preparing to fight. But Arch complains the ground is “too rooty,” and, after clearing it, Mike tells him to wait while he unbuttons his “gallowses.” In the meantime the ferry is about to leave, so they agree to cross the river and fight on the other side. When Mike is unable to get his horse aboard in time, they find themselves on opposite shores still yelling back and forth, until Mike finally rides off, explaining, “My wife she would be'spectin' me at the house, an' might raise pertickler h-ell if I didn't get thar in time.” Mike's final comment to those listening to his recital is, “I tell you what, I came the nearest wallopin' that feller, not to do it, that ever you saw!” (HOS, pp. 310-315). The humor of the anecdote lies in the contrast between the brave boasting and the obvious reluctance of either man to fight, but as in the Paulding sketch the combatants have actually accomplished a great deal. Through their game—and Mike specifically calls it “a game two could play at”—they have each established themselves, to their own satisfaction and probably that of their friends, as tough sonsabitches that others had better not mess with. The actual fight is irrelevant, and the fact that it never comes off is the best possible conclusion to the game. The boasts and “cussin” take the place of the fight—they become a ritual game that confers victory on both. In the fight for territoriality, for “turf” in the jargon of modern street gangs, both Mike Hooter and Arch Coony have earned the right to stride confidently about the countryside assured of their reputations.

Such games, then, in the sketches of the Southwest humorists provide the players with the most essential and fundamental sense of personal identity. Fights are fought to determine the “best man,” in an account by Mason Locke Weems; for honor, according to Thomas Kirkman's “Jones' Fight”; or for proof of manhood, in A. B. Longstreet's “The Fight” (HOS, p. 5; BB, p. 34; GS, p. 46). These are simply three ways of expressing the same idea, and the fairness of the fights and observance of their rituals are essential to achieving it. Other less violent frontier games serve the same function. A race between steamboats conducting passengers along the Ohio River takes place because, as the narrator of one sketch says, “A craft like ours with such a company, and such a captain, mustn't be beaten” (BB, p. 126). A shooting match in Georgia Scenes becomes the occasion for the citified narrator to gain the respect of the country folk, who establish a hierarchy of first citizens according to shooting skill. Even the courts recognize the necessity of honor to personal identity. Baldwin reports in Flush Times that criminal cases for killing or deadly assault “were usually defended upon points of chivalry” (FT, p. 42), and Cash confirms in his analysis of the mind of the ante-bellum South the presence of what he calls an “honor complex”: “As is well known, the laws of most of the states either openly or tacitly countenanced the formal affaire, and in none of them was a killing in such a brush likely to bring forth more than a perfunctory indictment. And the common murderer who had slain his man in a personal quarrel and with some appearance of a fair fight, some regard for a few amenities, need not fear the indignity of hanging. If the jury was not certain to call it self-defense, the worst verdict he had to expect was manslaughter.”¹⁰ The keys are “fair fight” and regard for the “amenities”—that is, observance of the rituals of a game that was the basis not just for a social order but for the definition of morality and personal identity as well.

The examples cited thus far seem to emphasize the narcissism of most of these games, but this impression is misleading. If the antagonists can walk away from boasting matches, fights, and other contests more secure in their self-worth, they also walk away with greater respect for their opponents. Mike Hooter feels that Arch Coony is a pretty tough bird after all, and a good ol' boy besides. The victorious batteauxman and the beaten wagoner recognize each other's prowess and will regard each other respectfully in future encounters. A sense of community is difficult to generate in a region newly settled by citizens who are liable to move again soon, in restless pursuit of Western promises. People are spatially isolated from one another to a much greater extent on the frontier than in more settled communities, and restless movement constantly brings them in contact with strangers. The game-structure of many of these encounters reported by the Southwestern humorists describes an important manner of establishing community between two individuals. It is a fact known to every athlete that a player establishes a bond, a closeness, to those he has competed against, and the more direct the confrontation the closer the bond. This fact is also apparent in the fiction we are considering. Joseph M. Field describes Mike Fink and a young friend shooting cans off each other's heads at forty yards: “This wild feat of shooting cans off each other's head was a favorite one with Mike—himself and ‘boy’ generally winding up a hard frolic with this savage, but deeply-meaning proof of continued confidence” (HOS, p. 103). The chance of death makes this game a particularly potent bond of feeling, but such extreme risks are not necessary. A more light-hearted sketch, “Dick Harlan's Tennessee Frolic,” describes a country dance in which the competitive urges of the dancers soon erupt in a fight that seems simply the climax of the entertainment. The narrator sums up the experience: “Luck rayther run again me that nite, fur I dident lick eny body but the fiddler, and had three fites—but a fellow cant always win! Arter my fite in the ground we made friends all round (except the fiddler—he's hot yet) and danced and liquored at the tail of every Reel till sun up, when them that was sober enuff went home, and them that was wounded staid whar they fell” (QR, p. 90). The fight is the culmination of the game of rivalries that prevailed throughout the “frolic”; it is a cathartic conclusion that seems to bind the participants into closer friendship. One suspects they will reminisce over the highlights of the fight for days to come, and eagerly look forward to the next occasion for another.

Virtually all of the games that have been discussed in other contexts serve this community-producing function. In horse-swaps, quarter races, poker games, exchanges of boasts, and fights the game is an occasion for a temporary but intense relationship between two individuals that is an important source of community. These games are not casual encounters but complex interactions in which the two contestants respond to one another in meaningful ways. The tacit agreement to the rules and shared respect for the worthiness of the opponent create a bond that makes the outcome of the contest actually less important than the simple playing. In the establishment of personal identity and mutual recognition of the identity of the other lies the foundation for whatever social order exists in the frontier Southwest of these sketches. And it is achieved through games.

3.

The two greatest creations of the Southwestern humorists, Simon Suggs and Sut Lovingood, provide ironic commentary on the games I have been discussing. Games, I observed, are a natural response to frontier conditions, an expression of the competition that frontier equality engenders, and a mode of interaction that creates order and community in the political and social vacuum of the frontier. But this is a somewhat idealized notion of human response to frontier conditions; as W. J. Cash claims, an altogether different reaction is equally possible:

In theory, the frontier is the land of equal opportunity for all. In theory, its rewards are wholly to industry, to thrift, to luck. … In practice, they are just as often to cunning, to hoggery and callousness, to brutal unscrupulousness and downright scoundrelism. In practice, on any frontier which holds out large prospects, and where, accordingly, men congregate in numbers, where events move swiftly and competition is intense, there invariably arises the schemer—the creator and manipulator of fictitious values, the adept in spurring on the already overheated imaginations of his fellows—and, in his train, a whole horde of lesser swindlers and cheats.¹¹

This description suggests another kind of game-playing in which fairness and mutual recognition of rules, stakes, and the opponent's worthiness have no part. Cash describes the conditions that produced the confidence man, the amoral speculator, the rogue. Of their kind of game-playing, Johnson Jones Hooper and George Washington Harris captured the essence in two memorable characters.

Simon Suggs is the less amoral of the two; he operates according to a consistent ethic, but it is not one which is capable of producing a new civilization. To be shifty in a new country is indeed necessary, and Simon, growing up in newly settled Middle Georgia, is adept at the kind of shiftiness that enables him to emerge repeatedly from tight scrapes not just intact but triumphant. We learn from the beginning that as a youth he was an inveterate game-player, stealing his mother's roosters and father's plough horses for cockfights and quarter races, pitching dollars, playing “old sledge,” and “stocking the papers” (SS, pp. 9-10). The major incident of his youth which catapults him on to an illustrious career in the wider world occurs when he is caught playing poker by his father. When Simon bets that he can cut a Jack from the deck of cards, his father, in order to prove that such a feat is “agin nater,” agrees. Just in case “nater” needs some help, however, the elder Suggs removes all the face cards from the deck, but his son produces a Jack from his sleeve to win the bet. As Simon ironically tells his daddy, a “hard shell” Baptist preacher, “It was predestinated,” and on the pony he has won rides off into the world to seek his fortune.

This initial escapade establishes the pattern for all of Simon's subsequent game-playing. He is motivated in all of his games by but two desires—to increase his own material fortune, and secondarily to expose hypocrisy. Outcheating the cheater has different implications here than it had in the sketches cited earlier. The difference is a subtle one, but the importance of the game for both Simon and his father lies simply in winning; the mere playing of the game matters not, and cheating is less an expression of ingenuity than of the simple desire to win at all costs. The material stake in all of Simon's games—the sum of money or the value of the object won—receives much greater emphasis than it does in the tales discussed earlier. Even more significantly, the loser of these contests does not appear as a worthy opponent who has been outplayed, but as a hypocritical or greedy fool who gets exactly what he deserves. The game is simply not meaningful in the broader context of human relations.

This pattern is quickly established. In his first encounter after leaving home Simon tricks a greedy land speculator, winning one hundred and seventy dollars and a better horse than his own. He next allows a fellow passenger on a stage coach to believe he is a legislator, and permits the man, seeking a bank directorship for himself, to give him a twenty dollar bribe. Simon is a skillful player; as a prototypical confidence man he exploits others' belief. With seeming passivity, he allows others to misinterpret his true identity and set themselves up to be taken. Simon acts according to a perverse sort of honesty: “Honesty's the bright spot in any man's character!” he says. “Fair play's a jewel, but honesty beats it all to pieces!” (SS, p. 37). Simon does not have to lie, because the others set their own traps—he can be honest without being fair.

Simon's career continues in this fashion. He allows others to believe him a wealthy hog rancher, accepting their deference, their food and drink, and their money. In order to buy land from an Indian woman at a ridiculously advantageous price, he plays on the greed of other speculators, tricking them into providing the entire purchase price for only a share of the profits. In yet another escapade he out-cheats the cheaters betting on an Indian lacrosse game. But it is at a camp meeting that Simon plays his greatest game of all. In the meeting he sees only competition: “He viewed the whole affair as a grand deception—a sort of ‘opposition line’ running against his own” (SS, p. 115). When he feigns conversion, the faithful are so moved by the redemption of such a profligate sinner, that Simon becomes the “lion of the day.” In exhorting the others to follow suit, he indulges extensively in “his favorite style of metaphor”; encouraging them to come pray he says: “It's a game that all can win at! Ante up! ante up boys—friends I mean—don't back out! … No matter what sort of hand you've got … take stock! Here am I, the wickedest and blindest of sinners—has spent my whole life in the sarvice of the devil—has now come in on narry pair and won a pile! … The bluff game ain't played here! No runnin' of a body off! Every body holds four aces and when you bet, you win!” (SS, pp. 122-23). Simon's metaphor is ironic, of course. He speaks of religious conversion as a game they can win, while it is actually his own game to capitalize on their credulity—most assuredly a “bluff game.” He successfully exploits the preacher who would exploit the people, and takes advantage of the congregation's pride of purse. As he rides off with their money collected so that Simon can start his own church, he observes, “I'll never bet on two pair again! They're peart at the snap game, theyselves, but they're badly lewd this hitch” (SS, p. 126).

In this manner Simon thrives throughout his career; in a world of rascals he is the Big Rascal. Assuming others will do anything to win, he is never caught unaware; knowing others will cheat, he will simply cheat better: “No thar's sense in short cards. All's fair and cheat and cheat alike is the order; and the longest pole knocks down the persimmon!” (SS, p. 169). The only game that Simon cannot win is faro—the “tiger” always whips him because he is unable to cheat—but elsewhere he is invincible. He is the essence of a frontier type who refuses to recognize the claims of any person or any society. His self-aggrandizing play cannot create the foundation for a new ideal Western society but can only expose the moral insufficiencies of the one already in formation. What he finally comes to represent is triumphant but unscrupulous individualism; in his own ironic words at the conclusion of another game successfully played: “Well, as I've allers said, Honesty and Providence will never fail to fetch a man out! Just give me that hand, and I'll ‘stand’ agin all creation!” (SS, p. 180).

If Simon Suggs undercuts the possibility of culturally meaningful game-playing, Sut Lovingood inverts it totally. George Washington Harris was the most skillful, imaginative, and truly funny of the Southwestern humorists, and in Sut Lovingood he hilariously parodies the games and playfulness that are so much a part of their writing. Sut acknowledges the importance of games quite clearly, when he describes his “sentiments ontu folks”: “men wer made a-purpus jis' tu eat, drink, an' fur stayin awake in the yearly part ove the nites; an' wimmen wer made tu cook the vittils, mix the sperits, an' help the men du the stayin awake.” To this basic philosophy Sut adds that it is proper for “the men tu play short kerds, swap hosses wif fools, an' fite fur exercise at odd spells” (SL [Sut Lovingood's Yarns], p. 77). Simon Suggs seeks only his own personal gain in his games, but he does so at the expense of the greedy and hypocritical by allowing them to beat themselves. Sut's game-sense, on the other hand, is totally anarchic; he is motivated only by revenge, jealousy, or just plain orneriness. Not even money, but only a perverse pleasure in the discomfort of others is generally the goal of his pranks and games. The games that he admits he excels in are not ones that serve any productive function. “Hit takes a feller a long time,” he tells his friend, George, the narrator, “to fine out what his gif' am, his bes' pint, what game he's stronges' on.” But Sut decides he has two such gifts: “Gittin' intu trubbil were one, an' then runnin' out ove hit were tuther” (SL, p. 287). Sut's most distinctive physical feature is his uncommonly long legs, and he constantly speaks in terms of races in describing how he uses them to escape the many difficulties he causes for himself. After breaking up Sicily Burns's wedding, that ends with her father galloping off on an enraged bull, he describes “how I won my race agin all his sons, that houns, an the neighborhood ginirally” (SL, p. 84). It is only sneakiness and cowardice that are celebrated by such “races,” and Sut is the first to admit he is a coward. He simply wanted to get “even” with Sicily for rejecting him; he breaks up a Negro night-meeting, not like Simon to gain some money and expose hypocrisy, but just for cussedness, and he uses a typical game-metaphor to describe his involvement. When the preacher introduces his text, “Thar shall be weepin an' railin an' chompin ove teef …,” Sut says, “Dorg on me ef yu haint draw'd the rite kerd this pop, fur I know'd I were 'sistin' ove him” (SL, p. 133). Gaining advantage over the sheriff by discovering an adulterous love note elicits a similar metaphor: “Now, I jis know'd es long es I hed that paper, I hilt four aces ontu that sheriff, an' I ment tu bet on the han” (SL, p. 183).

Such metaphors appear repeatedly in the sketches and they reveal complete absence of the sense of honor that marks the games of the other Southwestern humorists. Sut thinks of himself as a “natral born durn'd fool,” and of his relations to others as either revealing his advantage over them or theirs over him. He relates one incident in which his distress at tangling with a bull is simply the cause for a bystander to wager: “Two tu one on laigs,” soon becomes, “Two tu one on the bull,” and eventually, “Ten tu one on the bull, an' iseters [oysters] fur the wun what takes the bet,” as his predicament worsens (SL, pp. 111-12). Sut appears not to disapprove of the other's unconcern, and when he later encounters another in a similar difficulty, he reacts in the same way. When Boze, his father's “half bull half raskil ove a dorg” attacks a stranger, Sut calls it “a chance for a race,” and when Boze has treed the man, Sut comments, “I put up the game at about six an' six an' Boze's deal, an' sorter hope that he mout turn Jack” (SL, p. 283).

The utter meaninglessness of Sut's games in any larger context is perhaps best exemplified by a short sketch describing an incident of his childhood. According to Sut's daddy, a “powerful sharp boy” bet Sut a dozen “marvils” that he couldn't jump four feet on a course the other boy selects. Hoss Lovingood describes the outcome: “Well! Smarty tuck ‘my son’ within three feat ove a frame house an' told him to jump toards the house, an' at hit he went—you bet. The licks could be hearn a mile, but, arter a while, the weatherboards give way; so did the laths, an' plarster—‘my son’ Sut won them marvils. When he come home, his head was as big as a bushell, an' his brains were churned as thin as water, an' when he shook his head, they sloshed. They slosh yet” (SL, p. 305). In this wonderful parody of the future hero proving his industriousness as a youth, the futility of victory is appropriate for such a figure as Sut. The games he continues to play throughout his career are equally unproductive of anything but proof for his belief in “univarsal onregenerit human nater.” The games which other Southwestern humorists used to express their characters' honor and magnanimity, and which suggest the beginnings of a new social order on the lawless frontier, are parodied by Harris so thoroughly that they become the most extreme evidence that Sut is indeed simply a “natral born durn'd fool.”

It is tempting to claim that Hooper and Harris are the realists among a group of Southwestern writers who are essentially sentimentalists. But it is perhaps fairer to suggest that the frontier games so much a part of this fiction served a variety of purposes for the writers. Heroes as well as rascals played games in this literature, and both a myth of the formation of frontier society, and the undercutting of that myth, emerged from it. Perhaps a more basic question must be asked; did the Southwestern humorists invent the game-playing as a comic feature of the eccentric characters and behavior with which they wished to amuse sophisticated readers, or did they in fact capture the true essence of the frontier? In other words, did they create an artificial epic of frontier game-playing, or, unwittingly or not, chronicle the actual formation of the American character? Several of the writers, of course, claimed authenticity for their stories—for the events themselves or for the fact that they heard the stories told. In presenting the “character of a native Georgian,” for example, Longstreet claimed “that there is nothing herein ascribed to him of which he was incapable” (GS, p. 22). In Flush Times Baldwin included serious accounts of Southwestern jurisprudence and legal personages with his more exotic portraits of liars and pranksters. All of Flush Times is presented as a true record of Mississippi and Alabama in the 1830's, as Georgia Scenes claims to offer “Characters, Incidents, Etc., in the First Half Century of the Republic,” according to the book's subtitle. The more obviously fanciful sketches that appeared in Porter's Spirit of the Times, when republished in two separate volumes, were offered as “Sketches Illustrative of Characters and Incidents in the South and South-West,” and “Sketches Illustrative of Scenes, Characters, and Incidents, Throughout ‘the Universal Yankee Nation.’” Porter's subtitles are most suggestive; if verisimilitude is ignored in certain facts, fidelity to the character of the region and its people is said to be maintained.

If we accept the claim forwarded by Frederick Jackson Turner and others that the frontier had a critical impact on the formation of American character, and if we recognize the game-quality in so much of American life today, we might well believe that the Southwestern humorists did indeed express the true spirit of frontier America in the games they described. America is a frontier nation. For a century-and-a-half before nationhood and throughout the nineteenth century, not just in the South and West but in New England and the East as well, settled communities pressed up against the slowly receding frontier which could not but exert its influence. The frontier spirit of expansionism, veneration of bigness, prizing of individualism, and resistance to the intrusions of authority continue to define a significant part of the national character today. The game-quality of American life is evident in most of our major institutions. Not just the legal system, which, as was mentioned earlier, pits prosecution against defense in a game-like contest, but the American political and economic systems likewise resemble formalized games. In the relationships of employer and employee, producer and consumer, government and individual, no absolute standard of justice exists, but order and stability are maintained by the contending sides being forced to “play” fairly. The ethics of horse-swaps and land speculations that emerged from the tales of the Southwestern humorists remain essentially unchanged in the relationship of producer and consumer today. We consumers have had to accept governmental help so that we can be an evenly matched opponent for corporate producers in determining “fair” prices and truthful representation of products, but otherwise we are still cousins to frontier horse-traders. The relationship of the typical American, rich or poor, in seeking tax loopholes or applying for welfare, to his government today is often characterized by his seeking his best advantage within the rules (or, if he is clever or lucky, outside the rules) which define the government's allowable moves in a game. This situation is no more apparent than at income-tax time, when the typical American's conception of his “fair” taxes seems simply a recent expression of the pervasive resistance to authority chronicled in Southwestern humor, perhaps best represented by Old Singletire who refused to be “annixated.”

It does not seem unreasonable to conclude from such observations that the Southwestern humorists did, in fact, capture the spirit of an important part of the emerging American character in their collective epic of game-playing. The myth of a frontier people must emphasize their ability to survive the constant hardships of life, their adaptability to changing conditions, and their success in establishing order, community, and personal identity within the vacuum of a land without tradition or convention. Writers like Longstreet, Baldwin, Thorpe, and the numerous contributors to the Spirit of the Times express these values in the games they describe, and Hooper and Harris do not so much expose the fallacy of this epic as make it more complete—forcing our recognition of the mere self-serving, sometimes even destructive dimension of much game-playing, a dimension that is clearly a part of American character today. Americans, in the daily activities of their ordinary lives as well as in their passions for sport and competitions to determine “the best” in every field from female beauty to literature and film, seem a game-playing people for both good and ill. Any myth of this people must include some element of this game-playing, and the Southwestern humorists have indeed done that. As Richard Slotkin observes in meticulously tracing the evolution of frontier mythology in this country from 1600 to 1860: “The myths are generated on a subliterary level by the historical experience of a people and thus constitute part of that inner reality which the work of the artists draws on, illuminates, and explains.”¹² By unabashedly tapping the sources of oral frontier tales, the Southwestern humorists may have articulated an important American myth more effectively than many more self-conscious and more skillful writers. In a century of American writers obsessed with defining national identity, the Southwestern humorists, without pretension to high literary achievement but close to the mind of the common folk, perhaps best understood the myth of an emerging American people.

Notes

1. Dorothy Dondore, “Big Talk! The Flying, the Gabe, and the Frontier Boast,” American Speech, 6 (October 1930), 45.

2. Thomas W. Cooley, “Faulkner Draws the Long Bow,” Twentieth Century Literature, 16 (1970), 269. The tellers of tall tales also often competed with one another, as Constance Rourke observed: “Tall tales were often like wrestling matches or the rhapsodic boastings and leapings and crowings and neighings that prefaced a fight in the backwoods, with one tale pitted against another.” American Humor (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931), p. 49.

3. Spirit of the Times, XXI, 205 (28 June 1851). Quoted in Walter Blair, Native American Humor (New York: Chandler, 1960), p. 69.

4. W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Knopf, 1941), p. 4

5. Blair, Native American Humor, p. 62.

6. The following abbreviations, noted in the text, refer to these editions:

   BB: William T. Porter, ed., The Big Bear of Arkansas and Other Tales (New York: AMS Press, 1973). This is a facsimile of the 1845 edition.

   FT: Joseph G. Baldwin, The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi (New York: Sagamore Press, 1957).

   GS: A. B. Longstreet, Georgia Scenes (New York: Sagamore Press, 1957).

   HOS: Hennig Cohen and William B. Dillingham, eds., Humor of the Old Southwest, 2nd ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1975).

   QR: William T. Porter, ed., A Quarter Race in Kentucky and Other Tales (New York: AMS Press, 1973). This is a facsimile of the 1847 edition.

   SL: George Washington Harris, Sut Lovingood's Yarns, ed. M. Thomas Inge (New Haven: College and University Press, 1966).

   SS: Johnson Jones Hooper, Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969).

7. Cash observes that the dominant trait of the mind of the South was an “intense individualism,” and that the essence of any frontier is competition. The Mind of the South, pp. 31, 12.

8. Quoted by Manly Wade Wellman in his “Introduction” to Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, pp. xii-xiii.

9. Dorothy Dondore, “Big Talk!”, 52.

10. Cash, The Mind of the South, pp. 73-74.

11. The Mind of the South, pp. 18-19.

12. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), p. 4.