THE SETTLERS who put their stamp on Texas were predominantly from the
southern states--and far more of them came to Texas to work out of debt
than came with riches in the form of slaves. The plantation owner came
too, but the go-ahead Crockett kind of backwoodsman was typical. The
southern type never became so prominent in New Mexico, Arizona, and
California as in Texas. Nevertheless, the fact glares out that the code
of conduct--the riding and shooting tradition, the eagerness to stand up
and fight for one's rights, the readiness to back one's judgment with
a gun, a bowie knife, money, life itself--that characterized the whole
West as well as the Southwest was southern, hardly at all New England.
The very qualities that made many of the Texas pioneers rebels to
society and forced not a few of them to quit it between sun and
sun without leaving new addresses fitted them to conquer the
wilderness--qualities of daring, bravery, reckless abandon, heavy
self-assertiveness. A lot of them were hell-raisers, for they had a lust
for life and were maddened by tame respectability. Nobody but obsequious
politicians and priggish "Daughters" wants to make them out as models
of virtue and conformity. A smooth and settled society--a society
shockingly tame--may accept Cardinal Newman's definition, "A gentleman
is one who never gives offense." Under this definition a shaded violet,
a butterfly, and a floating summer cloud are all gentlemen. "The art of
war," said Napoleon, "is to make offense." Conquering the hostile Texas
wilderness meant war with nature and against savages as well as against
Mexicans. Go-ahead Crockett's ideal of a gentleman was one who looked
in another direction while a visitor was pouring himself out a horn of
whiskey.
Laying aside climatic influences on occupations and manners, certain
Spanish influences, and minor Pueblo Indian touches, the Southwest from
the point of view of the bedrock Anglo-Saxon character that has made it
might well include Arkansas and Missouri. The realism of southern folk
and of a very considerable body of indigenous literature representing
them has been too much overshadowed by a kind of _So Red the Rose_
idealization of slave-holding aristocrats.
ALLSOPP, FRED W. _Folklore of Romantic Arkansas_, 2 vols., Grolier
Society, 1931. Allsopp assembled a rich and varied collection of
materials in the tone of "The Arkansas Traveler." OP.
ARRINGTON, ALFRED W. _The Rangers and Regulators of the Tanaha_, 18 56.
East Texas bloodletting.
BALDWIN, JOSEPH G. _The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi_, 1853.
BLAIR, WALTER. _Horse Sense in American Humor from Benjamin Franklin
to Ogden Nash_, 1942. OP. _Native American Humor_, 1937. OP. _Tall Tale
America_, Coward-McCann, New York, 1944. Orderly analyses with many
concrete examples. With Franklin J. Meine as co-author, _Mike Fink,
King of Mississippi River Keelboatmen_, 1933. Biography of a folk type
against pioneer and frontier background. OP.
BOATRIGHT, MODY C. _Folk Laughter on the American Frontier_. See under
"Interpreters."
CLARK, THOMAS D. _The Rampaging Frontier_, 1939. OP. Historical
picturization and analysis, fortified by incidents and tales of
"Varmints," "Liars," "Quarter Horses," "Fiddlin'," "Foolin' with the
Gals," etc.
CROCKETT, DAVID. _Autobiography_. Reprinted many times. Scribner's
edition in the "Modern Students' Library" includes _Colonel Crockett's
Exploits and Adventures in_ _Texas_. Crockett set the backwoods
type. See treatment of him in Parrington's _Main Currents in American
Thought_. Richard M. Dorson's _Davy Crockett, American Comic Legend_,
1939, is a summation of the Crockett tradition.
FEATHERSTONHAUGH, G. W. _Excursion through the Slave States_, London,
1866. Refreshing on manners and characters.
FLACK, CAPTAIN. _The Texas Ranger, or Real Life in the Backwoods_,
London, 1866.
GERSTAECKER, FREDERICK. _Wild Sports in the Far West_. Nothing better on
backwoods life in the Mississippi Valley.
HAMMETT, SAMUEL ADAMS (who wrote under the name of Philip Paxton),
_Piney Woods Tavern; or Sam Slick in Texas_ and _A Stray Yankee in
Texas_. Humor on the roughneck element. For treatment of Hammett as man
and writer see _Sam Slick in Texas_, by W. Stanley Hoole, Naylor, San
Antonio, 1945.
HARRIS, GEORGE W. _Sut Lovingood_, New York, 1867. Prerealism.
HOGUE, WAYMAN. _Back Yonder_. Minton, Balch, New York, 1932. Ozark life.
OP.
HOOPER, J. J. _Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs_, 1845. OP. Downright
realism. Like Longstreet, Hooper in maturity wanted his realism
forgotten. An Alabama journalist, he got into the camp of respectable
slave-holders and spent the later years of his life shouting against
the "enemies of the institution of African slavery." His life partly
explains the lack of intellectual honesty in most southern spokesmen
today. _Alias Simon Suggs: The Life and Times of Johnson Jones Hooper_,
by W. Stanley Hoole, University of Alabama Press, 1952, is a careful
study of Hooper's career.
HUDSON, A. P. _Humor of the Old Deep South_, New York, 1936. An
anthology. OP.
LONGSTREET, A. B. _Georgia Scenes_, 1835. Numerous reprints. Realism.
MASTERSON, JAMES R. _Tall Tales of Arkansas_, Boston, 1943. OP. The
title belies this excellent social history--by a scholar. It has become
quite scarce on account of the fact that it contains unexpurgated
versions of the notorious speech on "Change the Name of Arkansas"--which
in 1919 in officers' barracks at Bordeaux, France, I heard a lusty
individual recite with as many variations as Roxane of _Cyrano de
Bergerac_ wanted in love-making. When Fred W. Allsopp, newspaper
publisher and pillar of Arkansas respectability, found that this book of
unexpurgations had been dedicated to him by the author--a Harvard Ph.D.
teaching in Michigan--he almost "had a colt."
MEINE, FRANKLIN J. (editor). _Tall Tales of the Southwest_, Knopf,
New York, 1930. A superbly edited and superbly selected anthology with
appendices affording a guide to the whole field of early southern humor
and realism. No cavalier idealism. The "Southwest" of this excellent
book is South.
OLMSTED, FREDERICK LAW. _A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States_, 1856.
_A Journey Through Texas_, 1857. Invaluable books on social history.
POSTL, KARL ANTON (Charles Sealsfield or Francis Hardman, pseudonyms).
_The Cabin Book; Frontier Life_. Translations all OP.
RANDOLPH, VANCE. _We Always Lie to Strangers_, Columbia University
Press, New York, 1951. A collection of tall tales of the adding machine
variety. Fertile in invention but devoid of any yearning for the
beautiful or suggestion that the human spirit hungers for something
beyond horse play; in short, typical of American humor.
ROURKE, CONSTANCE. _American Humor_, 1931; _Davy Crockett_, 1934; _Roots
of American Culture and Other Essays_, 1942, all published by Harcourt,
Brace, New York.
THOMPSON, WILLIAM T. _Major Jones's Courtship_, Philadelphia, 1844.
Realism.
THORPE, T. B. _The Hive of the Bee-Hunter_, New York, 1854. This
excellent book should be reprinted.
WATTERSON, HENRY. _Oddities in Southern Life and Character_, Boston,
1882. An anthology with interpretative notes.
WILSON, CHARLES MORROW. _Backwoods America_. University of North
Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1935. Well ordered survey with excellent
samplings.
WOOD, RAY. _The American Mother Goose_, 1940; _Fun in American Folk
Rhymes_, 1952; both published by Lippincott, Philadelphia.