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Legends of the Old Southwest Straddling the borders between the myth of the West and the myth of the South are those heroes and writers who are associated with the humour and legends of the Old Southwest.And if 'The Fight' illustrates the strategy of comedy, then another tale in Georgia Scenes, 'The "Charm- ing Creature" as a Wife', illustrates the other approach. In the latter tale, the reader is told how the son of 'a plain, practical, sensible farmer' was ruined by marriage to the only child of a wealthy cotton merchant: a creature infected by what the nar- rator calls 'town dignity' - which involves an inordinate sense of her own worth, a preference for the glittering social world where she was brought up, and a failure to appreciate the 'order, neatness, and cleanness' of her husband's home and com- munity. There is no doubt where the narrator's sympathies lie here. On every possible occasion, he criticizes or makes fun of the pretensions of the 'charming creature', her idleness and 'irregular hours', and her longing to return to the fash- ionable world of town. Eventually, she gets her way; the couple leave the simple, rural world she detests, and in their new urban surroundings the husband sinks melodramatically into debt, drunkenness, illness and an early grave. The story then ends with the narrator pointing the moral of his tale: which, unsurprisingly, has to do not only with the pretensions but with the dangers of all those known as 'charming creatures'. It is a rather different moral from the one drawn at the end of 'The Fight'. In that story, all that the nineteenth century associated with the word 'culture' - taste of a certain genteel kind, 'schools, colleges, and benevolent associations' - is held up for approval; it provides a convenient vantage point from which to look down on the 'barbarism and cruelty' of the frontier. In 'The "Charm- ing Creature" ', however, that very same culture is mocked - words like 'refine- ment' and 'fashionable' become terms of abuse - and the idea of the 'natural' becomes the touchstone.Longstreet's probable motives for writing in this way were ones he shared with many other Southwestern humorists: among them, Joseph Glover Baldwin (1815-64), author of The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi (1853), Johnson Jones Hooper (1815-62), who wrote Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, Late of the Tallapoosa Volunteers (1845), and Thomas Bangs Thorpe, whose stories about what he called 'a hardy and indomitable race' of frontier people were collected in The Big Bear of Arkansas; and Other Sketches Illustrative of Character and Incidents in the South-West (1845).Davy, who boasted that he relied on 'natural-born sense instead of law learning', was soon turned by skilful politicians into a frontier hero, whose picturesque eccentricities, country humour, tall tales, shrewd native wit and rowdy pioneer spirit were all magnified and cel- ebrated.But soon after that, tales of the legendary frontiersman had begun to spread, by word of mouth, songs and poems, almanacs (known as Crockett Almanacs), and by such publications as The Lion of the West (1831) by James Kirke Paulding, Sketches and Eccentricities of Colonel David Crockett of West Tennessee (1833) by Mathew St Claire Clarke (1798-1842?) and An Account of Colonel Crockett's Tour to the North and Down East (1835).By this means, violence could be interpreted as an excess of high spirits and honest energy; apparent moral anarchy was metamorphosed into a reassertion of con- ventional principles; and the disruption of established social patterns could be regarded as a crucial step on the road to the recovery of a deeply traditional democratic ideal.The sketches were linked by the appearance in nearly all of them of a narrator bearing a suspicious resemblance to the author himself - a kindly, generous but occasionally pompous and patronizing man who tended to treat his subjects as if they were specimens of some strange form of life, with a mixture of curiosity and amusement.A healthy distance was maintainedfrom characters who were presented not so much as individuals as in terms of their common behavioural patterns; and the combined effect of the detachment, the condescension and the generalizing tendency was to create an impression some- where between folktale and caricature, legend and cartoon.As a professional gentleman and a Whig, Longstreet was inclined to nervousness about the crude habits of frontier life: a life characterized by what Baldwin, in Flush Times, called 'vulgarity

• ignorance - unmitigated rowdyism .They also appeared in magazines and newspapers, like the Spirit of the Times, which specialized in tales of the frontier and sporting sketches, and in almanacs - among them, the Crockett Almanacs, which did not confine themselves to the exploits of Davy.In the Preface to Georgia Scenes, Longstreet claimed proudly that he was filling in a 'chasm in history that has always been overlooked'; and 'The Fight' illustrates how he reconciled this claim with the demands of comedy.Davy Crockett became, more and more, a larger than life figure whose exploits, a mixture of the comic and the legendary, turned him into an embodiment of the rough spirit and even rougher individualism of the frontier.'Thanks to the Christian religion, to schools, colleges, and benevolent associations,' he explains, 'such scenes of barbarism and cruelty as that which I have been describing are now of rare occurrence, though they may still be occasionally met with in some of the new counties.'The simplicity and the exaggeration that create the comic note are there, in effect, because they enable Longstreet to show what is different about people like Bob and Bill, and emphasize that at the expense of any qualities they may share, in a Wordsworthian sense, with the rest of humanity.Serving in Congress from 1827 to 1831, and from 1833 to 1835, he was quickly adopted by Whig politicians, oppos- ing the populist hero Andrew Jackson, who saw in Crockett a useful tool for associating their party with backwoods democracy.Pouring 'about a ton on't over the sun's face', he got the sun loose; then, Crockett says, concluding his brag, 'I lit my pipe by the blaze o' his top-knot, shouldered my bear, an' walked home, introducin' people to the fresh daylight with a piece of sunrise in my pocket'.Crockett and Fink inhabit an interesting borderland between 'popular' and 'high' culture, the political and the legendary, oral folk tradition and published literature.And the narrator concludes by reassuring the, presumably genteel, reader that more refined habits and customs have now arrived.So, in an eminently understandable way, Longstreet and other Southwestern humorists attempted to distance their frontier surroundings, to place them in a framework that would make them manageable and known.A Georgia lawyer and academic, Longstreet published Georgia Scenes: Characters, Incidents &c, in the First Half-Century of the Republic in 1835.In a series of sketches varying from the descriptive to the dramatic, Longstreet presented his readers with illustrations of life in the remoter parts of the state.In one story, 'Sunrise in His Pocket', which appeared first in one of the posthumous almanacs, Davy tells a tall tale of how he got the sun moving again after it had 'got jammed between two cakes o' ice'.Fink announces, in this extended celebration of himself: I'm a reg'lar screamer from the ol' Massassip!I'm half wild horse and half cock-eyed alligator and the rest o' me is crooked snags an' red-hot snappin' turtle .The tone of the de- scription is humorous but the writer clearly hopes that, by means of his humour, he will show something significant about backwoods character: its simplicity, its rough energy, its notions of justice and its capacity for violence.Another way of doing it was via legend: they also tried to identify the rough, rude world they saw around them with a familiar rural type - the plain farmer, with his straightforward approach to things, his raw integrity and earthy language, and above all his muscular self-reliance.Simultaneously beautiful and tongue-in-cheek, swaggering and comic, the story captures nicely the rough pride of the hero of these stories and his refusal to take himself too seriously.He evidently helped to foster that legend by telling tales about himself, but it was others who wrote the tales down, among them the newspapermen Thomas Bangs Thorpe (1810-56) and Joseph M. Field (1815-78).The stories about Fink appeared in books, the earliest of which was The Last of the Boatmen by Morgan Neville published in 1829.'Bill presented a hideous spectacle,' he goes on. 'About a third of his nose, at the lower extremity, was bit off, and his face so swelled that it was difficult to discover in it anything of the human visage.'One way of doing this was via the humour: by its means, violence was transformed into play, social anarchy into curious spectacle, and fear and anxiety into mild amusement.As for heroes, the notable figures here are Davy Crockett (1786-1836) and Mike Fink (1770?-1823?).With the help of a ghost writer, Crockett wrote A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, of the State of Tennessee (1834): a book clearly designed to help him gain or retain political popularity.Perhaps the most famous piece of prose associated with Fink is 'Mike Fink's Brag', which achieved circulation around 1835-6.It captures perfectly the exuberance, the brute humour and animal vitality of the old frontier, and its absolute belief in itself.The first writer to make the legends and humour of the Old Southwest part of the literary tradition was Augustus Baldwin Longstreet (1790-1870).One of the sketches, for example, 'The Fight', describes a country scrap in detail and then ends with a lengthy description of the two fighters' wounds.Cock-a-doddle-do!whoop!....

Legends of the Old Southwest
Straddling the borders between the myth of the West and the myth of the South
are those heroes and writers who are associated with the humour and legends of
the Old Southwest. As for heroes, the notable figures here are Davy Crockett
(1786–1836) and Mike Fink (1770?–1823?). Crockett spent a shiftless youth until
his political career began when he was thirty. Serving in Congress from 1827 to
1831, and from 1833 to 1835, he was quickly adopted by Whig politicians, oppos-
ing the populist hero Andrew Jackson, who saw in Crockett a useful tool for
associating their party with backwoods democracy. Davy, who boasted that he
relied on ‘natural-born sense instead of law learning’, was soon turned by skilful
politicians into a frontier hero, whose picturesque eccentricities, country humour,
tall tales, shrewd native wit and rowdy pioneer spirit were all magnified and cel-
ebrated. With the help of a ghost writer, Crockett wrote A Narrative of the Life of
David Crockett, of the State of Tennessee (1834): a book clearly designed to help
him gain or retain political popularity. But soon after that, tales of the legendary
frontiersman had begun to spread, by word of mouth, songs and poems, almanacs
(known as Crockett Almanacs), and by such publications as The Lion of the West
(1831) by James Kirke Paulding, Sketches and Eccentricities of Colonel David Crockett
of West Tennessee (1833) by Mathew St Claire Clarke (1798–1842?) and An Account
of Colonel Crockett’s Tour to the North and Down East (1835). In some of these
publications, Crockett may have had a hand; in many, he did not. And when he
died at the Alamo in 1836, even more life was given to the legend. Davy Crockett
became, more and more, a larger than life figure whose exploits, a mixture of the
comic and the legendary, turned him into an embodiment of the rough spirit and
even rougher individualism of the frontier. In one story, ‘Sunrise in His Pocket’,
which appeared first in one of the posthumous almanacs, Davy tells a tall tale of
how he got the sun moving again after it had ‘got jammed between two cakes o’
ice’. His solution to the problem was to take ‘a fresh twenty-pound bear’ he hadbeen carrying on his back, ‘and beat the animal agin the ice till the hot ile began
to walk out on him at all sides’. Pouring ‘about a ton on’t over the sun’s face’,
he got the sun loose; then, Crockett says, concluding his brag, ‘I lit my pipe
by the blaze o’ his top-knot, shouldered my bear, an’ walked home, introducin’
people to the fresh daylight with a piece of sunrise in my pocket’. Simultaneously
beautiful and tongue-in-cheek, swaggering and comic, the story captures nicely
the rough pride of the hero of these stories and his refusal to take himself too
seriously.
As an actual historical figure, less is known of Mike Fink than of Crockett. He
was a keelboatman on the Ohio and Mississippi. Before that, he had worked as
Crockett had, as an Indian scout; and, when he left the river, he moved west to
become a trapper. It was on the river, however, that his violence, humour and
energy made him a legend. He evidently helped to foster that legend by telling
tales about himself, but it was others who wrote the tales down, among them the
newspapermen Thomas Bangs Thorpe (1810–56) and Joseph M. Field (1815–78).
The stories about Fink appeared in books, the earliest of which was The Last of the
Boatmen by Morgan Neville published in 1829. They also appeared in magazines
and newspapers, like the Spirit of the Times, which specialized in tales of the frontier
and sporting sketches, and in almanacs – among them, the Crockett Almanacs,
which did not confine themselves to the exploits of Davy. Perhaps the most famous
piece of prose associated with Fink is ‘Mike Fink’s Brag’, which achieved circulation
around 1835–6. ‘I’m a Salt River roarer! I’m a ring-tailed squealer!’ Fink announces,
in this extended celebration of himself:
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 ain’t had
a fight for two days an’ I’m spilein’ for exercise. Cock-a-doddle-do!
It captures perfectly the exuberance, the brute humour and animal vitality of the
old frontier, and its absolute belief in itself.
Crockett and Fink inhabit an interesting borderland between ‘popular’ and ‘high’
culture, the political and the legendary, oral folk tradition and published literature.
The first writer to make the legends and humour of the Old Southwest part of the
literary tradition was Augustus Baldwin Longstreet (1790–1870). A Georgia lawyer
and academic, Longstreet published Georgia Scenes: Characters, Incidents &c, in the
First Half-Century of the Republic in 1835. In a series of sketches varying from the
descriptive to the dramatic, Longstreet presented his readers with illustrations of
life in the remoter parts of the state. The sketches were linked by the appearance in
nearly all of them of a narrator bearing a suspicious resemblance to the author
himself – a kindly, generous but occasionally pompous and patronizing man who
tended to treat his subjects as if they were specimens of some strange form of life,
with a mixture of curiosity and amusement. A healthy distance was maintainedfrom characters who were presented not so much as individuals as in terms of
their common behavioural patterns; and the combined effect of the detachment,
the condescension and the generalizing tendency was to create an impression some-
where between folktale and caricature, legend and cartoon. One of the sketches,
for example, ‘The Fight’, describes a country scrap in detail and then ends with a
lengthy description of the two fighters’ wounds. ‘I looked and saw that Bob had
entirely lost his left ear,’ the narrator recalls, ‘and a large piece from his left cheek.’
‘Bill presented a hideous spectacle,’ he goes on. ‘About a third of his nose, at the
lower extremity, was bit off, and his face so swelled that it was difficult to discover
in it anything of the human visage.’ The fighters did not meet after that for two
months, we learn. They then made up, with Bill admitting, ‘Bobby you’ve licked
me a fair fight; but you wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t been in the wrong’. The
tale acknowledges the notions of rough justice embodied here, but it does not
mitigate the brutality. And the narrator concludes by reassuring the, presumably
genteel, reader that more refined habits and customs have now arrived. ‘Thanks to
the Christian religion, to schools, colleges, and benevolent associations,’ he explains,
‘such scenes of barbarism and cruelty as that which I have been describing are now
of rare occurrence, though they may still be occasionally met with in some of the
new counties.’
In the Preface to Georgia Scenes, Longstreet claimed proudly that he was filling
in a ‘chasm in history that has always been overlooked’; and ‘The Fight’ illustrates
how he reconciled this claim with the demands of comedy. The tone of the de-
scription is humorous but the writer clearly hopes that, by means of his humour,
he will show something significant about backwoods character: its simplicity, its
rough energy, its notions of justice and its capacity for violence. The simplicity and
the exaggeration that create the comic note are there, in effect, because they enable
Longstreet to show what is different about people like Bob and Bill, and emphasize
that at the expense of any qualities they may share, in a Wordsworthian sense, with
the rest of humanity. Longstreet’s probable motives for writing in this way were
ones he shared with many other Southwestern humorists: among them, Joseph
Glover Baldwin (1815–64), author of The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi
(1853), Johnson Jones Hooper (1815–62), who wrote Some Adventures of Captain
Simon Suggs, Late of the Tallapoosa Volunteers (1845), and Thomas Bangs Thorpe,
whose stories about what he called ‘a hardy and indomitable race’ of frontier
people were collected in The Big Bear of Arkansas; and Other Sketches Illustrative
of Character and Incidents in the South-West (1845). As a professional gentleman
and a Whig, Longstreet was inclined to nervousness about the crude habits of
frontier life: a life characterized by what Baldwin, in Flush Times, called ‘vulgarity
– ignorance – unmitigated rowdyism . . . bullying insolence’ and ‘swindling raised
to the dignity of the fine arts’. Violent, rowdy and anarchic, that life frightened
anyone used to a more stable culture with habits of deference and respect. So, in
an eminently understandable way, Longstreet and other Southwestern humorists
attempted to distance their frontier surroundings, to place them in a framework
that would make them manageable and known. They tried, in effect, to encloseand encode them. One way of doing this was via the humour: by its means,
violence was transformed into play, social anarchy into curious spectacle, and
fear and anxiety into mild amusement. Another way of doing it was via legend:
they also tried to identify the rough, rude world they saw around them with a
familiar rural type – the plain farmer, with his straightforward approach to things,
his raw integrity and earthy language, and above all his muscular self-reliance. By
this means, violence could be interpreted as an excess of high spirits and honest
energy; apparent moral anarchy was metamorphosed into a reassertion of con-
ventional principles; and the disruption of established social patterns could be
regarded as a crucial step on the road to the recovery of a deeply traditional
democratic ideal.
These two strategies were, of course, not wholly reconcilable. And if ‘The Fight’
illustrates the strategy of comedy, then another tale in Georgia Scenes, ‘The “Charm-
ing Creature” as a Wife’, illustrates the other approach. In the latter tale, the reader
is told how the son of ‘a plain, practical, sensible farmer’ was ruined by marriage to
the only child of a wealthy cotton merchant: a creature infected by what the nar-
rator calls ‘town dignity’ – which involves an inordinate sense of her own worth,
a preference for the glittering social world where she was brought up, and a failure
to appreciate the ‘order, neatness, and cleanness’ of her husband’s home and com-
munity. There is no doubt where the narrator’s sympathies lie here. On every
possible occasion, he criticizes or makes fun of the pretensions of the ‘charming
creature’, her idleness and ‘irregular hours’, and her longing to return to the fash-
ionable world of town. Eventually, she gets her way; the couple leave the simple,
rural world she detests, and in their new urban surroundings the husband sinks
melodramatically into debt, drunkenness, illness and an early grave. The story then
ends with the narrator pointing the moral of his tale: which, unsurprisingly, has
to do not only with the pretensions but with the dangers of all those known as
‘charming creatures’. It is a rather different moral from the one drawn at the end
of ‘The Fight’. In that story, all that the nineteenth century associated with the
word ‘culture’ – taste of a certain genteel kind, ‘schools, colleges, and benevolent
associations’ – is held up for approval; it provides a convenient vantage point from
which to look down on the ‘barbarism and cruelty’ of the frontier. In ‘The “Charm-
ing Creature” ’, however, that very same culture is mocked – words like ‘refine-
ment’ and ‘fashionable’ become terms of abuse – and the idea of the ‘natural’
becomes the touchstone. Both stories, and the morals that are drawn from them,
spring from the same impulse, though: which is to contain the anarchy of the
backwoods. In ‘The Fight’, it is acknowledged as anarchy but then placed in a
narrative frame, to be viewed only sometimes and from a distance. In ‘The “Charm-
ing Creature” ’, notions of anarchy and the backwoods setting are both changed
utterly by the idiom Longstreet adopts, caught safely within the timeless framework
of pastoralism. As amusing barbarian or as good, plain farmer, the frontiersman
ceases to be a source of anxiety, a rough beast slouching towards the Southwest to
be born; he becomes a remembrance of things past rather than the shape of things
to come.As time passed, though, the narrative enclosure in which Longstreet, Baldwin
and other Southwestern humorists chose to pen their frontier subjects tended to
dissolve. And with dramatic results: the work that certainly represents the culmina-
tion of Southwestern humour, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, shows that.
Even before that, the abolition of the conventional narrative frame was a notable
feature of the comic stories and tall tales of George Washington Harris (1814–69).
Harris began writing about his backwoods hero, Sut Lovingood, as early as 1843,
in pieces published in the Spirit of the Times. But it was not until after the Civil
War, in 1867, that a full-length volume appeared, Sut Lovingood: Yarns Spun by
a Nat’ral Born Durn’d Fool. Warped and Wove For Public Wear. Sut tells his own
tales. And all those tales are guided by his belief that, as he puts it, ‘Man was
made a-pupus just to eat, drink, an’ fur stayin’ awake in the yearly part of the
nites’. A native of rural Tennessee, Sut is a primitive or natural man: a man
who stands on the periphery of conventional society and yet still offers signi-
ficant comments on it. His life, circumscribed by the animal functions, is a con-
tinual drag on our own pretensions, about the nature of our personalities and
the efficacy or security of the society we have organized for ourselves. At one
point in his narrative, Sut admits that he has ‘nara a soul, nuffin but a whisky
proof gizzard’; and Harris’s habitual strategy, of making us, the readers, share
Sut’s life and experience the connection between what he is and how he lives,
leads us to suspect that in similar conditions we might be forced to say exactly
the same.
Harris’s intentions and techniques are, in effect, very different from those of
Longstreet and the other humorists. They emphasize the difference between the
world of the characters and the genteel world of the author and the presumed
reader. Harris, by contrast, presents the reader with a kind of test case that para-
doxically derives its impact, the sense of relevance to our lives, from the distance
it establishes between the literate reader and the illiterate protagonist. Suppose,
Harris intimates, we had been brought up in surroundings similar to those of
Sut Lovingood: would we be that different from him? Would we not, perhaps,
speak the same language, live on the same level; and, if we would, does this not
undermine our pretensions – the belief in our dignity as God-given rather than
acquired as a matter of special privilege? Sut Lovingood is detached from us,
certainly – the use of an almost impenetrable dialect sees to that – but he is
detached from us only in the way that a freakish mirror image of ourselves is.
We watch him and, in doing so, witness a curious aping and a criticism of our
own behaviour.
The criticism is all the more effective because of Harris’s capacity for reminding
us, in the middle of Sut’s various scrapes, that his protagonist does have traces of
what we like to call virtue, waiting for the right conditions to bring them to life. He
shows pride and independence of judgement, for instance, qualities that lead him
to consider himself ‘the very best society’ and to punish those he feels have insulted
him in any way. More telling still is the ability Harris gives him for sensing who his
enemies are, regardless of whether they have slighted him or not. They are, herealizes, the preachers and the pedagogues, the politic and educated leaders of
society who are there not simply to supply a butt for Sut’s fooling, although they
certainly do that, but to remind us of the kind of people – people like ourselves,
the readers, perhaps – who are indirectly responsible for his condition. For their
privileges, the suggestion is, have been bought at his expense; they, and maybe we,
are the beneficiaries of a system from which he is excluded and by which he is
deprived. The mirror is being held up to the readers as a group, in other words, as
well as to the reader as an individual. We see in Sut Lovingood a reflection of
possibilities existing in ourselves – and we are forced to acknowledge our complicity
in the creation of circumstances that, in Sut’s case, have translated possibility into
fact. Just in case we should continue to miss the point, denying Sut a germ of
sensitivity even after all this, there are moments in the narrative when more energetic
hints of his potential are allowed to appear. Instead of a reference to some dormant
virtue, the reader is confronted with a passage of lyric beauty – not denying the
comic framework but actually growing out of it – that serves as a reminder of
all those aspects of Sut Lovingood’s character that mostly remain unexercised. In
one striking episode, for instance, Sut waxes lyrical about a mealtime. In a long
passage, he describes in loving detail a supper that, he recalls, was like ‘a rale
suckit-rider’s supper, whar the ’oman ’ove the hous’ wer a rich b’lever’. An evocat-
ive catalogue of all the food laid out on the table is followed by a description of the
woman who has cooked it all, for Sut and her husband, that combines eroticism
and domesticity. ‘Es we sot down, the las’ glimmers ove the sun crep thru the
histed winder,’ Sut recollects,
an’ flutter’d on the white tabil-cloth and play’d a silver shine on her smoof black har,
es she sot at the head ove the tabil, a-pourin out the coffee, wif her sleeves push’d
tight back on her white roun’ arm, her full throbbin neck wer bar to the swell ove her
shoulders, an’ the steam ove the coffee made a movin vail afore her face, es she slowly
brush’d hit away wif her lef han’, a-smilin an’ flashin her talkin eyes lovingly at her
hansum husbun.
The occasion being described here is mundane enough, certainly, but what matters
is all that Harris allows his protagonist to make out of it. Sut, the reader is forced
to recognize, has a sensitivity – a capacity for recognizing the sensuous beauty
and the value of a particular experience – which will emerge at the least opportun-
ity, although too often it is left to waste unrecognized. The waste is articulated
elsewhere in the narrative, in the scenes of comic violence and degeneracy that
illustrate the actual conditions of his existence. Here there is something different:
an instinctive insight, and wisdom, that align Sut with the ideal of the natural man.
Sut voices a vision, for and of himself, and, at such moments, he is more than just
a comic legend. He is one of the first in a long line of American vernacular heroes,
who compel the reader to attend because, the sense is, no matter how poor, stupid
or peripheral they may appear to be, they and what they have to say deserve
attention.