From Lewis Gaylord Clark and William Peterfield Trent in the nineteenth century to John Erskine and Arthur Hobson Quinn in the twentieth, the impression has lingered among American readers that, in Clark’s phrases, one "might as well look for a smile in the jaws of an alligator" as for humor in Simms.¹ Partly because of such statements, the strong elements of native humor that sinew the work of the antebellum South’s foremost man of letters have been almost completely neglected. In this essay, I hope to remedy at least a portion of that neglect by describing how Simms, as a well-known author in touch with the major literary currents of his time, drew throughout his career on three strains of native humor widely discussed in twentieth-century scholarship. These strains involve the trickster or confidence man, Davy Crockett material, and hunting yarns or tall tales, particularly the story known as the "wonderful hunt." With each of these subjects, we see Simms attempting, as he once wrote a friend, "to catch the popular smile & to provoke its desires."²

The first of these areas of native humor, that centering on the confidence man, is one which has drawn substantial attention in recent years, with the publication of articles and books about the character and a 1977 conference held in his honor.³ A confidence man, it is generally agreed, is anyone who systematically and deliberately manipulates the trust of others for financial gain.⁴ Simms used such a figure in volumes spanning a period of nearly forty years; but the confidence man’s chief appearances in his work are as a Yankee peddler in his first novel, Guy Rivers (1834), and as a mountain villain in his last one, Voltmeier (serialized 1869). These books, which virtually frame Simms’s literary career, also represent one major branch of his fiction, which portrays the frontier of the Gulf South or old southwest during the flush times of the 1830s and of the Appalachian mountain South in the next decade.

The Yankee character as Simms uses him in Guy Rivers develops out of two opposed yet overlapping strands of folk traditions about Yankees, which I will call for convenience the "Jonathan" and the "peddler" strands. The former, representing the Yankee as thrifty, shy, awkward, bumptious, yet good-natured and helpful, was fostered by the melody "Yankee Doodle," by characters in

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eighteenth-century almanacs, by plays from The Contrast onward involving Yankee figures, and by two memorable creations of nineteenth-century journalism, Joe Strickland and Jack Downing.⁵ In his "Jonathan" garb the Yankee, though he may be naive and doltish, turns out to have a kind heart and a fund of native shrewdness that enable him to help his "betters" when they are in distress—as they often are, especially in the Yankee plays. That Simms knew this side of the Yankee folk character is shown by remarks in his letters and by imitations in his fiction. He knew the other tradition as well, that of the Yankee as pawky peddler and con artist—in Richard Dorson’s words, "a wily, cozening trickster, posed under a mask of ingenuousness and seeming good will for a shrewd deal or an act of mischief."⁶ The product of travelers’ narratives, newspaper tales, native drama, and oral tradition, the Yankee peddler was lanky, crafty, laconic; by all odds his most famous nineteenth-century incarnation was as Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s Sam Slick, who sold flawed clocks to unsuspecting buyers. In what was perhaps an early folk rendition of sectional hostilities, the Yankee as peddler was particularly obnoxious to the South; and, predictably, in fiction as in fact, his trail often led there.⁷ It is in the South, as a matter of fact, that we first find the archetypal peddler from New England on Simms ‘s pages.

In Jared Bunce, the prying, talkative Yankee of Guy Rivers, Simms blends the "Jonathan" and the "peddler" traditions, while seasoning them with a liberal dash of propaganda for the Southern way of life. Slippery and deceitful, during his early appearances Jared indulges in standard peddler behavior; but his benevolent actions as the novel unfolds and his eventual transformation into honest tradesman show his debt to the trusty "Jonathan" figure as well.⁸ A trickster who operates on the Georgia frontier in the 1830s, Jared is, so his enemies claim," ‘a chap what can wheedle the eyes out of your head, the soul out of your body, the gould out of your pocket, and give you nothing but brass, and tin, and copper, in the place of ‘em. . . . Why, he kin walk through a man’s pockets, jest as the devil goes through a crack or a keyhole, and the money will naterally stick to him, jest as ef he was made of gum turpentine. His very face is a sort of kining [i.e., coining] machine. His look says dollars and cents; and its [sic] always your dollars and cents, and he kines them out of your hands into his’n, jest with a roll of his eye, and a mighty leetle turn of his finger. He cheats in everything, and cheats everybody.’"⁹

The settlers whom Jared has tricked by selling wooden nutmegs,

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coffee made from rotten rye, and calico prints "‘warranted for fast colors, that ran faster than he ever ran himself’" try to lynch him; but he gets away through a maneuver well documented in peddling lore, a crooked horse swap, as he swindles a frontier lawyer out of his nag.¹⁰ The "Jonathan" side of Jared’s nature emerges, though, when late in the novel he works actively to help the hero and heroine escape the villain’s clutches. Finally, in one of Simms’s obvious puffs for Southern living, Jared forswears his Yankee origins, declaring, "‘I guess I must ha’ been bor by nature in the South, though I did see daylight in Connecticut,’" and prepares to set up shop as a respectable merchant in South Carolina. At the end of the volume, however, he lapses once more into his peddling ways as he tries to cheat the village idiot out of some cash.¹¹

If he matriculated as a Yankee, the confidence man swiftly graduated to the old southwest, where humorists like Joseph Glover Baldwin and Johnson Jones Hooper tracked his progress. As Baldwin’s Ovid Bolus, as Hooper’s Simon Suggs, he was a cunning rogue who preyed on the gullible or the unwary, using lies or disguises to cloak his purpose and operating in standard frontier milieus like the tavern, the revival meeting, and the circus. Simms, who had traveled in the old southwest and knew the writings of its humorists, adapted their picture of the confidence man for his last full-length novel, Voltmeier, set on the mountainous frontier of the North Carolina Appalachian region.

The title character and protagonist of Voltmeier is a German immigrant with a double identity, a man who deals in disguises and deceptions—as Voltmeier a wealthy and respected planter, as Bierstadt a clever manufacturer of counterfeit money which he circulates among the simple mountain people. A confidence man himself, he finds a fitting echo in his enemy Richard Gorham, who like Jared Bunce is a "‘shadow-skinning Yankee’"¹² with origins in different but related character types—the standard villain of popular romance and the ruthless swindler of southern and southwestern writing. Simms emphasizes the two sides of Gorham’s nature as the needs of his plot require. Gorham as the villain is given appropriate attributes-black hair, long black beard, cold, gleaming eyes, and menacing manner; he speaks acceptable English, with only a trace of dialect in his occasional "‘I reckon.’" But Gorham as confidence man is another matter altogether. In this role he assumes two aspects, that of a shuffling, grinning bumpkin apparently too idiotic for his own good, and that of a canny rogue of the Simon Suggs derivation. In the latter guise, he tells a mountain attorney how he

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once cheated his own father out of a horse, using heavy dialect that contrasts with his "villain" mode of speech:

As devotees of Simon Suggs know, "Dicky’s" escapade bears some resemblance to one of Simon’s famous pranks, in which he cheats his old father out of a pony and leaves home to start swindling on a grand scale.¹³

The second major category of native humor that Simms used for his writing has, like the confidence man material, a distinctly southern flavor. It centers on yarns involving Davy Crockett, a spectacular American hero of fact and legend, who surfaced as a backwoods hunter and politician in Tennessee during the early antebellum period and then, after a stint in Congress, went to Texas, where he fought and died at the Alamo. The material about Crockett is extremely complicated in both its literary and its political dimensions, stemming, like the Yankee stories, from many different sources—fake autobiography, political biography, British and American journalism, plays about the Alamo, jest books, oral yarns, and of course the well-known Crockett Almanacs. Out of this welter of stories emerges, says historian of American humor Walter Blair, not one but six Davy Crocketts, a number we may reduce to three for present purposes—a legendary demigod, a bumpkin, and a homely, realistic frontiersman.¹⁴ The least fetching of these figures, Crockett as bumpkin, developed out of the highly partisan politics of the day. Crockett began his political career as a Jacksonian Democrat, but then after entering Congress switched to the Whig side. The Democratic

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journalists who had puffed him when he was a Jacksonite therefore ridiculed him as a turncoat, playing up, and exaggerating, his oafish qualities. Simms, a realist who was nevertheless responsive to the fantastic elements in the Crockett legend, depicted both the realistic and the legendary qualities of Davy. But as a Jacksonian Democrat in his middle years, he responded to the political or bumpkin portrait too. In a masterful stroke, he combines strands from all three traditions about Davy in his melodrama Michael Bonham; or, The Fall of Bexar (produced 1855), which deals with a battle preliminary to the Alamo and employs Crockett as a leading figure.¹⁵

The Crockett of Simms’s play is a soldier and woodsman, strong and sensible: as such he recalls the actual or real-life Crockett. He is also a hunter whose extraordinary skill in killing bears recalls the legendary hero of the Crockett Almanacs; he enters the play with a bear on his shoulders and boasts to his comrades, "I treed him some three hours ago, creased him without killing him, and brought him down a little more lively than when he went up. . . . He’s made my ribs ache for it, but thanks to Jim Bowie, I riddled my way into his" (I, i). But chiefly Simms’s Crockett is a yokel, garrulous and blundersome, who gapes at the splendors of city life—muttering "look at the diamonds . . . them’s the ra’al grit" to a friend (IV, iv). In the portions of the play that stress the "yokel" side of Crockett’s character, Simms—perhaps indulging his own slight anti-Crockett bias¹⁶—draws on popular stories that purported to show the gaucherie of the backwoods Congressman in elegant Washington social circles. Two of these stories, widely echoed in writing of the time, depict Crockett’s bafflement before such civilized amenities as fingerbowls and spittoons. In one of the yarns, Davy recounts how, after dinner, he "‘saw a man coming ’long carrying a great glass thing . . . stuck full of little glass cups. . . . Thinks I, let’s taste ’em first. They were mighty sweet and good—so I took six of ’em. If I didn’t I wish I may be shot.’"¹⁷ In the other tale, he calls a spittoon "a beautiful tin box with a leetle hole in the top of it" and refuses to use it, spitting on what he calls a "splendiferous carpit" instead.¹⁸ Simms in Michael Bonham refers to both these stories and adds a third one, when he has Crockett’s friend Sparrow say that in Congress, Davy’s "decency went so far that he refused to spit in the president’s silver spittoon, and emptied five finger basins at a draught. Say you, Davy. is it true that when the waiter brought you a soupplate of soup, you ordered him to bring the tureen?" (V, ix).

The Crockett material, with its streak of fantasy, is one element in

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the third strain of folk humor which embellishes Simms’s fiction, that involving hunting yarns and tall tales. Hunting lore, especially as conveyed through the tall story or "stretcher," is perhaps the epitome of southern humor; one particularly extravagant version of this lore, the "wonderful hunt," forms an ancient motif found throughout European and American folk material. In this story, typically, a fairly ordinary hunter sets out to bag one kind of game but through an extraordinary streak of luck ends up getting several kinds-a deer, its fawn, a rabbit, a fish, and so on. The core of Simms’s fine tall tale, "How Sharp Snaffles Got His Capital and Wife" (1870), is a wonderful hunt story of this sort, while its "shell" is a frontier courtship yarn of a type familiar from William Tappan Thompson’s Major Jones’ Courtship onward, where a rustic and awkward suitor has to overcome obstacles, often posed by relatives, to get his sweetheart. Together the two strands in "Sharp Snaffles" create what is perhaps the most appealing aspect of the story, its mixture of prosaic realism and rollicking fantasy, traceable to different kinds of comedy in folk tradition.

With its details about Sharp’s fruitless wooing, Simms’s story begins realistically enough; but it soon moves into the realm of the marvelous, as its courtship narrative provides the impetus for the wonderful hunt. Sharp, a self-proclaimed "‘poor hunter and poor man,’" courts the daughter of a haughty farmer, Squire Hobson, who scorns Sharp’s suit because he’s "‘got no capital.’" Out hunting the next day, Sharp finds what he says are "‘millions upon millions’" of geese on a secluded lake. He makes a net of fishhooks and plow lines to snare them but absentmindedly fastens the ends of the lines to his thigh. The geese carry him into the air, but the net gets entangled in tree branches and Sharp falls into a hollow tree, which proves to be full of honey. He grabs hold of a bear that has ventured down the tree and gets out by clinging to its tail. He kills the bear, secures the geese, weighs the honey, and concludes, "‘Thar’s capital!’" So he sells bear, geese, and honey for a grand profit, buys the mortgage on the Hobson farm, and taunts the squire with it: "‘[A]x yourself ef you’re the sawt of looking man that hes any right to be a feyther-in-law to a fine, young, handsome-looking fellow like me, what’s got the ‘capital?’" The courtship story, like the wonderful hunt, ends happily, with Sharp’s marriage to Merry Ann Hobson and their subsequent fecundity. To the astonishment of his friends, Sharp claims, "‘[W]e hev hed thirty-six children. . . . Count for yourself. First we had three gal children, you see. Very well! Put down three. Then we had six boys, one every year for four

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years; and then, the fifth year, Merry Ann throwed deuce. Now put down the six boys a’ter the three gals, and ef that don’t make thirty six, thar’s no snakes in all Flurriday!’"¹⁹

Through creative use of native humor, Simms worked into his fiction and drama a rich vein of material that connects his writing with the lively kinds of comedy which characterized popular culture during the antebellum period. His humor shows his responsiveness to a vital, vigorous mode of expression of oral and printed derivation and his skill at using this material, itself robust and rowdy, in books that are essentially formal, serious, and genteel. The confidence man, Davy Crockett, and the wonderful hunt, used as Simms uses them, help refute Gaylord Clark’s snide charge that one might as well look for a smile in the jaws of an alligator as for humor in Simms–by proving Clark as wrong about Simms’s comic talents as he was right, we may concede, about alligators.

SOUTHWEST TEXAS STATE UNIVERSITY

NOTES

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