In the summer of 1964, we indexed several thousand literary and humorous items in the New York Spirit of the Times, using the nearly complete and well-preserved set in the Franklin J. Meine collection at the University of Illinois Library. Our quest in the Spirit was motivated by earlier commentators—Walter Blair, Victor Chittick, Constance Rourke, Bernard DeVoto, Eugene Current-Garcia, Norris Yates, Meine himself—who had said that the Spirit is a gold mine of original, indigenous American comic realism. We did discover that the Spirit is a gold mine; we felt like miners in the pits, and we shoveled tons of ore to recover a few ounces of glittering metal: purely original tall tales and comic yarns. The Spirit is also filled with pirated treasure: whole sections of books from England, France, and Germany, as well as America, and articles from the European journals and other American newspapers. By far the largest amount of original material in the Spirit is another kind of ore: simple reportage, much of which is useful if you are seeking information about the history of the race track or the Mexican War. But the overwhelming majority of the stories and fillers in the Spirit are simply awful. As we compiled our index cards, we found ourselves cataloguing endless numbers of bad jokes about drunks, inept hunters, and country bumpkins. Wisdom, however, can be found even in dreck. As we worked our way through William T. Porter’s weekly "Chronicle of the Turf, Agriculture, Field Sports, Literature and the Stage," we discovered that processes are as important as products in the Spirit. By watching carefully for the glitter, we came upon the Spirit’s products—its gold nuggets: Thomas Bangs Thorpe’s "The Big Bear of Arkansas," George Washington Harris’s "The Snake-Bit Irishman," Henry Clay Lewis’s "Cupping on the Sternum" and "A Tight Race Considerin’," Charles F. M. Noland’s Pete Whetstone letters, John S. Robb’s "Swallowing an Oyster Alive." Researching the Spirit’s processes cannot, finally, be compared to gold mining; it might be better described as an inevitable effect of immersion, or getting soaked in the river while panning for gold. To the student of literature, some of the processes we discovered are even more interesting than the individual products of any single-minded search for a specific kind of lore. By processes, we mean events which occurred in the weekly issues across time, which

include such matters as the development of an individual writer or a shift in editorial emphasis from one kind of material to another. The second part of this paper discusses processes, but we will examine some useful products first.

The researcher who wishes to find specific types of materials can begin with the indexes which were compiled by the Spirit’s staff and bound into the back of each annual volume. These are sometimes misleading: a good hunting yarn might appear under the heading, "Field Sports." But the editorial staff did try to organize the indexes, and the researcher will find that all the horse racing material is usually under one heading and theatrical matters under another. We estimate that about 80 percent of the material is indexed. Once the opening and closing dates for a specific search are established, the indexes can be supplemented by some scanning of individual issues. In this way, the researcher will soon find out which departments of the paper are most likely to contain good comic yarns.

Researching the work of minor regional figures who wrote during the 1830s, ’40s, and ’50s remains one of the more fruitful pursuits. In Native American Humor, Walter Blair named his ten favorite Southwest humorists, and a common misconception is that all of these writers can be found abundantly represented in the Spirit. In fact, five of the authors, Johnson Jones Hooper, Sol Smith, Thomas Bangs Thorpe, Joseph M. Field, and John S. Robb, are represented only by scattered items, many of them pirated from anthologies or other papers. Henry Clay Lewis is the only writer on the list to have written quite a few stories exclusively for the Spirit. Pieces by Augustus Baldwin Longstreet and William Tappan Thompson are relatively scarce. George Washington Harris appears a few times under the pseudonyms "Mr. Free" and "Sugartail," and these items are important because Harris later revised some of them for Sut Lovingood, which appeared in 1867. In the Spirit versions, a few of Sut’s awesome comic characteristics can be seen in the teller—Sugartail—himself. Apparently, no one has yet found an item in the Spirit by the tenth name, Joseph Glover Baldwin. Writers not on Blair’s list certainly accounted for more sheer bulk in the Spirit’s pages—Charles F. M. Noland, William T. Stockton, and George T. Dunbar, for instance. (Leonard Williams has recently edited and published Noland’s writings as Cavorting on the Devil’s Fork: The Pete Whetstone Letters.) Colonel Stockton lived in Quincy in the Florida Panhandle and was a good friend of Johnson Jones Hooper. Stockton was no great writer, but he produced some lively hunting yarns about comic failure, as opposed to exaggerated

success: misfires, buck fever, and the many awkward possibilities of fire hunting for deer—an incredibly dangerous activity now known as jacklighting. George T. Dunbar was "Piscator" of New Orleans, and he submitted a long series entitled "Scraps from the Field Book of an Engineer," which began late in 1842 and included tales of Indian massacres and vicious White reprisals, along with a number of wild yarns spun by a character named Antoine, who is a sort of Creole Leatherstocking. In general, it is productive to look for writers who lived in areas other than the Old Southwest, such as Henry Hastings Sibley ("Hal, a Dacotah"), who wrote about the Missouri Territory, or William P. Hawes, who used the pseudonym "J. Cypress, Jr." and wrote long, horrific yarns, including one about confronting a polar bear and another about fighting off sharks in Long Island Sound.

Anyone pursuing the history of sport would do well to read the Spirit, and we mention this material here because of the strong analogies between sport and humor. Humor and sport are both forms of play: they are pure inventions, they are communal exchanges tightly constrained by mutually agreed-upon contractual rules, they are absolutely unmotivated by necessity, they are activities engaged in strictly for fun. The first baseball box score ever published anywhere appeared in the issue of 9 July 1853, and there are numerous columns throughout 1852 on the famous yacht America and the winning of the world championship that was later named The America’s Cup. In the issue of 17 September 1842, there is an interesting round-by-round account of a cruel bare-handed boxing match which ran one hundred and twenty rounds—two hours and forty-three minutes. The loser, Thomas McCoy, was beaten into an unrecognizable mass of gore and died in the arms of his second. The victor, Christopher Lilly, strutted around the ring shouting, "Come, carry off your dead, and produce your next man!" Horse races were also merciless in those days: on 10 May 1842, Boston and Fashion ran two consecutive four-mile heats, Fashion winning both, in 7:32½ and 7:45 respectively. If Fashion had lost either heat, the horses would have had to run a third. The purse was $20,000, each side having bet $10,000 (Spirit, 21 May 1842). Every imaginable sport is covered in the Spirit, from billiards to bowling, from golf to gander-pulling. In addition, much of the sports coverage is humorous.

There is a vast amount of theatrical information in the Spirit, such as descriptions of the work of the famous character actor James Hackett and reports of the sensational triumphs of Jenny Lind. Besides theatrical criticism, there are a number of remarkable essays

exemplifying the period’s literary chauvinism; most of these are by the paper’s founder and editor, William T. Porter, who thought that a new and original American literature could be built upon stories of wildcats, bears, Indians, mountains, and rivers (see, for example, the columns on the first and third pages of the Spirit’s first issue, 10 December 1831). The Spirit contains hundreds of reviews of important literary works, especially humorous books or serious books with humor in them. John T. Flanagan, for instance, has written about the reviews of Melville’s novels, some of which are quite interesting, such as the review of Moby-Dick in the issue of 6 December 1851. This features a reprint of the chapter in which Stubb cons the captain of the Rose-Bud out of the ambergris whale. Finally, the Spirit is a rich mine of examples for anyone studying the history of ethnic humor, for it contains thousands of jokes at the expense of Irishmen, Jews, Frenchmen, and Blacks.

The simplest form of research involving the important processes displayed in the Spirit is historical tracing. It is intriguing, for example, to read letters coming in from Lieutenant William Seaton Henry, first from Florida, where he reported the Army’s failures against the Seminoles; next from various points across North Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana as his unit moved towards the conflict in Texas; and finally from Matamoras, Monterrey, and Vera Cruz in Mexico. Henry was perhaps the Spirit’s most prolific writer; his long letters appeared continuously from December, 1842, to May, 1848. But we are interested here in more complex literary findings which are indirectly useful to both the history and the theory of American humor.

Probably the best-known example of a writer’s development in the pages of the Spirit is that of Charles Fenton Mercer Noland, who used two signatures: "N. of Arkansas" and "Pete Whetstone." The interesting thing about this correspondence is that at the beginning, in 1836, Noland, as N. of Arkansas, wrote in primarily to report horse racing results. Occasionally he lapsed into a yarn about hunting or used a bit of dialogue. Once or twice, he referred to a colorful local character, Pete Whetstone. Then, one earthshaking day, 18 March 1837, the Spirit published a letter signed by Peter(!) Whetstone himself, dated February 14, from the Devil’s Fork of Little Red River. For twenty years, both N. of Arkansas, the reporter, and Pete Whetstone, the dialect yarnspinner, held important places in the Spirit’s pages. Pete Whetstone is a complex and ingenious invention. He is "quite an original"—a backwoodsman who speaks in his own idiom, lampooning the absurd conventions of

more refined folks even as he illuminates his own ludicrous and often violent endeavors.

Another kind of development can be seen by comparing two versions of one story as it appears in the Spirit and then again in a later collection. Often the differences are merely typographical, as are those to be found by comparing "The Big Bear of Arkansas" in the Spirit of 27 March 1841, to the story as it was reprinted in Porter’s 1845 collection of yarns, The Big Bear of Arkansas. But a truly startling change can be observed between two versions of a story by George Washington Harris, both of which involve a hunting party in camp, an offensive Irish intruder, and a trick designed to get rid of the unwanted visitor. (These two versions are conveniently available in Tom Inge’s two collections of Harris yarns.) The story is most commonly known as Sut Lovingood’s "The Snake-Bit Irishman," and the perpetrator of the joke in that version is Sut. In the original Spirit version, however, published 17 January 1846, the narrator is Sugartail. Sugartail is not an observer and straight man like George in the Sut stories; he is instead both persona and main actor, and he resembles Harris himself. Most significantly, it is Sugartail who plays the trick later assigned to Sut. This change is an outstanding example of the humorous writer’s extremely productive artistic schizophrenia.

Perhaps the most complicated processes in the Spirit are those involving editorial choices across time. Several years ago, one of us (Richard) published an article on the Dickens controversy in the Spirit. In 1842, Charles Dickens visited America and then published American Notes. American citizens read it and were outraged, as was the American press in general. Before 1842, Porter had made good use of Dickens’s publications, pirating The Pickwick Papers, for example, as he had pirated Thackeray’s Yellowplus Correspondence and as he continued to pirate Douglas Jerrold’s columns in Punch. The Spirit even went so far as to perpetrate a Dickens hoax. The issue of 29 February 1840 proudly displayed a splendid piece titled Marmaduke Myddleton, which was a good enough counterfeit that other papers pirated it and published it as Dickens’s latest novel. Porter reprinted a few selections from American Notes before the controversy burst into flame. Suddenly, however, his subscribers began writing in to complain, and some of these correspondents were old, steady contributors. The consequent disappearance of Charles Dickens from the pages of the Spirit is striking. From 1842 until 1850, nothing but trivial quotations and indifferent reviews of his books indicate that the Spirit’s editors knew of Dickens’s

existence. In 1850, the paper did start to quote from Household Words, and thereafter Dickens made a modest reappearance. The immediate effect of Dickens’s disappearance was that the Spirit needed lots of new humorous material. British borrowings in general declined after 1842, and the intensity of the editorial call for original American stories rose sharply. From 1842 to 1845, the Spirit saw its best years, as scores of fresh new pieces came in from all over the United States and its territories. It is not an oversimplification to say that before 1842, Dickens dominated the Spirit’s humorous literature, and that after 1842, his disappearance made room for the growth of American humor.

Collecting bad as well as good tall tales from the Spirit teaches us by contrast what constitutes a fully developed tall tale. Many of the yarns have no framework, and relatively few are told by a character like Pete Whetstone. Literally hundreds of them are written in polite prose without any attempt to capture the storyteller’s idiom. One yarn, published on 29 December 1845, has a very promising subject but is entirely deflated by its formal style. A ship attacking a fort fires a cannonball which falls in the sea and is swallowed by a shark. The cannonball is hot and burns its way through the fish’s stomach. A sailor alone in a rowboat nearby falls overboard at just this moment, and the shark swallows him, too. His mates put another boat over and are surprised to see that the shark is swimming casually towards shore instead of trying to escape from them. Here is how the story ends: "The boat soon arrived at the point of attraction, when the crew was thrown into the utmost consternation, mingled with joy, by the reappearance of the former messmate, who proceeded to elucidate the mystery, by informing them that, finding his situation in the interior of the monster rather uncomfortable, he had shoved his oar through the aperture made by the shot, and sculled him ashore!"

Such a story contrasts sharply with "The Big Bear of Arkansas," which displays every useful technique of the genre. The written tall tale needs a formal framework in which a persona of the author presents a character who will tell the story within the story. The framework tells us about the manners and mores of storytelling: it may describe the audience, tell how the audience reacts, introduce the yarnspinner, and reveal the author’s own attitude towards the storytelling event. The yarnspinner is almost always said to be an original—like Pete Whetstone, a character in the humorous sense of the word character—and he tells the story in his own .idiom. The line between reality and fantasy is deliberately obscured. Ideally, no one can tell whether the yamspinner believes his own story or not, and if

his con game has been successful, he and his audience celebrate the event by taking a drink together.

There is a great deal to learn from the way the Spirit mixes factual descriptions of real animals and reports of legendary animals. In one issue, the reader finds straight-faced descriptions of the gyascutus and the prock; a month later, he reads about the duck-billed platypus (Spirit, 9 February and 8 March 1856). As Melville reminds us in The Confidence-Man, the greatest English scientists pronounced the first platypus specimen they saw a hoax. How was the contemporary reader of the Spirit to do any better? The paper published numerous serious agricultural articles, including descriptions of new breeds of sheep, cattle, and swine, but what was the unsuspecting reader to make of "Gigantic, Double-wattled, Lop-eared Polar Hogs" that would dive down in the rivers and eat fish, or "Longbodied, Camel-footed, Spiral-homed, Fork-tailed, Ring-streaked, Circassian Cattle"? (Spirit, 4 July and 11 July 1840).

Finally, by persevering among these curious pages, we occasionally find a glittering speck of serendipitous dust. One of us (Richard) has recently written a book for Greenwood Press about the legend of Davy Crockett. James Kirke Paulding denied that he had Crockett in mind when he created the character of Nimrod Wildfire in The Lion of the West, the play in which we find the famous half horse, half alligator bragging speech (a version of which appeared in the first issue of the Spirit). In spite of Paulding’s denial, however, the public soon associated Wildfire with Crockett, and this association was certainly reflected in the role as it was played by James Hackett. Most of the almanac pictures of Crockett are not of Crockett at all but come instead from a portrait of Hackett posing as Wildfire, a rifle in his hands and a wildcat-skin cap—not a coonskin cap—on his head. We are not the first scholars to refer to the following item, of course, but nonetheless we were delighted to find it in the Spirit of 21 December 1833: "The Washington Correspondent of the Patriot, says: ‘Col. Crockett made a prodigious figure last night at the Theatre. Hackett was to play Nimrod Wildfire—and Col. Crockett attended by invitation. A whole box was assigned the Colonel,—and the Col. bowed and Nimrod Wildfire bowed, both at each for a long time, as if old acquaintances,—while the Theatre rung with the cheers of the multitude assembled. . . .’" The legendary figure who invented his own legend had met the legendary actor re-creating that legend in yet another kind of inventive act. Doubtless intensely aware of their audience, both perhaps wondered about the disappearance of reality,

but surely neither cared where reality had gone, just as long as the illusions themselves brought down that thundering applause.

UNIVERSITY OF WEST FLORIDA
AND PENSACOLA, FLORIDA

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