As Walter Blair has pointed out, the humorists of the Old Southwest influenced the humor-oriented group of Western local colorists that began with Bret Harte and Edward Eggleston.¹ In prefaces, memoirs, interviews, and magazine essays on their craft, both groups insisted on their first-hand acquaintance with frontier life, their commitment to what Eggleston called "provincial realism." And if they claimed one kind of accuracy more than the rest, it was in recording vernacular speech. Short of reprinting indecencies, and "with no more elimination than . . . necessary for the artistic conception," these innovators argued that they were true to the oral tradition as they found it, from the southern highlands to the Pacific.² A. B. Longstreet explained that he had written the pioneering Georgia Scenes (1835) as "an eye and ear witness" to the backwoods folkways he portrayed, especially "wit" and "dialect": "there is scarcely a word from the beginning to the end of the book which is not strictly Georgian."³ Many later provincial realists echoed him, including Bret Harte at the end of the century. Placing his California fiction in the pre-war tradition of American humor, Harte praised the Southwestern brand in particular. Successful local color, he declared, depended on the author’s "absolute knowledge" of his subject; there could be "no fastidious ignoring of its actual expression, or the inchoate poetry . . . hidden in its slang."⁴

But these taboo-breakers were at a disadvantage; they had to deal cautiously with their frontier material, fearing contamination from it. Elevated language, learned allusions, the frame-story technique, the antiseptic use of quotation marks around words tinged with colloquialism, a generally patronizing tone—these much discussed devices lessened an author’s offenses against decorum, by establishing his social and moral distance from the half-quaint, half-sinister communities he wrote about. For art’s sake and history’s, he had to risk guilt by association and stress his "absolute knowledge" of frontier violence and vulgarity; in self-defense, he could only put similar stress on his genteel literary credentials. Ironically but understandably, the literature that he typically wanted to show that he knew best, the literature he hoped somehow to rival, was that of Augustan, Romantic, and contemporary England.

This dilemma of the provincial realists has been remarked often, but I think something remains to be said about how it affected one part of their work. However contrived and literary we find much of their Victorian frontier writing in other respects, we have rarely questioned their avowed fidelity to the vernacular. Mediocre authors among them have been accused of such faults as using it too timidly and sparingly, or sacrificing readability to phonetically exact spelling, but seldom of falsifying "what people actually said."⁵ Doubtless this is nearly as it should be: for example, even the weakest of these writers avoided the pseudo-rustic verbal slapstick of their rivals, the "Literary Comedians." As time passes, moreover, it would seem less and less easy for us to gauge any nineteenth century author’s accuracy in transcribing local idioms and dialect of his day. But this proposition still has its exceptions. I would like to consider some brief examples, and an extended one, of how precedents in English literature could shape what the Southwestern humorists and their Western successors set down as frontier vernacular speech.

Whether by accident or design, this vernacular speech as most of the authors wrote it was marked by abrupt diction shifts. True, the shifts were usually believable—and funny; much Southwestern humor amounted to verbal comedy of manners in which backwoods speakers plausibly bungled or burlesqued polite rhetoric. Typical was the old whiskey-seller, Sugar, greeting the crowd at a political rally in John S. Robb’s "The Standing Candidate": "Hold on, boys,—keep cool and shady . . . whar’s the candidates?—none of your splurgin round till I git an appropriation fur the sperits. Send em along and we’ll negotiate fur the fluid, arter which I shall gin ’em my instructions. . ." (p. 350).

But the control that this method demands was not always sure-handed. A backwoods vaunter might abruptly turn genteel in mid-sentence, adopting the author’s own polished syntax and phraseology for two or three improbable clauses, before returning to local dialect. Jim Doggett in T. B. Thorpe’s "The Big Bear of Arkansas" brags that his hound Bowie-knife thinks "the world is full of bar, he finds them so easy. It’s lucky he don’t talk as well as think; fir with his natural modesty, if he should suddenly learn how much he is acknowledged to be ahead of all other dogs in the universe, he would be astonished. . ." (p. 340; italics added). A similar back country speaker narrates William Tappan Thompson’s "The Hoosier and the Salt Pile." Describing a stagecoach trip, the story-teller begins by denouncing the new railroad;

it makes "sich a everlastin clatter" and keeps travellers "from seeing whar they’re gwine." But presently the usage errors and Georgia orthography fade to mere incongruities, as the oral tradition yields to that of the Spectator:

I love to hear the pop of the whip as the interestin conversation between the driver and his horses; and I like the constant variation in the motion of the stage. . . . But what’s still more agreeable about stage-coach travelin, is that we have a oppertunity of makin the acquaintance of our feller passengers, of conversin with ’em and studdying ther traits of character, which from the striking contrast they often present, never fail to amuse if they don’t interest our mind. (p. 333)

Similar anomalies thrived in Bret Harte’ s local color fiction. Possibly the most glaring of these appeared in the melodramatic climax scene of his otherwise humorous and satiric tale, "The Idyll of Red Gulch" (1870). A prostitute’s boy has been a pupil at the mining camp’s little school, and mother love makes this nameless woman approach the young teacher, Miss Mary, as she is closing the schoolhouse for the summer. While Miss Mary hears her out and reacts in silence during a few interpolated pauses, the mother speaks passionately for Victorian domestic ideals. Harte refines her grammar and pronunciation sentence by sentence; and her utterance, halting at first, takes on a stage queen’s authority as her essential orthodoxy becomes more and more clear:

"I heerd tell that you were goin’ down to the Bay tomorrow, and . . . I came to thank you for your kindness to my Tommy. . . . [T]har ain’t a sweeter, dearer, better boy lives than him. And if I ain’t much as says it, thar ain’t a sweeter, angeler teacher than he’s got.
". . . [T]he boy must forget me, sooner or later—and so I ain’t goin’ to cry about that. For I come to ask you to take my Tommy—God bless him for the bestest, sweetest boy that lives—to—to—take him with you.
". . . I’ve money plenty, and it’s all yours and his. . . . The worst you can do will be kindness to what he will learn with me. Only take him out of this wicked life, this cruel place, this home of shame and sorrow. . . . [Y]ou must not, you cannot say no! You will make him as pure, as gentle as yourself; and when he has grown up, you will tell him his father’s name—the name that hasn’t passed my lips for years—the name of Alexander Morton, whom they call here Sandy!
". . . I cannot go until you speak. Do not deny me now. You will!—I see it in your sweet face—such a face as I have seen in my dreams. I see it in your eyes, Miss Mary!—you will take my boy!"⁶

Another kind of literary echoing was probably more deliberate and served the needs of Southwestern and Western humor better. By the 1820s, it was understood that frontier speech in the Mike Fink and Davy Crockett tradition must be brashly idiosyncratic, filled with memorable novelties. Clearly, it taxed the ingenuity of the humorists to provide specimens of this utterance in print—specimens that were not just slangy or ungrammatical but freshly figurative. It would have been surprising if cultivated authors, happening upon useful scraps of just such speech at the theatre or in their reading, had not put what they remembered into the mouths of their frontier characters now and then. Georgia Scenes offers at least one likely instance. In the classic opening sketch, "Georgia Theatrics," we overhear a plowboy rehearsing his rhetoric for a fight, acting out not only his own part and his opponent’s, but that of an onlooker or two. After working himself up with such threats as "—My soul if I don’t jump down his throat, and gallop every chitterling out of him," he gets an imaginary friend’s promise to see to fair play. The plowboy’s aphoristic turn of speech at this point, when he declares himself satisfied and ready to fight, is a trim little hybrid of far-fetched analogy and comic attribution: "That’s sufficient, as Tom Haynes said when he saw the elephant. Now let him come!" (p. 288). I have not found other Southwestern or Western examples of this comic device, but Dickens’s superlative cockney, Sam Weller, made it his own when the Pickwick Papers came out in 1836, a year after Georgia Scenes:

   "Your servant, sir. Proud o’ the title, as the Living Skellington said, ven they show’d him."
"[H]e’s the wictum o’ connubiality, as Blue Beard’s domestic chaplain said, with a tear of pity, ven he buried him."
"Wotever is, is right, as the young noblemen sveetly remarked ven they put him down in the pension list ’cos his mother’s uncle’s wife’s grandfather vunce lit the king’s pipe with a portable tinder-box."⁷

In all probability Longstreet and Dickens had a common source in Samuel Beazley ‘s play, The Boarding House, first performed in London late in 1811. Dickens’s biographer Thomas Wright ascribes Sam Weller’s phraseology to this long-successful farce, in which the militiaman Simon Spatterdash has such lines as "I am down on you, as the extinguisher said to the rushlight," and "Let everyone take care of themselves, as the jackass said when he was dancing among the chickens."⁸ Like Dickens, Longstreet was an enthusiastic playgoer, in his native Augusta and elsewhere, through the mid-1830s at least; Georgia Scenes itself often reflects this en-

thusiasm. Moreover, The Boarding House remained popular in America for two decades after it opened here in 1812; resident and touring companies featured it again and again in nearly every city from New York to New Orleans where detailed performance records have survived.⁹ Very probably, then, Longstreet had at least one chance to enjoy Simon Spatterdash’ s lines and remember them, as Dickens did, before "Georgia Theatrics" first appeared as a newspaper sketch in 1833.

A generation later, through his influence on Bret Harte, Dickens himself almost certainly contributed a more lasting mannerism to frontier comic speech. Harte’s great general debt to Dickens has been clear from the first; the master’s fanciful pathos and humor are unmistakable ingredients in the disciple’s local color, as when the tenderhearted ruffians of "Dickens in Camp" fall silent around the fire while the youngest reads The Old Curiosity Shop aloud. But Harte’ s borrowing sometimes extended even to specific oddities of Dickens’s characters, and one of these oddities, a linguistic quirk of the blacksmith Joe Gargery, was to have a curious longevity in Western humor.

Pip’s earliest, staunchest friend and protector in Great Expectations (1861), the manly but humble Joe has few faults and no pretensions. But his very humility makes him rhetorical, for he defers to others instinctively and chooses his words to them with painful care. He almost always sounds stilted, then, since he sees no way to be candid and civil but to aim at formality—to meet his listener bravely, if haltingly, on what he takes to be that listener’s own, higher ground. The stiffness of Joe’s untutored syntax becomes the measure of his good intentions.

And Joe’s verbal trade-mark, the sure sign of constraint to come, is his earnest introductory "Which." When Miss Havisham calls him to Satis House to explain Pip’s prospects and asks first if Joe is Pip’s sister’s husband, the awestruck blacksmith cannot bring himself to answer her directly; he addressed the boy instead. "‘Which I meantersay, Pip,’ Joe now observed. . . ‘as I hup and married your sister, and I were at the time what you might call (if you was anyways inclined) a single man. . . .’" And when Miss Havisham asks next if he expects a premium for raising Pip as his apprentice, "‘Pip,’ returned Joe . . . as if he were hurt, ‘which I meantersay that were not a question requiring a answer betwixt yourself and me, and which you know the answer to be full well No. . . .’" Later, once Pip begins his new genteel life in London, Joe becomes ill at ease even when speaking to him alone: "‘Which

you have that growed,’ said Joe, ‘and that swelled, and that gentlefolked;’ Joe considered a little before he discovered this word; ‘as to be sure you are a honour to your king and country.’"¹⁰ More and more of his sentences take on this strained elegance, until one can hardly imagine another preamble but "Which" for them.

When this Dickens term crossed the Atlantic, its connotations began to change. Within five years it reappeared in Harte’s early poems of the gold fields, beginning in July, 1866, with "To the Pliocene Skull." Here, in a dozen sham-erudite stanzas in the San Francisco Californian, the young newsman scoffed at credulous Darwinians in the California Academy of Natural Sciences, for accepting the recently discovered "Calaveras Skull" as an authentic paleontological find. Reportedly this relic had been unearthed in a local mine shaft; but the mine lay in hoax country, as Harte was already aware. When the poet implores the Pliocene Skull to speak of its past amid "the stately Sigillaria" and "cheerful Pterodactyls," the reply is disconcerting:

Which my name is Bowers, and my crust was busted
Falling down a shaft in Calaveras County;
But I’d take it kindly if you’d send the pieces
Home to old Missouri!

Harte’s Pacific Coast contemporaries recognized this speaker with delight as the affable Joe Bowers of Pike, a mythical lout of Gold Rush days; a popular song had made him famous as "a kind of Western John Doe."¹¹

Associations of name and caste may have suggested giving Joe Gargery ‘s meek mannerism to Joe Bowers, but Harte’s dialect verse soon lent new coloring to the mannerism itself. In "Dow’s Flat," published in the June, 1870, Overland Monthly, another vagrant from Missouri strikes it rich, and boasts of his "house with the coopilow . . . which the same isn’t bad for a Pike." "Which . . ." was clearly on its way from conscious humility to Gilded Age ostentation, and three months later Harte’s most famous speaker, the exuberant Truthful James from Table Mountain, went on to fix the term firmly in the American imagination of his time as a Western flourish:

Which I wish to remark
And my language is plain,
That for ways that are dark
And for tricks that are vain,
The heathen Chinee is peculiar,
Which the same I would rise to explain.

At times Harte used "Which . . ." more unstintingly than Dickens himself had. Here Truthful James pens a love letter to a girl back in the States, on behalf of an injured fellow-miner, "an intimate party,—Which the same I would term as a friend":

. . .with you, Miss, he "challenges Fate,"
(Which the language that invalid uses
At times it were vain to relate) . . .
And now, my respects, Miss, to you;
Which my language, although comprehensive,
Might seem to be freedom, is true.¹²

Soon, the Dickens term reappeared in the comic "Wolfville, Arizona" stories of Alfred Henry Lewis. Arguably Harte’s ablest successor among the Western local colorists, he was to handle the humorous "comprehensive language" more freely still. Adding freshness and verve of his own to the formula, Lewis adapted Harte’ s picturesque approach and an assortment of his character types, themes, and vernacular devices to the Arizona cattle country. By unlikely turns a prosecuting attorney in Cleveland, a cowboy, a Kansas City reporter, and a Hearstian muckraker in Washington and New York, the energetic Lewis wrote his Wolfville stories between 1889 and 1913, under the pen name Dan Quin; lauded by T. R., collected in six books, and illustrated by Frederic Remington, they remained popular well after World War I.¹³ In them, Joe Gargery’s ceremonious "Which . . ." returns from verse to colloquial, trope-crammed prose, as Lewis’s drawling narrator, the Old Cattleman, celebrates Wolfville’ s epic past. His discourse blends formality and slang in a gaudier, more varied pattern than Harte’ s speakers had managed, and ranges across a broader comic spectrum. Even Truthful James’s "Which . . ." had generally implied his deference, however improbable, to a social or cultural superior; in Lewis’s fiction, the term comes to bespeak simply the unabashed Westerner on his mettle, confronting every sort of outlander, so that only the words that follow can show us his tone, as it varies from patience to swagger, from drollery to elaborately veiled menace.

    "Which I’ve told you," observed the Old Cattleman, puffing at his briar pipe— "which I’ve already told you how Missis Rucker goes on surroundin’ old Rucker with connoobial joy to sech a degree that, one mornin’ when her wifely back is turned, he ups an’ stampedes off into the hills, an’ takes refutch with the Apaches."
"Which the inborn b’ligerency of that Red Dog camp is sech as to cause it to go about on perpetchooal tiptoe, growlin’ same as a sorehead dog! . . . But, you hear me! if Wolfville and Red

159

Dog ever hooks up hostile, historians will shore head the chapter, ‘Red Dog’s Last Days.’"

Moreover, practically everyone in the Old Cattleman’s reminiscences shares his inherited tricks of speech:

    "‘Which I’ve seen these yere reevivals . . . an’ thar’s no foretellin’ what a gent will do, once he’s filled with grace.’"
"‘Which,’ says the witness, . . . letting’ on he ain’t made bashful an’ oneasy by so much attentions bein’ shown him, ‘which I was a-eatin’ of a few sardines, a drinkin’ of a few drinks of whiskey, a-smokin’ of a few seegyars, an’ a-romancin’ ’round.’"
"‘Which said motion,’ observes Enright, ‘onless I hears a protest, goes as it lays.’"¹⁴

In 1911 the Denver newsman Damon Runyon followed Lewis to Hearst’s New York American. Covering his first horse show at Madison Square Garden that year, Runyon wrote a cowboy poem in which the visiting stockman "Mr. Deeters of Cheyenne" paid tribute to the daring gowns of the socialite audience:

An’, son, I been to that Madison Square,
and I see that hawse’s show,
W’ich, I’ll mention free, I admired to see
how they cuts them blankets low—
. . . they’d freeze in the range from the sudden
change if they cut them blankets so low.¹⁵

Presently, the Harte and Lewis influences would show themselves more fully in Runyon’s prose fiction, most strikingly in his present tense narration;¹⁶ but there was to be no place in the Broadway stories for the prefatory Western "Which." This mock-elegant, well-traveled neologism closed its literary career in America after half a century.

And with the frontier closed too, no more provincial realists could come forward, claiming expertise in its lost folkways, to keep the genteel and quasi-genteel features of its vernacular tradition unchanged. The dialogue in Western fiction and films has remained firmly stylized, it is true; latter-day novelties like Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man and the Brando role in The Missouri Breaks are as conspicuously mannered as even the most self-conscious comic sketches of over a century ago. Perhaps it could be argued, then, that a "literary" element in today’s representations of the oral tradition has outlived the age of Longstreet and Harte after all. But this survival, if it is one, has certainly not preserved the specific literary influences, the rhetorical nuggets and rhinestones, that embellished the frontier’s first "inchoate poetry."

KANSAS STATE UNIVERSITY

Notes

    ¹Native American Humor (1937; 2d ed. San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Co., Inc., 1960), pp. 124–139.
   ²Edward Eggleston, "Preface to the Library Edition," The Hoosier Schoolmaster (New York: Orange Judd Company, 1892), p. 7; Bret Harte, "The Rise of the ‘Short Story," Cornhill, NS 7 (July, 1899), 8, quoted in Blair, Native American Humor, p. 127.
   ³Quoted in O. P. Fitzgerald’s Judge Longstreet, A Life Sketch (Nashville: Publishing House of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1891), pp. 164–66.
   ⁴"The Rise of the ‘Short Story," quoted in Blair, Native American Humor, p. 126. Wherever possible, I have drawn my examples of literary vernacular from sketches reprinted in this classic, readily available anthology; all citations from them are indicated by Blair’s page numbers, enclosed in parentheses within the text.
   ⁵Henry Nash Smith and Arlin Turner, among others, have commented on failures to handle dialect accurately and consistently throughout a broad range of nineteenth-century American regional literature and sub-literature; until now, however, humorists and local colorists who dealt with the frontier have usually escaped these particular criticisms. Cf. Smith’s Virgin Land (1950; rpt. New York: Vintage Books, Inc., 1957), pp. 106, 108–9, 110, 279–85 (quotation is from p. 283), and Turner’s "Comedy and Reality in Local Color Fiction, 1865–1900," in The Comic Imagination in American Literature, ed. Louis D. Rubin, Jr. (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 160–64.
   ⁶The Writings of Bret Harte (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1896–1914), I, 61–63.
   ⁷Pickwick Papers, ed. Edgar Johnson (New York: Dell, 1964), pp. 245, 309, 745–46.
   ⁸The Life of Charles Dickens (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), pp. 87–88.
   ⁹For theatrical activity in Augusta to the mid-1830s, and for indications of Longstreet’s interest in the stage, see John Donald Wade, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, ed. M. Thomas Inge (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1969), pp. 15, 41–42, 75, 135, 183; James H. Dormon, Jr., Theater in the Ante Bellum South 1815–1861(Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1967), pp. 37–38, 119, 137, 275; Georgia Scenes (New York: Sagamore Press, Inc., 1957), pp. 1, 2, 165–71. Many performances of Beazley’s Boarding House between 1812 and 1834 in New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore, and New Orleans are reported in George C. D. O’Dell, Annals of the New York Stage, II (New York: Columbia Univ. Press 1927), 387, III (1928), 350, 366; Reese D. James, Old Drury of Philadelphia: A History of the Philadelphia Stage 1800–1835 (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1932), pp. 639, 651, 677; Nelle Smither, A History of the English Theatre in New Orleans (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1944), p. 328.
   ¹⁰Great Expectations, ed. and introd. Louis Crompton (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1964), pp. 106, 107, 236.
   ¹¹Harte, Writings, XII, 269; George R. Stewart, Jr., "A Bibliography of the Writings of Bret Harte in the Magazines and Newspapers of California 1857–1871," Univ. of California Publications in English, 3, No. 3 (1933), 151, and his Bret Harte: Argonaut and Exile (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931), pp. 142–44.
   ¹²Writings, XII, 118, 129, 160–61; on the swift, widespread Anglo-American popularity of "Plain Language from Truthful James" after its first publication in the Sept., 1870, Overland Monthly, see Stewart, Bret Harte, pp. 179–81. After "To the Pliocene Skull," "Dow’s Flat," and this poem, Harte used "Which . . ." in four more of the eight Truthful James poems: "His Answer to ‘Her Letter’" and "Further Language from Truthful James," in the Dec., 1870, and Jan., 1871, Overland Monthly, and "Truthful James to the Editor (Yreka, 1875)" and "The Spelling Bee at Angels," published after Harte had left California in 1871. Besides the famous "The Society upon the Stanislaus," which had been the first to appear, in the Sept. 26, 1868, San Francisco News Letter and California Advertiser, the series also included, from the post-California 1870s, "A Question of Privilege" and "The Thought-Reader of Angels" (Stewart, "A Bibliography . . . 1856–1871," passim; Writings, XII, 146, 160–62, 165–67, 183).

    ¹³George Harvey Genzmer in DAB s.v. "Lewis, Alfred Henry"; William L. McCorkle, "Kansas City Had Early Muckraker," Kansas City Times, 27 Sept. 1968, Sec. B., p. 18, cols. 4–8.
   ¹⁴Wolfville Folks (1907; rpt. New York: Appleton, 1927), pp. 1, 50, 75–76, 100; "The Man From Red Dog" [1897], in The Local Colorists: American Short Stories 1857–1900, ed. and introd. Claude M. Simpson (New York: Harper, 1960), p. 333. I am indebted to Prof. Simpson for suggesting "Plain Language from Truthful James" as a probable source for the Old Cattlemen’s initial "Which" (p. 333). I think it likely also that other Truthful James poems, especially those that quote the stylized vernacular of "Bill Nye," influenced Lewis’s present tense narration:

Nye sez, "By the law
Of nations, forbear!
I surrenders—no more:
And I looks to be treated,—you hear me?
—as a pris’ner, a pris’ner of war!"
. . . the look in his eye
Was quite painful to see
And he says, "You mistake; this poor injin
I protects from such sharps as you be!"

(Writings, XII, 147, 166)

   ¹⁵Quoted in Edwin P. Hoyt, A Gentleman of Broadway (Boston: Little, Brown, 1964), pp. 104–05.
   ¹⁶For a detailed study of the continuity between Harte, Lewis, and Runyon see my "The Last Local Colorist: Damon Runyon," Kansas Magazine (1968), pp. 73–81.