The Southwestern Humorists

In days of yore, or so I'm told, critics had an unfortunate tendency to dismiss the 19th century southwestern frontier as something of a literary wasteland. In doing so they merely followed the popular sentiment, alas still alive and well today, that those states that had aligned themselves with slaveholders in the Civil War could only be untutored racist barbarians, too morally and spiritually impoverished to be capable of great literature on the same level with their genteel and cultured brethren to the North. However, the rising tide of a rapidly opening canon over the last half century has brought to light many texts otherwise ignored, and it is no longer acceptable to assume that Mark Twain and William Faulkner, for example, sprung up unassisted from the scorched earth of the American South. Reading the Southwestern Humorists, we discover their roots grown long in the rich soil of a significant frontier literary tradition.

Southwestern Humor was in its heyday in the decades leading up to the Civil War, 1830-1861 when William T. Porter's Spirit of the Times, a weekly New York sporting paper, was known for its humorous sketches. The authors of these sketches often hailed from the southwestern frontier territories, from Georgia and Alabama, Tennessee and Missouri. Their gentlemen narrators sought to record for public consumption the way of life in these wild proto-states, the dialect of their people, and the unique humor of the rugged frontiersman. Widely read outside of New England (still under the thumb of the literary giants in Boston), the Spirit of the Times was a success due in large part to the anti-romantic, realistic writings of the southwest.

The authors who penned these tales were not professional "men of letters" (like New Englanders Emerson and Thoreau) but doctors and lawyers deeply engaged in the lives of the communities about which they wrote. Men like Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Johnson Jones Hooper, Kittrell J. Warren, and George Washington Harris lived and worked, for the most part, in the communities that appear in their stories, and the narrators they created were similar to themselves. Intimate outsiders, the authors and their narrators were too educated to truly fit into the worlds they wrote about, but ideally situated to describe them.

Reading what they describe is always a curious experience and occasionally rather hard to take since much of what must have been considered humorous in the 19th century is rather appalling now. The description of the casual abuse of slaves and animals and the brutal violence of everyday relationships would scarcely be tolerated in today's strangely moral publishing world, unless their depiction was accompanied by a multitude of disclaimers and a healthy moral at the close. But these authors give it to us raw; while evil is often punished and good rewarded, it seems more accidental than anything else. Universal justice is by no means to be relied upon. As Richard Boyd Hauck argues in A Cheerful Nihilism (1971) readers will find in the protagonists of this literary tradition a nihilism that renders them incapable of making meaning in an absurd world. Though they are often adept at pulling a confidence trick, these protagonists lack the ability to create and maintain confidence, both in themselves and in the world around them.

Mark Twain's Roughing It

In a blog titled The Salted Mine, it seems only right to begin with Mark Twain’s 1872 ode to the American West, Roughing It. Twain's extensive travels during the 1860s had taken him clear across the country to Nevada, California, and ultimately as far as the Hawaiian islands. Roughing It is a loose chronicle of that period, intermixed with anecdotes, newspaper clippings, hearsay, and, if we know Twain at all, a fair bit of exaggeration.

Roughing It is an amusing, if somewhat too long, bit of travel fiction, featuring a Twain not at his strongest, nor at his funniest, but worth reading to anyone with an interest in the history of the American West or an overabundance of interest in early Twain. My interests lie in neither of these directions. For me, Roughing It is worth reading primarily for its references to the promise and the perils of speculation on the American Frontier. Twain's charmingly naive narrator engages in a whole host of speculative activities, demonstrating (as Twain did in his own lifetime) a singular incapacity for business. After accidentally burning down his logging project, he allows his ownership of a million dollar mine to lapse while he is spending his projected capital, and then sleeps through the departure of the ship scheduled to take him to a fortune-making meeting.

If he manages to avoid becoming a victim of one of the most popular hoaxes of the time, the salted mine, it is more by luck than skill. A salted mine is, of course, a mining claim that has been planted with a small amount of gold, silver, or in some cases a small number of gemstones, in order to make it appear more rich than it is in fact. One of the truly classic confidence tricks, the salted mine plays on the greed and haste of the mark who, in his hurry to claim near instantaneous wealth, fails to ascertain the true value of the land in question before laying out his money. The glittering appearance of the salted mine was designed to make the seller rich and the speculator appallingly poor.


The trick worked because the truth is that most of the mining fortunes made after the initial surge of the gold rush were not made by individual miners driving their picks into veins of solid gold or panning goose-eggs out of the local stream. Actual mining was expensive, back-breaking work best conducted on a large scale by cheap labor. The real money was in speculation. Mines were established with minimal labor, their value assessed (often unreliably) by a small sample of rock submitted to an appraiser, and then they were sold by the foot to other miners, who often had no more intention of actually working the mine than the original owner did. Feet of mine traded hands in exchange for whiskey and pork and haircuts, much like paper money does now (and did in the Eastern States at the time).

As with the salted mine, the apparent exchange value of these feet often far exceeded what the mine would yield in reality. This contrast between appearance and reality is one to which Twain repeatedly returns throughout the narrative; in this charmingly self-deprecating scene the narrator believes he has struck it rich during a casual stroll through wilderness and presents his findings to his more experienced friends:

"Gentlemen," said I, "I don't say anything--I haven't been around, you know, and of course don't know anything--but all I ask of you is to cast your eye on that, for instance, and tell me what you think of it!" and I tossed my treasure before them.
There was an eager scramble for it, and a closing of heads together over it under the candle-light. Then old Ballou said:
"Think of it? I think it is nothing but a lot of granite rubbish and nasty glittering mica that isn't worth ten cents an acre!"
So vanished my dream. So melted my wealth away. So toppled my airy castle to the earth and left me stricken and forlorn. Moralizing, I observed, then, that "all that glitters is not gold."
Mr Ballou said I could go further than that, and lay it up among my treasures of knowledge, that nothing that glitters is gold. So I learned then, once and for all, that gold in its native state is but dull, unornamental stuff, and that only low-born metals excite the admiration of the ignorant with an ostentatious glitter. However, like the rest of the world, I still go on underrating men of gold and glorifying men of mica. Commonplace human nature cannot rise above that.

I like very much Twain's moralizing here, for it is to these "men of mica" that this blog is dedicated. My own commonplace human nature cannot abide honest or earnest men (I leave Whitman and Emerson to other folk), and pledge this blog to those men (and occasionally women) whose appearance continually belies their reality, to the cheats, quacks, frauds, fakes, humbugs, charlatans, swindlers, and counterfeits of the remarkable nineteenth century.