Humorous Columns of Frontier Newspapers: Part 2

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

In the April 11, 1895, supplement to the Barton County Democrat, which was published in Great Bend, Kansas, the anonymous author of a “Good Humor” column concerning “The Philosophy of Happiness Under All Occasions” treats his readers to a treatise on the topic of humor's frequent origin in unpleasant experiences.

Burke and Goldsmith

The article starts the ball rolling by recalling that Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774) once observed that it was "the unhappy lot" of [Edmund] Burke (1729-1797) 'to eat mutton cold and cut blocks with a razor.'” (Like most Western newspaper articles, this one seeks to enrich its readers' vocabulary, offering them such rarely employed words as “anteprandial,” meaning “prior to eating a meal”; “prandial,” which means “of or pertaining to a meal”; and “haec fabula docet,” meaning “this fable teaches us.” Whether the journalist's purpose is pedantic or pedagogical is, perhaps, like the madness of many an Edgar Allan Poe protagonist, insusceptible to analysis.)

We are to learn, however, from Burke's “unhappy lot” that experiences which seem bitter during their occurrence can later prove to be fodder for amusement—that of others, if not our own. The “cold mutton” and the “blocks,” although unpleasant in the eating and in the cutting, respectively, nevertheless may later occasion humorous treatment. (Many stand-up comics echo this observation, declaring that calamity and catastrophe, especially of the personal variety, often bear the fruit of laughter.)

We are next advised that Joseph Addison (1672-1719)—the “Good Humor” columnist, either because of space limits or to impress his readers (or himself) concerning his intimacy with the authors whose names he bandies about, frequently uses only their surnames—divides humor into two classifications: “true” humor and “false humor.” The former involves “truth,” “good sense,” “wit” and “mirth.” (The columnist does not indicate whether it is truth, good sense, or wit and mirth that makes “true humor” true, but seems to suggest that true humor is derived from, or based upon, all these ingredients.) False humor is predicated upon “nonsense,” “frenzy,” and “laughter.”

Irving

Next, the writer references “two other great humorists,” this time, perhaps to reveal the fact that he is not on as intimate terms with them as he is with the others whose names he has dropped with abandon, naming their full names: Washington Irving (1783-1859) and John Bunyan (1628-1688).

Bunyan

Neither of these “other great humorists” is very helpful, as the comments of both are so general as to be vacuous, Irving defining “honest good humor” as “the oil and wine of a merry meeting,” adding, with no more clarity, that “no jovial companionship [is] equal to that where the jokes are rather small and the laughter abundant,” despite his own earlier comparison of “honest good humor” with “ the oil and wine of a merry meeting.” Bunyan prefers poetry to prose, offering this obscure couplet: “Some things are of that nature as to make/ One's fancy chuckle while his heart doth ache.”

The article ends where it began: nowhere. Despite the aid of Goldsmith, Burke, Addison, Irving, and Bunyan, we learn virtually nothing about humor and less about wit, although our guide has insisted that “good humor is a great constituent in happiness in life,” while warning us that “wit, unless it is of the kindly sort” (in which case, it is not wit, after all, but a species of “good humor”) “may be valuable in giving a sense of intellectual supremacy” to those of us, presumably, who are troubled by poor self-esteem or who imagine ourselves as being intellectually inferior to others. Since wit “never makes friends,” the journalist assures us, we are “better off without it,” if we want to live a happy life. (Why, then, does the writer bring it up at all? To reach the allotted word count for his column, I suspect.)

The whole point of the column is to explain how we can, through the exercise of humor, live happily ever after, but the column does almost nothing to help us understand what humor is or how to employ it to this (or any other) purpose. However, in reading the column, we might have been entertained, if not amused, for a few minutes, and we might suppose that we had learned something worthwhile. We might even believe that we now have the secret of happiness for which humanity has longed since the days of our primeval parents.

Humorous Columns of Frontier Newspapers: Part I

Copyright 2020 by Gary L.Pullman

In a time such as our own, when newspapers are quickly becoming a thing of the past, it is difficult, perhaps, to imagine how readers, in the past, looked forward to the delivery of their daily chronicles.

The newspaper brought the world into their homes, where the news of the day—stories of election fraud, of gunfights, or stagecoach and train robberies, of hangings, of gold strikes—could be read in armchairs by the fireside or over bacon and eggs at breakfast tables.

Stories of travel and adventure, of newfangled inventions, of battle and of war in the planet's far-flung countries could be read and debated in pool halls and barbershops and saloons.

The newspaper opened parochial, small-town life on the frontier to the world at large. The stories, often reported in a dramatic tone, were calculated to provoke, to excite, to anger, and to amaze.

Journalism was emotional; unless a newspaper article did as good a job at arousing its readers' passions as it did in relating the facts, a story hadn't successfully performed its task. (In truth, sensationalism was often more important than objectivity, just as feeling was more significant than facts.)

In their efforts to amuse and to be many, if not all, things to all readers, frontier newspapers also often contained humorous columns. Indeed, these periodicals included even analyses of the nature and methodology of humor, as in the “Wit and Humor” article published in the November 2, 1889, edition of Elko, Nevada's Daily Independent, which states that, although “laughter may be either genial or malignant, . . . it is allied rather to egoism and contempt than to affection and devotedness, the chief source of the ludicrous being the degradation of some person or thing which we have been accustomed to associate with power, dignity, or gravity.”

Although this is but one of several competing theories of what tickles the funny bone and why, it certainly prescribes, for reader and humorist alike, the main types of humor, their common wellsprings and method, and even the typical targets of the humorist. But our author, who prefers the protection provided by anonymity, further enlightens his readers as to the differences between wit and humor.

Sydney Smith

Originally, the writer instructs, “wit” referred to “intelligence,” but has since itself “become so degraded that paronomasia [the newspaper writers of yore were often intimately familiar with the lexicon] it is considered a species of wit.” The rest of the column continues to differentiate between humor and wit, backing its claims with allusions to the English wit Sydney Smith, the essayist William Hazlitt, the lexicographer Noah Webster, and the satirist Thomas Carlyle and ending with an example of each category.

As an instance of humor, the author cites Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote: the would-be knight  exemplifies humor, the columnist says, when he explains to his page, “The reason, Sancho, why thou feelest that pain all down thy back is that the stick which gave it thee was of length to that extent.”

As an exhibit of wit, the writer repeats the anecdote of a mute whose master reproached him for laughing “at a funeral” by observing, “You rascal, you, I have been raising your wages for these two years past on condition that you should appear more sorrowful, and the higher wages you receive the happier you look.”

The article, both educational and amusing, is a good mix, and a good example, of the humor and wit its author defines, in all places, on the page of a newspaper published in one of the towns of the American Wild West!

Charles M. Russell's Portrait of the American West

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Born in Oak Hill, Missouri, near St. Louis, a year before the end of the American Civil War, Charles M. Russell became an early devotee of the American West, working first as a shepherd and then as a cowboy on Montana ranches. After marrying Nancy Cooper, in 1896, Russell began his career as a full-time artist, “painting and sculpting” inside his “log cabin studio next to their home” in Great Falls, where he died in 1926, leaving a legacy of work chronicling and commemorating the time and place he'd loved all the days of his life.

In over two thousand paintings, Russell captures the spirit and adventure of the Wild West. His work depicts roundups, bronco busting, the fording of rivers, cowboys' encounters with wild animals, buffalo hunts, camping, gambling, scouting, gold mining, hunting, and much more.

Many of his paintings are also devoted to the nomadic life of Native Americans, as they hunt buffalo, fight cavalry soldiers, attack frontiersmen, travel from campsite to campsite, grieve fallen warriors, greet the famous explorers Lewis and Clark, encounter other tribes, worship, communicate by smoke signals, and perform other tasks of daily life.

Several tribes are portrayed, including the Piegan, Crow, Sioux, Blackfoot, Chinook, Navajo, Shoshone, Cree, Mandan, and Kootenai. By today's standards, Russell's portraits of Native Americans are, at times, politically incorrect. In his art, which depicts its subjects' encounters with both other tribes than their own and with white men, whom they see variously as traders, fighters, settlers, and invaders, battles, bloodletting, and death are likely to follow.

More than a few of the paintings are dedicated to displays of Native Americans at war, both with each other and with whites. as the works' titles suggest: Scouting the Enemy, On the Warpath, The Battle Between the Blackfeet and the Piegans, War Council, The Making of a Warrior, Planning the Attack, The Attack, Indian War Party, Sun River War Party, Battle of Belly River, Mandan Warrior, Return of the Warriors, Cree War Party, The War Party, and WAR.

When Native Americans are not waging war, they are often engaged in other hostile acts, against other tribes or against white men, as they are in such paintings as Sioux Torturing a Blackfoot Brave, Planning the Attack on the Wagon Train, The Horse Thieves, Blackfeet Burning Crow Buffalo Range, and Crow Sheep Stealer.

Not all of Russell's paintings depict Native Americans as uncivilized, battle-driven killers, thieves, and arsonists, of course. A couple show individuals as “noble” and “romantic” figures. In a number of works, Russell's Native American subjects are even portrayed in a seemingly lighthearted or humorous fashion (A Piegan Flirtation, Indian Beauty Parlor, Waiting and Mad), a reverent manner (Invocation to the Sun, Sun Worship in Montana), or a diplomatic pose (Lewis and Clark Meeting Indians at Ross' Hole, Lewis and Clark Reach Shoshone Camp Led by Sacajawea the Bird Woman, Indians Discovering Lewis and Clark, Lewis and Clark Meeting the Mandan Indians).

One can't help but to notice, however, that in the diplomatic series involving the meetings between Lewis and Clark and various tribes, the white explorers receive top billing in the titles, and it is usually they, not the Native Americans, who are assigned the active role; it is they who meet; even when Sacajawea leads, her name appears after theirs, and they are assigned the primary active role: they “reach” the Shoshone's camp. It is almost as an afterthought that their guide's action, in leading them, is mentioned. Clearly, in Russell's view of the American West, whites are the protagonists. His Native Americans are the villains or supporting characters or, in some cases, even window dressing.

Russell's work tends to show Native Americans as treacherous and militant or, in the comparatively rare moments in which they are not burning a field, torturing an enemy, plotting battles, or waging war, as comical, paganistic (animistic), or helpful to the active, purposeful white men they serve. There is only one other major category of Native American on display in the artist's gallery of “Indians”: the stereotypical representative, usually in portraiture, of Indian Brave, Indian Buck, Indian Squaw, and [Portrait of an] Indian.

Although Russell is largely positive in his portrayal of white men as the heroic tamers of the Wild West, he also lampoons them on occasion and shows them in a bad light at times. In one painting, a cowboy tries to “bargain” with a Native Indian “for an Indian girl.”

In another work, Whooping It Up, a band of cowboys, apparently drunk, gallop down the main street, past a saloon, shooting their revolvers at the sky and frightening a Chinese pedestrian, who drops a basket of laundry, scattering chickens, while a dog runs in the opposite direction and, across the street, men look on from the boardwalk in front of a saloon, while Asian women in front of Hop Lee's Laundry stare in fear. The white men's behavior is reckless and dangerous, but no one seems ready to intercept or challenge them.

In the ironically titled Peaceful Valley Saloon, gamblers are about to duel at their table, possibly to settle a charge of cheating at cards; one hold his extended weapon, while his adversary begins to draw his own six-shooter from his holster. None of the other patrons of the saloon, including the bartender, appears concerned, suggesting they have seen such behavior before. Adding to the irony is the Native American who looks on, rifle in hand, a stoic expression on his face, since, often, in Russell's' work, Native Americans are depicted as hostile and violent.

In The Tenderfoot, a cowboy makes a new arrival to the West, who is still dressed in the fashion of the East, “dance” by shooting his pistol at the dude's feet, much to the amusement of the other frontiersmen gathered outside the saloon before which the spectacle takes place and to the consternation of a fleeing dog. Even the token Indian in the group looks amused by the potentially dangerous shenanigans.

Outlaws, as such, are fairly rarely represented in Russell's work. However, a pair of highway robbers appears in Fleecing the Priest, and, as the painting's title indicates, their victim is a man of the cloth. As one of the robbers holds a gun on the clergyman, who stands between the two outlaws, his hands overhead, looking frightened, the other reaches deep into the left pocket of the unfortunate soul's trousers. The lining protruding from the other pocket suggests that it has already been searched. Four lines of partially rhyming verse explain the villains' attitude toward the man they are robbing:

If coin is the root of all evil

Your reverence is going to weed;

It's the work of a saint, not a sinner,

To shake your clothes out for seed.

When Russell's depictions of the Wild West depart from the heroic white Westerner to the criminal element, the deviation is also one from the sublime to the ridiculous, for the painter almost always depicts the cowboy or the sheriff or the soldier as an exalted hero, while he portrays the outlaw as an absurd buffoon. The True West, he implies, is about the men who tamed the wilderness and civilized the frontier; it is not about those who, like robbers, attempted to subvert law and order, nor is it about those who, like Native Americans, fought against or stood in the way of progress.

Russell's paintings show rugged Western terrain, its plains and mountains, canyons and gorges, deserts and snowy highlands, rivers and lakes, pines and cacti. The landscapes also depict the wildlife of the West: buffalo, mustangs, wolves, bears, big horn sheep, elk, and deer. Such paintings reflect the reality, in the untamed West, of the need to “kill or be killed.” The frontier is a land “red in tooth and claw,” in which “only the strong survive” in a constant contest in which “the survival of the fittest” is enacted every day, whether among plants, animals, or men.

Signs of stable, established civilization—white civilization, that is—are few and far between in Russell's oeuvre: an occasional cabin, a trading post, a saloon, a fort, storefronts along a boardwalk adjacent to false-fronted buildings built mostly of wood. Only rarely is there a brick or stone edifice suggesting commitment and permanence. Most of the signs of white civilization, the foil of which, in Russell's art, is the nomadic culture of the Native American, as represented by temporary camps of tepees and clothing of blankets, loincloths, beads, moccasins, robes, and headdresses, buckskin dresses or skirts, and coarse blouses, are transient: chuck wagons, buckboards, stagecoaches, trains.

Russell's vision of the West is flawed. Stereotypical at best, it borders upon racism at times in its depiction of white men as the rowdy, uncouth bringers of civilization to the untamed West and of Native Americans as typically (that is, stereotypically) savage and militant, uncivilized and hostile, wild and brutal. White men have come to tame the West, and that includes the savage, uncivilized Native Americans who attack the newcomers' camps, settlers' cabins, wagon trains, and railroad cars. For the West to be tamed, the Native American must be defeated, killed, banished, and otherwise controlled. These ideas are implicit in Russell's art. It is politically incorrect.

There is, however, truth in his depictions of Native Americans as well as implicit falsehoods or misrepresentations. The cowboy, the farmer, the rancher, the sheriff, the railroad worker, the miner, the soldier, and the other white figures of the West did bring civilization—their civilization—to the West. They built towns. Schools. Churches. Telegraph lines. Railroads. Stockyards. Gold and silver mines.

Russell's heroes built cabins and houses and towns on plains. They laid rails so that trains could travel over mountains, bridge canyons and gorges, and cross miles of desert wasteland. Their boats journeyed up and down rivers and across lakes. They built houses from oaks and pines and quenched their thirst on the juices of cacti. They hunted buffalo, elk, and deer. They captured and domesticated mustangs. They killed dangerous wolves and bears. They made the West habitable and safe—or safer, at least, than it had ever been.

Eventually, they, or their children, also built newspaper offices, libraries, museums, art galleries, department stores, and a host of other pedagogical, religious, commercial, technological, journalistic, and artistic institutions; they spread Western culture throughout the New World. In that sense, the Western heroes Russell's art depicts were heroic, indeed; they were larger than life; they were knights in Stetsons and gun belts and boots.

Despite Russell's lopsided and oversimplified view of Nature and Civilization and their respective human masters, the Native American and the mostly white Westerner, the painter constructed a vast, panoramic vision of this conquest of the Wild West that continues to have a powerful effect on the imagination and the emotions. It is a vision which, although in need of correction and further development, is one that can still be considered inspirational to a significant degree.