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William C. Hall (c. 1819–1865)
- University of Missouri Press
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289 William C. Hall (c. 1819–1865) Little is known about the life of William C. Hall. Though his family was originally from Tennessee, Hall, born in Yazoo County, Mississippi, attended Transylvania University in Kentucky, and became a newspaperman in New Orleans. His fame rests principally on five humorous sketches,the“Yazoo Sketches,”published initially in the New Orleans Daily Delta and Weekly Delta in 1849 and 1850, under the signature of “H.” These “Yazoo Sketches” all focus on Mike Hooter, based on real-life Yazoo County resident Michael Hooter, a mild-mannered, devoutly religious, civic-minded, and prosperous cotton planter, whom Hall, according to John Q. Anderson, helped to transform into a mythic frontier icon. While not as well known as Davy Crockett or Mike Fink—both widely popular real-life heroes whose exploits were also mythologized—Mike Hooter was, in his fictional form, a character of a similar ilk. A rough-and-tumble, tall-talking backwoodsman and lay preacher, Hooter was reputed to be a great bear hunter, largely the result of his own boasting and self-promotion. In fact, as the sketches about Mike Hooter attest, his principal passions were bear hunting, drinking, preaching, and tale-telling. Because Mike demonstrated in three letters published in the New Orleans Delta in 1856 and 1857 that he could deliver loud and lively sermons, he also came to be known as “Mike Shouter.” In one of the sketches, “How Mike Hooter Came Very Near ‘Wollopin’ Arch Coony,” Arch refers to Mike’s preaching as “nuthin’ but loud hollerin.’” The first of the “Yazoo Sketches,”“Mike Hooter’s Fight with the ‘Bar,’” a frame tale, establishes Mike’s fascination for bear hunting, showcasing his backwoods vernacular and oral yarn-spinning. The second sketch, “Mike Hooter’s Bar Story ,” told almost entirely in Mike’s voice, exaggerates in tall-talish fashion the intelligence and spectacular human-like skills of Yazoo County bears. Henry Clay Lewis, the author of Odd Leaves in the Life of a Louisiana Swamp Doctor (1850) who lived for a while in Yazoo County, also wrote one sketch that clearly draws on materials associated with the Mike Hooter myth in his portrayal of the hunter Mik-hoo-tah, whose name means “the grave for bears,” in “The Indefatigable Bear Hunter.” 290 Southern Frontier Humor The most graphic, amusing, and engaging of the “Yazoo Sketches,” however, is “How Sally Hooter Got Snake-Bit.” In it, Mike Hooter relates an embarrassing incident involving his daughter Sally, who defies his wishes by creating a makeshift bustle from a large sausage that her mother prepared so she would be fashionably dressed for a camp meeting. But when the sausage, which Sally mistakes for a snake, slips loose and falls about her ankles, Mike saves her from the serpent. The earthy humor of this sketch, like that of Thorpe’s “The Big Bear of Arkansas” and of Harris’s “Parson John Bullen’s Lizards,” is built around suggestively risqué subject matter. James H. Justus describes Hall’s loud-talking braggart as a “skilled manipulator of delaying tactics and fruitful evasion,” a character who “dramatizes a shift from the heroic mold to the modern one, constructing himself as a witty, wry, and resilient personality unafraid of self-mockery.” While his work is not widely known today,William C. Hall is notable for creating a likeable,entertaining character in Mike Hooter,though Hooter is somewhat of an antihero. Moreover, Hall achieved some national exposure when three of his “Yazoo Sketches” were reprinted in Porter’s the Spirit of the Times soon after they appeared in the Delta. In the 1850s, several of Hall’s Mike Hooter sketches were even anthologized in T. A. Burke’s Polly Peablossoms’s Wedding; and Other Tales and W. E. Burton’s Cyclopedia of Wit and Humor. Texts:“Mike Hooter’s Bar Story,”New Orleans Delta January 6, 1850;“How Sally Hooter Got Snake-Bit,” New Orleans Delta March 24, 1850. Mike Hooter’s Bar Story: A Yazoo Sketch—No. II Showing how the Bear outwitted Ike Hamberlin. “It’s no use talkin,’” said Mike, “’bout your Polar Bar, and your Grisly Bar, and all that sorter varmont what you read about. They ain’t no whar, for the big black customer that circumlocutes down in our neck o’woods, beats ’em all hollow. I’ve heard of some monsus explites kicked up by the brown bars, sich as totein off a yoke o’ oxen, and eatin’ humans raw, and...