Southern Frontier Humor: New Approaches

The Real Big Kill: Authenticity, Ecology, and Narrative in Southern Frontier Humor

[ 210 ] THE REAL BIG KILL Authenticity, Ecology, and Narrative in Southern Frontier Humor JaMEs E. BisHoP OncE of tHE ricHEst traditions WitHin tHE gEnrE of old Southwest humor is the embellished story of the hunt, emphasizing the resourcefulness, tenacity, and self-reliance of the nineteenth-century American frontiersman. In recounting these stories, southern humorists , taken as a group, depict a veritable massacre of deer, bears, bison, raccoons, wolves, mountain lions, and a plethora of game bird and fish species, many of which faced extinction by the turn of the twentieth century . That the widespread slaughter of animals—what I term the “big kill” in this essay—was an object of humor for nineteenth-century American readers and writers points to several important questions about writers of southern frontier humor and their audiences. To what extent are these stories Americanized versions of European storytelling traditions, and in what ways are they products of the American frontier and the values of the people who lived there? What assumptions about nature were writers of Old Southwest humor making when they wrote these wildly exaggerated hunting stories, and why would these stories have been appealing to their audiences? What can these assumptions tell us about nineteenthcentury Americans’ attitudes toward the frontier and the natural world? Writers of southern frontier humor were not the first to exaggerate in their telling of hunting stories. Roman and Greek epics are interspersed with hunting tales meant to illustrate the bravery, skill, and manliness of their heroes. Beowulf is, in essence, a hunting yarn. A more direct influence on Old Southwestern humor is Baron Münchhausen’s Narrative of His Marvelous Travels and Campaigns (1785), by German scientist and tall tale writer Rudolph Raspe. A number of nineteenth-century southern frontier tales appear to be Americanizations of Raspe’s hyperbolic hunting stories. That Raspe’s tall tales likely had an important influence on writers of American Southwest humor is a point thoroughly elucidated in Walter autHEnticity, Ecology, narrativE in soutHErn frontiEr HuMor [ 211 ] Blair’s 1984 essay, “A German Connection: Raspe’s Baron Munchausen.” Blair shows that Raspe’s volume was popular in the United States, and he documents the numerous references to Münchhausen in popular American publications that seem to take for granted readers’ general familiarity with Münchhausen. In 1822–23, for instance, traveling British comedian Charles Mathews impersonated a character named Major Longbow, who was characterized in both newspaper reports and the show’s program as “a modern Munchausen” (Blair 126). Numerous other accounts throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries assumed American awareness of the Münchhausen stories.1 Surely the Baron Münchhausen stories were humorous to their original audiences because they placed their intrepid protagonist in unlikely, extravagant, and improbable situations that he overcomes with a combination of guile, panache, and spectacularly good luck. How, then, could the trope of the “big kill” induce laughter in an American context where large-scale destruction of wildlife was neither unlikely nor improbable? Three factors offer the most likely explanations. First, nineteenth-century Americans were astoundingly—and often willfully—oblivious to the widespread devastation of wildlife in the American West, partly because most Americans had never seen the West or witnessed its destruction. Second, frontier ideology mandated “taming” the wilderness to make way for westward expansion. Third, to the extent that Americans witnessed and recognized the environmental destruction that was occurring, the use of self-deprecating humor may have eased their guilt. Southern frontier humor is not, of course, responsible for perpetuating the ideology of environmental devastation that dominated nineteenth-century American policy and practice, but it did play a role in enabling and ennobling it. Wild exaggeration and whimsical imagination are the qualities for which Raspe’s Baron Münchhausen stories were best known when they appeared and for which they are still remembered.2 Raspe’s stories , based loosely upon the life of German nobleman Karl Friedrich Hieronymus, Freiherr von Münchhausen (known as Baron Münchausen or Münchhausen in English), a famous recounter of tall tales. A number of Raspe’s Baron Münchhausen tales concern his abilities as a hunter. In one story, for instance, Münchhausen sees through his bedroom window a flock of wild ducks on a nearby pond. He grabs his gun from the corner , runs downstairs, and on his way out of the house accidentally knocks [ 212 ] JaMEs E. BisHoP his head against the...