[CHAPTER V]
THE DISCOVERY OF PIKE COUNTY
The new era of vulgarity in literature, complained of by Stedman, came as a revolt against mid-century tendencies. The movement was not confined to America. In the early seventies, as we have seen, Millet and his Breton peasants for a time took possession of French art; Hardy with his Wessex natives caught the ear of England; Björnson made the discovery that in the Scandinavian peasant lay the only survival of the old Norse spirit; and the Russians Tourgenieff and Tolstoy cast aside the old mythology and told with minuteness the life of the peasant and the serf. Everywhere there was a swing toward the wild and unconventional, even toward the coarse and repulsive. The effeminacy of early Tennysonianism, the cloying sweetness of the mid-century annual, Keatsism, Hyperionism, Heineism, had culminated in reaction. There was a craving for the acrid tang of uncultivated things in borderlands and fields unsown.
In America had sprung up a group of humorists who had filled the newspapers and magazines of the era with that masculine laughter which was echoing along the Mississippi and the Ohio and the gold camps of the Sierras. They were pioneers; they were looking for incongruities and exaggerations, and quite by accident they discovered a new American type, the Pike,—strange creature to inspire a new literature.
I
America has evolved four types, perhaps five, that are unique "new birth of our new soil": the Yankee of the Hosea Biglow and Sam Lawson variety; the frontiersman and scout exemplified in Leather Stocking; the Southern "darky" as depicted by Russell, Harris, Page, and others; the circuit rider of the frontier period; and the Pike.
"A Pike," says Bayard Taylor, "in the California dialect, is a native of Missouri, Arkansas, Northern Texas, or Southern Illinois. The first emigrants that came over the plains were from Pike County, Missouri; but as the phrase, 'a Pike County man,' was altogether too long for this short life of ours, it was soon abbreviated into 'a Pike.' Besides, the emigrants from the aforementioned localities belonged evidently to the same genus, and the epithet 'Western' was by no means sufficiently descriptive.... He is the Anglo-Saxon relapsed into semi-barbarism. He is long, lathy, and sallow; he expectorates vehemently; he takes naturally to whisky; he has the 'shakes' his life long at home, though he generally manages to get rid of them in California; he has little respect for the rights of others; he distrusts men in 'store clothes,' but venerates the memory of Andrew Jackson."[50]
Although he had not yet been named, the Pike had already figured in American literature. George W. Harris had published in 1867 Sut Lovengood's Yarns, a true piece of Pike literature; Longstreet had drawn the type with fidelity in Georgia Scenes, Baldwin's Flush Times, and the sketches of such ephemeral writers as Madison Tensas, Sol Smith, T. W. Lane, T. A. Burke, and J. L. McConnel, the author of Western Characters, had drawn the first broad outlines. In all this work he was simply the crude, uncouth Westerner, the antithesis of the man of the East.
The first to discover him in his California phase and to affix to him for the first time in any book of moment the name Pike was "John Phœnix" who in Phœnixiana drew, as we have seen, a sketch which has scarcely been improved upon by later writers. It was not until 1871, however, that the name Pike and the peculiar type denoted by the name became at all known to the reading public.
The instant and enormous vogue of Pike literature came almost by accident. Bret Harte late in the sixties had dashed off in a happy moment a humorous account of an attempt made by two California gamblers to fleece an innocent Chinaman who turned out to be anything but innocent. He had entitled the poem "Plain Language from Truthful James" and had thrown it aside as a trifle. Some months later during the last exciting moments before going to press with an edition of the Overland Monthly it was discovered that the form was one page short. There was nothing ready but this poem, and with misgivings Harte inserted it. The result was nothing less than amazing. It proved to be the most notable page in the history of the magazine. The poem captured the East completely; it was copied and quoted and laughed at in every corner of the country. It swept through England and beyond. The Luck of Roaring Camp and the two or three strong pieces that followed it had given Harte a certain vogue in the East, but now he swiftly became not only a national, but an international figure. The fame of the "Heathen Chinee," as the poem was now called, brought out of obscurity other poems written by Harte during his editorial days, among them "The Society upon the Stanislaus," and it gave wings to other verses that he now wrote in the "Heathen Chinee" meter and stanza—"Dow's Flat" and "Penelope." Quickly there were added "Jim," "Chiquita," "In the Tunnel," and "Cicely," all of them dealing not with the "heathen Chinee" of his first great strike, but with that other picturesque figure of early California, the Pike.