KING, GRACE. New Orleans: The Place and the People; Balcony Stories.
MCVOY, LIZZIE CARTER. Louisiana in the Short Story, Louisiana State University Press, 1940.
SAXON, LYLE. Fabulous New Orleans; Old Louisiana; Lafitte the Pirate.
8. Backwoods Life and Humor
THE SETTLERS who put their stamp on Texas were predominantly from the southern states—and far more of them came to Texas to work out of debt than came with riches in the form of slaves. The plantation owner came too, but the go-ahead Crockett kind of backwoodsman was typical. The southern type never became so prominent in New Mexico, Arizona, and California as in Texas. Nevertheless, the fact glares out that the code of conduct—the riding and shooting tradition, the eagerness to stand up and fight for one's rights, the readiness to back one's judgment with a gun, a bowie knife, money, life itself—that characterized the whole West as well as the Southwest was southern, hardly at all New England.
The very qualities that made many of the Texas pioneers rebels to society and forced not a few of them to quit it between sun and sun without leaving new addresses fitted them to conquer the wilderness—qualities of daring, bravery, reckless abandon, heavy self-assertiveness. A lot of them were hell-raisers, for they had a lust for life and were maddened by tame respectability. Nobody but obsequious politicians and priggish "Daughters" wants to make them out as models of virtue and conformity. A smooth and settled society—a society shockingly tame—may accept Cardinal Newman's definition, "A gentleman is one who never gives offense." Under this definition a shaded violet, a butterfly, and a floating summer cloud are all gentlemen. "The art of war," said Napoleon, "is to make offense." Conquering the hostile Texas wilderness meant war with nature and against savages as well as against Mexicans. Go-ahead Crockett's ideal of a gentleman was one who looked in another direction while a visitor was pouring himself out a horn of whiskey.
Laying aside climatic influences on occupations and manners, certain Spanish influences, and minor Pueblo Indian touches, the Southwest from the point of view of the bedrock Anglo-Saxon character that has made it might well include Arkansas and Missouri. The realism of southern folk and of a very considerable body of indigenous literature representing them has been too much overshadowed by a kind of So Red the Rose idealization of slave-holding aristocrats.
ALLSOPP, FRED W. Folklore of Romantic Arkansas, 2 vols., Grolier Society, 1931. Allsopp assembled a rich and varied collection of materials in the tone of "The Arkansas Traveler." OP.
ARRINGTON, ALFRED W. The Rangers and Regulators of the Tanaha, 18 56. East Texas bloodletting.