A History of American Literature Since 1870. Fred Lewis Pattee
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.
It was gold—in the quartz, And it ran all alike; And I reckon five oughts Was the worth of that strike; And that house with the coopilow's his'n—which the same isn't bad for a Pike.
These poems with others were published in 1871 with the title East and West Poems. The Pike County pieces in the volume number altogether seven; John Hay's Pike County Ballads, which came out in book form at almost the same moment, numbered six—thirteen rather remarkable poems when one considers the furore that they created and the vast influence they exerted upon their times.
For a decade and more Pike County colored American literature. In 1871 J. G. Holland summed up the situation:
The "Pike" … has produced a strange and startling sensation in recent literature. … With great celerity he has darted through the columns of our newspapers, the pages of our magazines, while quiet, well-behaved contributors have stood one side and let him have his own wild way. And it began to seem, at one time, as if the ordinary, decent virtues of civilized society could stand no chance in comparison with the picturesque heroism of this savage in dialect.[51]
Much of Harte's fiction deals with this type. Save for Yuba Bill, who was evidently a Northerner, the New Orleans gamblers like Oakhurst and Jack Hamlin, and the Spanish and Mexican natives, his characters were prevailingly Pikes. The dialect in all of his work is dominated by this Southwestern element. In The New Assistant at the Pine Clearing School, for instance, the leader of the strike discourses like this: "We ain't hankerin' much for grammar and dictionary hogwash, and we don't want no Boston parts o' speech rung in on us the first thing in the mo'nin'. We ain't Boston—We're Pike County—we are." Tennessee's Partner was a Pike, and Uncle Jim and Uncle Billy, and Kentuck and Sandy—glorified to be sure and transformed by California and the society of the mines, but none the less Pikes.
Following Harte and Hay came the outburst of local color fiction. The Hoosier Schoolmaster, Cape Cod Folks, Sam Lawson's Fireside Stories, Hoosier Mosaics, Deephaven, Old Creole Days, In the Tennessee Mountains were but the beginning. For two decades and more American fiction ran to the study of local types and peculiar dialect. The movement was not confined to prose. The Pike County balladry was continued by Sidney Lanier and Irwin Russell with their songs and ballads of the negro quarters, Will Carleton with his farm ballads, James Whitcomb Riley with his Hoosier studies, Drummond with his tales of the "Habitant" of the Canadian frontier, and by Eugene Field, Sam Walter Foss, Holman F. Day, and scores of others down to Robert W. Service, the depicter of the Yukon and the types of the later gold rush.
II
Whether the Pike County balladry began with Bret Harte or with John Hay, is a question at present unsettled. Mark Twain was positive that Hay was the pioneer. His statement is important:
"It was contemporaneously supposed," he wrote after Hay's death, "that the Pike County Ballads were inspired or provoked by the Pike County balladry of Bret Harte, and they were first accepted as imitations or parodies. They were not written later, they were written (and printed in newspapers) earlier. Mr. Hay told me this himself—in 1870 or '71, I should say. I believe—indeed, I am quite sure—that he added that the newspapers referred to were obscure western back-woods journals and that the ballads were not widely copied. Also he said this: That by and by, when Harte's ballads began to sweep the country, the noise woke his (Hay's) buried waifs and they rose and walked."[52]
To this testimony may be added Howells's belief that Hay's ballads were prior to Harte's and that "a comparative study will reveal their priority,"[53] and the statement of W. E. Norris, a schoolmate of the poet, that "the ballads appeared as fugitive pieces in the newspapers, as I remember, and the attention they attracted induced the author to compile them with others in book form."[54]
A comparative study of the poems certainly reveals the fact that one set was influenced by the other. "Cicely" and "Little Breeches" have very much in common. They are in the same meter, and in one place they have practically identical lines:
But I takes mine straight without sugar, and that's what's the matter of me.—Cicely.
I want a chaw of terbacker,
And that's what's the matter with me.
—Little Breeches.
There are similarities in others of the poems:
Don't know Flynn—
Flynn of Virginia—
Long as he's been 'yar?
Look 'ee here, stranger,
Whar hev you been?
—In the Tunnel.
Whar have you been for the last three year.
That you haven't heard folks tell
How Jimmy Bludso passed in his checks