Frontier Humor Wild, Woolly As Ever

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Cavorting on the Devil’s Fork: The Pete Whetstone Letters of C.F.M. Noland (Paperback $19.95) has been reissued by the University of Arkansas Press as part of its Arkansas Classics series. In 1837 Charles Fenton Mercer Noland, a Batesville lawyer and state representative, began writing humorous letters in dialect from the perspective of his fictional character Pete Whetstone, who, along with his neighbors, devoted himself to hunting, fishing and an outdoors lifestyle in the southwest frontier.

Published regularly in the New York-based newspaper the Spirit of the Times, Noland’s pieces presented the activities, habits and vernacular speech of southwest frontier dwellers to urban readers who greatly enjoyed the strange, amusing and, sometimes, dangerous behavior of people in this little-known region. Noland quickly achieved a reputation as one of the Old Southwest’s best humorists years before Mark Twain, earning praise for the realism achieved in his work through strong, vivid characters, allusions to well-known people and events of the day, and a skillful rendering of the rich, earthy vernacular language that makes Pete Whetstone such a unique and believable character.

George E. Lankford, professor emeritus of folklore at Lyon College, has written an introduction to the Arkansas Classics edition that emphasizes the heightened recognition that Noland’s work has received since Cavorting on the Devil’s Fork was first published in 1979. One area of discussion centers on the discomfort that has long been felt by many Arkansans about the national perception of their state. Lankford notes that fictional characters such as Pete Whetstone and the Arkansas Traveler helped raise America’s awareness of Arkansas, a development that Arkansans initially found gratifying but later considered demeaning and even shameful. In many Arkansans’ minds, humorous frontier literature such as the Pete Whetstone letters had a lasting, negative effect on the state’s image.

Many of the gentlemen narrators in Southwest humor seemed to distance themselves from their frontier characters, displaying antagonism and scorn toward what one critic calls their “vernacular clowns.” Noland’s apparent ease with his Pete Whetstone character has been noted, and his use of the first-person viewpoint instead of the standard framework imposed by most gentlemen narrators is artistically groundbreaking as well as personally significant. Pete is given the authority to speak for himself with very little intrusion from Noland as author.

Many scholars suggest that the letters are semiautobiographical and that Pete Whetstone is the comic alter ego of Noland, who was both a cultured, educated gentleman from a prominent Virginian family and an outdoorsman passionately interested in hunting, fishing, horse racing and politics. Unlike other Southwestern humorists, Noland was amused whenever he was publicly identified as his character, probably considering Pete as himself “without refinement, social or political images to uphold, or hesitancy to indulge in the wild and raucous life on the Arkansas frontier.”

The Arkansas Classics series seeks to preserve Arkansas’ heritage and culture by bringing out-of-print works of timeless Arkansiana to a new readership in brand-new paperback editions.