For the new humor, which was to be the first product of the new period in American literature, was Western humor of the "John Phoenix" type. It came from three great seed places: the Mississippi and its rivers, the California coast, and, later, the camps of the Civil War. It was the humor of the gatherings of men under primitive conditions. It was often crude and coarse. It was elemental and boisterous and often profane. To the older school of poets and scholars in the East it seemed, as it began to fill all the papers and creep even into the standard magazines, like a veritable renaissance of vulgarity. "The worlds before and after the Deluge were not more different than our republics of letters before and after the war,"[17] wrote Stedman to William Winter in 1873, and the same year he wrote to Taylor in Europe, "The whole country, owing to _contagion_ of our American newspaper 'exchange' system, is flooded, deluged, swamped, beneath a muddy tide of slang, vulgarity, inartistic bathers [_sic_], impertinence, and buffoonery that is not wit."[18] Many of the new humorists had been born in the East, but all of them had been drilled either in the rough school of the West or in the armies during the war. Shaw had been a deckhand on an Ohio River steamer; Browne had been a tramp printer both in the East and the West, and had lived for a time in California; Clemens had been tramp printer, pilot on the Mississippi, and for five years miner and newspaper man on the Western coast; Webb and Nye and Newell had seen life in California; Locke had edited country papers in northern Ohio, and C. H. Smith, Landon, Bailey, Sweet, Lewis, and Burdette had been soldiers in the Civil War. All of them had been thrown together with men under circumstances that had stripped them and the life about them of all the veneer of convention and class distinction.