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. BALDWIN, JOSEPH G. _The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi_, 1853. BLAIR, WALTER. _Horse Sense in American Humor from Benjamin Franklin to Ogden Nash_, 1942. OP. _Native American Humor_, 1937. OP. _Tall Tale America_, Coward-McCann, New York, 1944. Orderly analyses with many concrete examples. With Franklin J. Meine as co-author, _Mike Fink, King of Mississippi River Keelboatmen_, 1933. Biography of a folk type against pioneer and frontier background. OP. BOATRIGHT, MODY C. _Folk Laughter on the American Frontier_. See under "Interpreters." CLARK, THOMAS D. _The Rampaging Frontier_, 1939. OP. Historical picturization and analysis, fortified by incidents and tales of "Varmints," "Liars," "Quarter Horses," "Fiddlin'," "Foolin' with the Gals," etc. CROCKETT, DAVID. _Autobiography_. Reprinted many times. Scribner's edition in the "Modern Students' Library" includes _Colonel Crockett's Exploits and Adventures in_ _Texas_. Crockett set the backwoods type. See treatment of him in Parrington's _Main Currents in American Thought_. Richard M. Dorson's _Davy Crockett, American Comic Legend_, 1939, is a summation of the Crockett tradition.