building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

non‐existent places, such as rivers full of gold or rich, flourishing towns. In his
description of the birth of the West and its link with American humour, Marcus
Cunliffe comments on some of these curious episodes:
The element of fraud, indeed, permeated American life and was a
conspicuous element in American humour, from the Yankee pedlar with
his wooden nutmegs to Bret Harte’s poem of the Heathen Chinese who
had twenty‐four jacks stuffed in his sleeves […] The ugliness of fraud was
made into a joke, and then even into a delight in deception. Humour
softened a swindle as moonlight beautified the shapeless streets of the
Western town. If everyone was something of a showman, nobody
ultimately was victimized […] this was one more of the hilarious
incongruities of America. Who could help but laugh at them: at the nonexistent
towns, for instance, advertised with pictures that portrayed the
long‐established communities? Laurence Oliphant visited one in
Wisconsin: . Or
who could resist the comedy of American names (except Matthew
Arnold, whom they offended)? Abraham Lincoln, for instance, when on
his way to the Black Hawk War (which he burlesqued in Congress)
paddled in a canoe from Pekin to Havana –and all in the state of Illinois.
Western humour was bound to reflect these incongruities 184 .
But if the kingdom of rafts was soon to be replaced by that of the steamboats, the
latter was no less ephemeral, although longer lasting. A few decades after the Civil
War, the steamboat left the river landscape. The frontier was directed way beyond
the horizon of navigable waters and moved on land along the railroad tracks. In fact,
the waterways and the steamboats underwent a crisis for two reasons. The
turnpikes improved over time and thus became a favourite, and the train was able
to count on a close network of internal connections from the 1860s onwards [Figure
184 CUNLIFFE, Marcus, The Literature of the United States, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1969, p.
164‐165 (Italian translation Storia della letteratura americana, Turin, Einaudi, 1970, pp. 171‐172)
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