Bull Rides Described by “Scroggins”, G. W. Harris, and Mark Twain

Abstract

In a regent artigle¹ i cited “sicily burns’s wedding” in Sut Lovingood’s Yarns by George Washington Harris as the source of Mark Twain’s stories of the whipping-boy’s bull ride, originally intended for The Prince and the Pauper, and Uncle Laxart’s bull ride in Joan of Arc. Professor Walter Blair of the University of Chicago—to whom I had sent a copy of my article has called my attention to another story of a bull ride which may have been known by Twain. It is “Deacon Smith’s Bull, or Mike Fink in a Tight Place,” by “Scroggins”. It appeared in the Milton (Pa.) Miltonian in 1851 and was reprinted in the Spirit of the Times and in the Mississippi Palladium in the same year, as well as in T. C. Halliburton’s anthology, Traits of American Humour, by Native Authors (3 vols.) in 1852.²