Cornfed Culture 253 



midwest with amused tolerance. It responded to Eugene Field, 

 and to the folksy quality of James Whitcomb Riley, even 

 though it refused to take them seriously as poets. They were 

 "cornfield writers," as Joel Chandler Harris dubbed himself. 



Riley knew his country. Well he might. Early in his career 

 he was a blackboard artist and sign painter advertising Doctor 

 Townsend's Magic Oil. When the medicine show drove into 

 town, with the horses sleek, the harness polished and the 

 plumes atop each bridle tossing proudly, Riley and the Doc- 

 tor's son Jim were already at work leaving handbills at the 

 homes of the town's leading citizens, enlisting the sympa- 

 thetic interest of the mayor and his lady. At night, when a 

 crowd filled the town square in front of the torchlighted plat- 

 form, the show went on. Farmers gaped at the juggler, laughed 

 at the clown, applauded the sentimental ballads and listened 

 earnestly to the speech made by young Jim Townsend, who 

 was destined later to be a political force in Ohio. Jim's best 

 speech was about the human "hopedunum" and the ills it 

 could fall heir to, and the suffering these ills would cause the 

 hopedunum's unfortunate possessor. What the human hope- 

 dunum needed, the speech made clear, was Doctor Town- 

 send's Magic Oil. And plenty of it, at one dollar the bottle. 

 Without the Magic Oil the hopedunum would grow more 

 and more cantankerous, the individual would grow thinner 

 and thinner here Riley's chalk went to work on the black- 

 board, sketching a cadaverous human being with what ap- 

 peared to be a snake eating its vitals the marks of acute pain 

 would show in the face chalk marks by Riley the hair 

 would fall out (work with the eraser) then the teeth. Finally 

 . . . There was no need to put the end into words. Riley 

 would draw a coffin about the hopedunum victim, and already 

 the crowd would be pushing forward, dollars in hand, to buy 

 bottles of saving oil. 



The west behind Sherwood Anderson, Lindsay, Sandburg, 

 Lewis and Willa Gather is the west of the medicine shows 

 and the Chautauquas, of grange picnics and state corn- 



