By temperament and training an artist and an essayist, Thomas Bangs Thorpe is recognized as one of the best known of the antebellum humorists of the Old Southwest, a group of writers including, most prominently, George Washington Harris of Tennessee, Johnson Jones Hooper of Alabama, A. B. Longstreet of Georgia, and Henry Clay Lewis of Mississippi and Louisiana. Yet Thorpe's literary reputation is based mainly on two humorous sketches--"Tom Owen, the Bee-Hunter" and "The Big Bear of Arkansas." "Tom Owen, the Bee-Hunter" was perhaps the most popular single frontier humor sketch of the antebellum period, while "The Big Bear of Arkansas" is unquestionably considered to be the most famous Southwestern humor yarn produced by the aforementioned group of writers. Not only did "The Big Bear of Arkansas" provide the title for the most important anthology of native American humor published prior to the Civil War, but it...