The literary career of Charles Fenton Mercer Noland poses unusual problems for both the biographer and the critic. It is difficult to evaluate the artistic achievement of a writer whose entire body of work consists of a series of 250 brief sporting epistles and humorous sketches which appeared under three pseudonyms in William T. Porter's New York Spirit of the Times between 1836 and 1856. It is even more difficult to argue for the literary influence of a figure who saw himself primarily as a newspaper editor, lawyer, politician, breeder of thoroughbreds, and gentleman, and only incidentally as a frontier humorist who never attached his own name to his pieces, and whose works never appeared in book form until almost 100 years after his death. And yet Col. C. F. M. Noland was not only the first contributor of original humorous sketches to the Spirit of the Times; he was for several...