In Laramie, Wyoming, Bill Nye produced humorous sketches for the Boomerang, a publication he had founded and named it honor of his pet mule. In Little Rock, Arkansas, Opie Read penned a column of backcountry sketches, "Arkansaw Traveler," read by approximately 85,000 subscribers. In Iowa, Robert J. Burdette relied on a whimsical style and a storehouse of puns to hold the audience for his "Hawk Eye-tems" column in the Burlington Hawkeye. In Colorado, Eugene Field, in preparation for greater audiences, delighted readers of the Denver Tribune with his "Nonpareil Column" and his "Old Gossip" items. And in Auatin, Texas, John Armoy Knox and his partner, Alexander Edwin Sweet (1841-1901), refined puns and sharpened their wit for Texas Siftings, a paper which printed some local news and conducted some crusades but appealed to its readers primarily because of its humor. Like Nye, Read, Burdette, and Filed, Knox and Sweet gave...