page 425 note 1 The Yankee first appears in the annals of formai litereture as a comic character in Royall Tyler's play, The Contrast (1787). Richard M. Dorson finds at least eleven examples of stock Yankee characters in American plays before Irvings Sketch Book. Since all these stage Yankees conform to a single type rather than exhibit individual characteristics, Dorson concludes that “it is more probable that a permanent Yankee folk type existed apart from [Tyler's] dramatic imagination and was adopted, and not created, by the playwrights.” In 1825 the first actor to be a professional Yankee performer appears; “a more convincing argument for the existence of a Yankee folk hero could scarcely be ad-duced than this attempted reproduction of the mythical Yankee by flash and blood repre-sentatives” (“The Yankee an the Stage,” NEQ, XIII [Sept 19401, 467-495, esp. pp. 468, n. 3; 472, n. 23; 480, n. 48; 480-482). Elsewhere than on the stage the schoolmaster evolved early as a Yankee type (see G L. Kittredge, The Old Farmer and His Almanac, Cambridge, 1904, pp. 216-233). In the early plays the Yankee is characterised by his rusticity, boastful-ness, inquisitiveness, independence, and the playing off of these characteristics against the mores of a more highly polished society (Dorson, pp. 468-472). Irving's Ichabod develops this early folk type in the direction of the succeeding popular literature, such as Hali-burton's Sam Slick. When the Yankee meets the frontiersman Instead of English fops or New York dandies, his role is reversed and he now becomes the representative of culture facing the unfettered natural man of the frontier.
The backwoodsman took over the early Yankee's boastfulness and independence, and added infusions of energy reflecting his physical prowess and the psychological stresses of living in a hostile wilderness. (See Constance Rourke, American Humor, New York, 1931, pp. 33-76.) Although the mythologizing of the frontiersman did not gather full momentum until after the war of 1812 (ibid., pp. 35-36), by mid-eighteenth century the pioneers, Indian fighters, and hunters of backwoods New England and New York were being cele-brated locally in oral tradition. Tom Quick, Tun Murphy, Nat Faster, and Nick Stoner were four York Stan frontiersmen, extant between the French and Indian War and the War of 1812, about whom folktale motifs, later found in the stories of Fink Crockett, and other ring-tailed roarers wen told (H.W.Thompson, Body Boots & Britches, Philadelphia, 1939, pp. 48-79). Daniel Boone was more widely known- in 1818 he found amusing a published fable of his own hunting prowess (Dixon Wecter, The Hero in America, Ne YORK, 1941, p. 186). The eye-gouging, ear-tearing fights at which Mike Fink became so adept were already an established tradition with their own barbarous code when Thomas Ashe visited Virginia in 1806 (Travels in America. . . ., London, 1808, I, 225-231); the boasting rhetoric accompanying such fights was common enough for Paulding to have reproduced in Letters from the South (1817) a specimen later imitated in the 1833 Sketches and Eccentricities of Colonel Crockett. (See F. C. Watkins, “James Kirke Paulding's Early Ring-Tailed Roarer,” SFQ, XV [Sept. 1951] 183-187.) The famed frontiersmen of the Jacksonian era combined that several attributes. Irving's Brom Bones, an earlier amalgam of many of these qualities, anticipates the folktale and fiction of the 1830's
But even more important is Irving', anticipation of the conflict between the two re-gional types. Irving reflects the traditional anti-Puritan feeling among the Hudson Valley Dutch, a sentiment soon to be widely shared as New Englanders left home to settle or trade on the frontier.
