Wondrous Times on the Frontier was published by August House in 1991. The book is a departure from Brown’s typical narrative history: instead of a sustained story, it assembles hundreds of humorous anecdotes, tall tales, jokes, satires, and comic episodes from the American frontier, organized thematically rather than chronologically.
Brown drew the material from frontier newspapers (which published humor alongside news and opinion as a matter of editorial policy), personal diaries, letters home, memoirs, and oral history collections. The effect is to recover an entire dimension of frontier life that serious histories typically ignore: the comic sensibility of communities living under extreme conditions.
The humor ranges from gentle self-deprecation to savage satire: jokes about bad food, worse weather, dangerous wildlife, incompetent politicians, confidence men, and the eternal gap between Eastern expectations and Western reality. There are tall tales in the tradition of Davy Crockett and Mike Fink, newspaper hoaxes that fooled readers for decades, and genuine wit from people whose verbal creativity was their primary entertainment.
Brown’s implicit argument is that the comic imagination is itself a survival strategy — that people who can laugh at their circumstances are better equipped to endure them. The book serves as a corrective to histories (including Brown’s own) that reduce frontier life to a series of tragedies and injustices.
Collecting Wondrous Times on the Frontier
First edition (August House, Little Rock, 1991): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $10–$25
- Signed: $30–$60