ABSTRACT
What General Ethan Allen Hitchcock called the ‘border defects’ of American English would seem to have had an open field once English speakers made their way through the Cumberland Gap beyond the Appalachians and out into the Great Plains, especially if those speakers included Southerners straying from the rigid paths of migration sometimes retrospectively laid out for them. From the puristic point of view to which practically everyone gave at least lip service, there was nothing to impede the spread of ‘bad’ English to the west except the trivial and probably futile factors of the Lyceum, the Chatauqua and the occasional schoolmarm. These agencies would have little effect in constraining the special varieties developing on the frontier. There was, on the other hand, the continuous growth of ‘ungrammatical’ structures and prestigeless vocabulary until there is accuracy to (part of) Mark Twain's contention in the ‘Buck Fanshaw's Funeral’ episode of Roughing It (1872) that ‘each adventurer had brought the slang of his nation or his locality’ with him producing a situation in which ‘Slang was the language of Nevada.’
