Did the Devil Make Me Do It?

Manifest Destiny, westward expansion and the California gold rush were fertile topics for humorists and satirists of the 1840s and 1850s. “A man without a sense of humor is occasionally to be respected, often to be feared and nearly always to be avoided.” —Anonymous True West Executive Editor and award-winning humorist and illustrator Bob Boze Bell says, “One thing that gets softened in the retelling of the Wild West is just how rough the humor was. But when you think about it, it