Prospector Pronouns: Them / Thar

The return of an icon.

I saw an an for Xfinity wi-fi that featured a gaggle of grizzled prospectors, and while it did not convince me to switch providers, I was surprised to see crotchety gold-mad hermit archetypes in a modern ad. Can’t quite say when - or if - the grizzled prospector faded from the popular culture, but it was definitely in decline. Let us reacquaint ourselves with the basics, as we children knew them long ago.

Spry, bowlegged, prone to quick excited movements

Clothing consists of overalls and a plaid shirt, a ratty frayed hat, no shoes - a rural Appalachian stereotype cliche beamed into the desert, but filled with a terrible singularity of purpose, a hillbilly on Adderall.

Prone to slapping his hat against his thigh while declaring things like “Jiminy, ” “By Cracky” or, on occasion, “tarnation,” a vast and undefined area into which things are put in a manner that does not clear up their function or identity - i.e., what in tarnation

Given to unprompted declarations of the existence of gold in the hills - not a specific hill, but the set of hills known as “them,” with the directional indicator of “thar.” E.g. “There is a glittering, valuable, noble metal with the atomic number of 79 in them thar hills.” It is unclear why the grizzled prospector would constantly say such a thing, as it would alert others to the existence of the gold and create competition. A wily prospector would say “T’aint none in them hills thar,” or “Them thar hills is played out, son” or “T’warn’t nuthin’ thar in them hills” or other obfuscating misdirections. But the GP is excitable and his tongue lacks governance, so he is prone to spreading his good fortune to all who will listen.

He has a long-suffering pack mule to which he ascribed a complex personality, even though the creature is profoundly stupid and lost in a distracted reverie.

If he knows one song, it is “Oh Susanna,” which involved “going to California with a banjo my knee,” which would seem to impede progress; if it was strapped lengthwise, it would require a stiff-legged gait, and if attached perpendicular to the limb, the neck would constantly be banging into things - cacti, hitching posts, etc.

When the GP did make a gold strike, which consisted of collecting rocks and washing them in a nearby stream, he would declare that he was rich. The gold would be placed in a white bag cinched with a yellow cord:

But there were two outcomes: it would either be “Fool’s Gold,” aka pyrite, which looked like gold but was not as valuable as gold because it wasn’t gold, in which case the GP would say “consarn it,” or he would spend it on a bender - drinking from a jug of corn likker with three Xs - and he would be right back where he started. And that was okay: prospectin’ was in his blood, often literally so due to the chemicals used to separate the gold from the stone, and it was the thrill of the search he really loved.

We knew all this from repeated archetype exposure over the years, and believed the GP to exist, unchanged, from 1865 to 1910. The Cowboy Era. All the other cliches - the town drunk, the barmaid hooker with a heart of gold (or pyrite), the bartender wearing bicep garters and polishing a glass, the piano-player trained to stop immediately when Johnny Sichsgunn bodies the swinging doors of the bar (which will continue to swing, but in an irregular, unmatched fashion) - they’re all buried so deep in the American psyche they can be resurrected in a trice. Even if most young folk today only know them from scenes that parodied the parodies of the source material, they’re ready to spring out at a moment’s notice and sell you wifi.

“Thar’s 5GB per second download speeds in them thar fiber-optic cables” doesn’t quite have the same romantic frontier spirit, though.