Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, March 1924 · page 6 of 71
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #57 — page 6: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page contains two humorous anecdotes about bears, typical of this satirical magazine's lighthearted storytelling style. The first story describes a failed Valentine's Day gift: someone sent a live bear as a romantic gesture, but it escaped near Brainerd, Minnesota, leading to a hunt and the bear becoming steak instead of a cherished pet. The second, more elaborate joke involves a cowboy sneaking a trained black bear onto a train by bribing the porter $20 to hide it in the last berth. The humor relies on the porter's complicity in this deception and the absurdity of smuggling a bear past the conductor. Both stories play on frontier/rural American stereotypes and the comedic collision between civilized spaces (trains, romance) and wild animals. There's no apparent political satire here—just frontier tall tales and vaudeville-style humor typical of 1920s comic magazines.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
4 Captain Billy's Whiz Bang But alas for good intentions—it must have been St. Vitus instead of St. Valentine who presided over the affair; for on the way, the animated missive chawed and clawed his way out of the cage and escaped near Brainerd, Minn. A bear hunt began—and this turned into bear steak because, unlike Davy Crockett's coon, bruin refused to come down when he got treed. Meanwhile I may have to buy a stuffed Teddy-bear for the lady at Pequot. ON my way to Brainerd to supervise distribution of the carcass, the subject got turned to bear. A friend was reminded of a story he had heard about another one of the species. It seems that as a train stopped late one night in a small western town, a cowboy got aboard with a trained black bear. Knowing that the conductor would object to the four-legged passenger, the puncher hunted up the porter and thrust a $20 bill in his hands. “Jest you take dat bear to the end of th’ car and shove him in the last berth,” the porter whispered. The cowboy did as told.