I sing the full version, pretty much straight from Old Put. Since most people in the clubs are well over 40, most did hear/learn some of it in school but the only real thought they have of it is that damned cute doggie wagging its tail.

I usually that while it's certainly a comic song, it's from the days when rubber crutches were considered funny. Nevertheless, it also certainly deals with many of the real tribulations the pioneers faced and/or were concerned about. In its way, the song is dead serious. Then I name some song elements..

You may (or may not) be interested in the random notes I've collected on it.

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Hangtown is along Hangtown Cheek, now part of Placerville, CA on US Route 50, northeast of Sacramento; one of the first places you'd hit in California. Hangtown prostitutes apparently had such a great reputation as the best whores in California that many girls in other areas falsely claimed to be from Hangtown. Nothing new about false advertising.

This well-known comic song mentions pre-marital sex, starvation, cholera, slaughter, privation, drunkenness, public disorderliness, public (partial) nudity, racial slurs, scalping, mortal fear, manslaughter, debility, toxemic seizure, bickering, morbid frustration, despair and discouragement, terror, pain, religious slurs, bigamy, kidnap, vehicular breakdown and crash, possible infanticide, animal abuse & death, alcohol poisoning, jealousy, unfaithfulness, divorce.

First printed in Put's Golden Songster, 1858

"A favorite California immigrant song of the fifties. Carl Sandburg writes: 'It has the stuff of a realistic novel. It is droll and don't -care, bleary and leering, as slippery and lackadaisical as some of the comic characters of Shakespeare.'"
From John Lomax Cowboy Songs and other Frontier Ballads, 1910 ('Brigham' verse from recording by Frank Warner. filename[ SWEETBET)

As to the tune:
Herbert Cazden Haufrecht and Norman Studer Folk Songs of the Catskills, pp 156-158, give a specific date of 1851 for the publication of the sheet music (in England) of "Vilikins" in a musical farce entitled The Wandering Minstrel. George Lyman Kittredge (not a man to be argued with) attributed to the pen of Henry Mayhew (he of the very important London Labor and London Poor).

Cazden notes that the first publication in the United States of the text of "Vilikins and His Dinah" was in the "Bobbin Around Songster" of 1851. Seven years later, he continues, the tune was sufficiently familiar in California for John A. Stone to use it for the air of his "Sweet Betsy from Pike," as printed in "Put's Golden Songster."

A side-note from From Lomax, Folk Songs of North America:

May 3, 1849. Fifteen miles to Bull Creek. The guide pointed out the continuous rise and fall of the track across what are rightly called the billows, or little ridges of the prairie. 'No, it's not high mountains ner great rivers ner hostile Injuns,' says Meek, 'that'll give us most grief. It's the long grind o' doin' every day's work regler an' not let-up fer nobody ner nothin'. Figger it fur yourself; 2,100 miles-four months to do it in between April rains and September snows- 123 days. How much a day and every cussed day?' I saw the point. Seventeen miles a day.

'Yaas,' drawled the scout. 'And every day rain, hail, cholera, breakdowns, lame 'mules, sick cows, washouts, prairie fires, flooded coulees, lost horses, dust storms, alkali water. Seventeen miles every day--or you land in the snow and eat each other like the Donner party done in '46.'

May 13, 1849. Long pull. Here we are beginning to meet people who are turning back, discouraged. They had seen enough of the 'Elephant'. Graves are more frequent these last days. We saw whitening on the plains, bones of animals which had died on the way.

Quote: From '49ers by Archer Butler Hulbert (Little, Brown & Co., Boston, 1931), pp. 16,41.