[Granville-Hough] rough and tumble - no holds barred

[Trustees for Granville W. Hough]

For Christmas my children gave me a DVD of the Disney Davy Crockett shows
that I watched about 55 years ago.     What kid living then could ever 
forget them?

At one point Davy is challenged to a fight -
"rough and tumble, no holds barred".
He ultimately succeeds by biting the thumb of his opponent.

This got me wondering - what exactly did that kind of fight entail?
Why was it so common and acceptable?
I found a long but interesting essay on just this topic here:


http://ejmas.com/jmanly/articles/2001/jmanlyart_gorn_0401.htm


There was certainly plenty of mayhem in rural Mississippi long after
Davy Crockett was gone.    
The invention of small revolvers changed the game, though, and by 
the time my father was growing up, violent 
disputes were more likely to be settled
quickly and decisively.
But my father wrote about hearing the story of a knife fight 
at Shiloh Baptist Church involving Wild Bill Sullivan - 

 Wild Bill had his stomach slit open,
 and his intestines were spilling out. He asked the ladies of the
 congregation if anyone had a needle and thread. Someone produced the
 necessary items and Bill proceeded to push his intestines back in. He
 then sewed up his stomach, took a drink of whiskey, then climbed on a
 nearby tree stump and crowed like a rooster.

His victim did not fare as well.
True or not, that's the sort of story the frontiersmen liked to tell about
themselves.