THE PANTHEON FAIRY TALE AND FOLKLORE LIBRARY
African Folktales by Roger D. Abrahams
Afro-American Folktales by Roger D. Abrahams
American Indian Myths and Legends by Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz
Arab Folktales by Inea Bushnaq
Chinese Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Moss Roberts
The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
An Encyclopedia of Fairies by Katharine Briggs
Favorite Folktales from Around the World by Jane Yolen
Folktales from India by A. K. Ramanujan
French Folktales by Henri Pourrat
Gods and Heroes by Gustav Schwab
Irish Folktales by Henry Glassie
Japanese Tales by Royall Tyler
Legends and Tales of the American West by Richard Erdoes
The Norse Myths by Kevin Crossley-Holland
Northern Tales by Howard Norman
Norwegian Folk Tales by Peter Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe
The Old Wives’ Fairy Tale Book by Angela Carter
Russian Fairy Tales by Aleksandr Afanas’ev
Swedish Folktales and Legends by Lone Thygesen Blecher and George Blecher
The Victorian Fairy Tale Book by Michael Patrick Hearn
Copyright © 1991 by Richard Erdoes
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover as Tales from the American Frontier by Pantheon Books in 1991.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Legends and tales of the American West / edited, told, retold, and illustrated by Richard Erdoes. p. cm. Originally published: Tales from the American frontier. c1991. (Pantheon fairy tale and folklore library). eISBN: 978-0-307-80161-6 1. Tales—West (U.S.) 2. Legends—West (U.S.) 3. Frontier and pioneer life—West (U.S.)—Folklore. 1. Erdoes, Richard. II. Title. III. Series: Pantheon fairy tale and folklore library.
GR109.T35 1998 398.2’0978—dc21 98-15793
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.: “Thunder Bay” from The Saginaw Paul Bunyan by James Stevens. Copyright 1925, 1947 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., and renewed 1953 by James Stevens. “Good for Our Assets” from Saloons of the Old West by Richard Erdoes. Copyright © 1979 by Richard Erdoes. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
American Folklore Society: “The Two Witches” from “A New Mexico Village” by Helen Zunser, from Journal of American Folklore 48:188, 1935. Reprinted by permission. Not for further reproduction.
The Richmond Organization: Excerpts from Billy the Kid collected, adapted, and arranged by John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax. TRO - copyright © 1938 (renewed) Ludlow Music, Inc., New York, N.Y. Reprinted by permission.
v3.1
To Jean, my favorite storyteller
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
It Ain’t Necessarily So
Foreword
Chapter 1 Ohio Fever
The Devil and Major Stobo
The Cheater Cheated
The Wild Hunt
Dreams
The Skeleton Hand
The Wild Hunter of the Juniata
The Consequences of Not Letting a Man Have His Drink
The Laughing Head
Chapter 2 The Long Hunters
Tarzan Boone
Swallowing a Scalping Knife
That’s John’s Gun!
A Clever Runner
A Damn Good Jump
The Warrior Woman
The Corcondyle Head
Chapter 3 Backwoodsmen
The Irrepressible Backwoodsman and Original Humorist
Grinning the Bark off a Tree
Davy Crockett on the Stump
The Drinks Are on Me, Gentlemen
Gouging the Critter
Jim Bowie and His Big Knife
Won’t You Light, Stranger?
Ohio Poem
Chapter 4 Ring-Tailed Roarers of the Western Waters
A Shooting Match
Did Such a Helliferocious Man Ever Live?
Like Father, Like Daughter
She Fought Her Weight in She-B’ars
He Crowed and Flapped His Wings
A Fight Between Keelboatmen Averted
Stranger, Is This a Free Fight?
The Screaming Head
Stopping Drinking for Good
Chapter 5 Mountain Men
Little Big Man
Kit Carson and the Grizzlies
Run for Your Life, White Man!
Old Solitaire
Pegleg Smith and Headless Harry
Mind the Time We Took Pawnee Topknots?
Lover Boy of the Prairies
Putrefactions
The Injin Killed Me Dead
Heaven According to Old Gabe
Damn Good Shootin’
Uncle Joe the Humorist
Ba’tiste’s Nightmare
Song of the Voyageur
Chapter 6 Timber!
Paul Bunyan and His Little Blue Ox
Paul Bunyan Helps to Build a Railroad
Kidnapped by a Flea
Thunder Bay
Chapter 7 Gold! Gold! Gold!
Tommy-Knockers
It Had a Light Where Its Heart Ought to Have Been
He Ate All the Democrats of Hinsdale County
A Golden-Haired Fellow
Treasures of Various Kinds
The Missing Chest
Chapter 8 Git Along, Little Dogies
The Saga of Pecos Bill
The Taming of Pecos Bill’s Gal Sue
Coyote Makes a Texas Cowboy
The Heart-Shaped Mark
The Skeleton Bride
Western Jack and the Cornstalk
Better Move That Drat Thing!
Being Afoot in Roswell
Outstunk the Skunk
Chapter 9 They Died with Their Boots On
No-Head Joaquín and Three-Fingered Jack
The Headless Horseman of the Mother Lode
El Keed
El Chivato
He Rose from the Grave
A Whale of a Fellow with a Gun
The King of the Pistoleers
A Western Duel
The Nuptials of Dangerous Davis
Killing Off the James Boys
Theme and Variations
The Winchester Ghosts
Chapter 10 Bucking the Tiger
A Hard Head
Indians Can Play Poker
Jim Bowie Takes a Hand
The Curly-Headed Little Boy
Shall We Have a Drop?
Colonel Tubbs Strikes It Rich
Good for Our Entire Assets
The One-Eyed Gambler
Chapter 11 Lady Wildcats of the Plains
Born Before Her Time
How Old Calam Got Her Name
Calamity Jane Meets a Long-Lost Lover
Chapter 12 The Man Who Never Was
Deadwood Dick
Deadwood Dick and the Grizzly
Deadwood Dick to the Rescue
Chapter 13 An’ That’s My Roolin’
The Law West of the Pecos
Ah Ling’s Hommyside
Fining the Deceased
The Hanging of Carlos Robles
Roy Bean’s Pet Bear
Judge Ba
rker, Old Zim, and the One-Eyed Mule
El Cuatro de Julio
A Drink’s Worth of Punishment
Chapter 14 Sky Pilots
Preachin’ One Can Understand
The Parable of the Prodigal Son
Lissen to the Heavenly Poker Player!
Hear What the Great Herd Book Says!
A Funeral Oration
A Black Hills Sermon
Chapter 15 Critters
The Valley of Headless Men
A Loup-Garou, or a Windigo, or Maybe a Carcajou
The Call of the Wild
The Windigo
The Great White Stallion of the West
Until Judgment Day
El Diablo Negro
Snake Yarns
A Rolling Snake Gathers No Moss
The White Snakes
A Pair of Fine Boots
The Young Man Who Wanted to Be Snakebit
The Peg-Leg Cat
Chapter 16 Mostly Lies
Somebody in My Bed
The Weather
It Gets Mighty Cold Around Here
Texican Liars
Chapter 17 Miracles, Saints, and Witches
The Three Lost Daughters
The Two Witches
The Owl Witch
San Isidro and the Angel
A Riddle
The Many-Times-Killed Young Man
The Caveman of the Hermit Peaks
The Miracles of Chimayo
The Miraculous Staircase
The Hitchhiker
Source Notes
Bibliography
About the Author
It Ain’t Necessarily So
Reader beware! This is a book of legends and fairy tales, not a work of cold, factual history. Sagas of the American West differ from those of other countries insofar as they often deal with real, historical personalities made into fairy-tale characters. Some events had hardly occurred when mythmakers were already at work to corriger la vérité, as the French put it, making poetical mountains out of historical molehills.
Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie did not fight to the death at the Alamo, but surrendered and were later butchered. John Colter did not hide himself inside a beaver hut in company with its furry tenants, but under floating driftwood. Wild Bill Hickok, “King of the Pistoleers,” could not shoot straight. Pegleg Pete did not amputate his own leg, but let Bill Sublette do it for him. Calamity Jane did not acquire her name because she rescued a soldier from dire calamity, but because gentlemen, after spending a night with her, were struck by a “venereal calamity.” Deadwood Dick, Paul Bunyan, and Pecos Bill existed only in some writers’ vivid imaginations. All true, but when faced with a choice between sober fact and beguiling poesy, I have chosen poesy every time. Damn the debunkers!
These tales are all well over one hundred years old. They reflect the language, foibles, and prejudices of their time. The settlers who despoiled the Indians of their land called them “fiends,” “heathens,” or “red devils.” They were themselves often considerably more savage than those they called savages. Scalping, after all, was a white man’s invention. And of course, you hate most those whom you have injured and robbed. On the other hand, there was much intermarriage, legal or illegal, between whites and Native Americans, some of the pathfinders and trappers becoming more Indian than the Indians themselves in the process. White America could never make up its mind whether to look upon the Indians as noble savages, unspoiled children of nature—morally superior to their white conquerors—or “fiendish redskins.” The Indians, for their part, had their own choice epithets for the palefaces—“fat-takers,” “hairy fools,” or “evil spidermen,” in their respective languages. We should not forget that white bounty hunters going after human game, “to make room for civilization,” received ten dollars for every scalp from an Indian male and five dollars for those from women and children.
In the Southwest, those called Anglos and Norteamericanos called the Hispanics “greasers.” The locals retaliated by calling the invaders “gringos.” However, it was the Hispanic vaquero who taught the newcomers how to become cowboys, enriching the American language with such words as “lasso,” “rodeo,” “corral,” “remuda,” “bronco,” and innumerable others.
Some of the stories that struck the nineteenth-century frontiersman as funny seem outrageous to us now, yet are an unerasable part of our folklore. The Frontier West was macho country, in which, sometimes, women played a conspicuous part. It was a violent land in which folks went to see a hanging as nowadays they would go to a movie or a county fair. And yet, reading today’s newspapers or watching the news on the idiot box, one might come to the conclusion that the Old West was a comparatively peaceable place. Colorful, raunchy, violent, lyrical, tragic, or funny, these tales are not always—to use a modern term—“politically correct.” Enjoy them in a spirit of innocence.
Richard Erdoes
Foreword
Myths are indications of people’s soul and character. We carry within us the memories of age-old ancestral tales, transmitted by mouth from generation to generation until the arrival of the myth-killing boobtube. In the words of Joseph Campbell, “Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of human life.”
Legends become a nation’s fate. The Odyssey embodies not only the poetry of the ancient Greeks, but also their restless, adventurous nature, which urged them to sail their frail oared crafts from the Black Sea to the Pillars of Hercules and beyond, to the Land of Amber on the Baltic shores.
The Saga of the Nibelungs epitomizes the German’s lust for war—war for its own sake, waged not to win, but to die.
In the stories of Gargantua and Pantagruel shines forth the spirit of France—l’esprit, élan vital, humor, ribaldry, the love of women and the good things in life.
The essence of American legends, particularly of western tales, is exaggeration. Nowhere else in the world can one find boastful grandiloquence like this. It is an exaggeration born of space—tales as big as the continent, stretching from sea to sea, stories evolving from a background of mighty rivers, endless plains, and shining mountains. It is this penchant for exaggeration which, in our own days, gave rise to a John Wayne, a Rambo, or a Batman. In western tales everything is larger than life, blown up out of all proportions as super-trappers fight super-Indians, super-ghosts, and super-bears. Lies are super-lies, as big as the proverbial Ocean of Grass.
Heroic tales rise out of a people on the move, discovering what is unknown, possessing themselves of new, strange lands, leaving history behind, pushing into a barely perceived future. Bragging is elevated into a novel, uniquely American art. Strangers introduce themselves: “I’m a rip-tail roarer! I can whip my weight in wildcats and tackle a grizzly without flinchin’! I was suckled by a she-bear and the click of a six-shooter is music to my ears. I’m from Texas, gentlemen. They call me the Great-Rip-tailed Roarer!”
The answer to this brag might be: “I’m the double-jawed hyena of the West. I got two rows of nipples and holes bored for more. I pull up trees by the roots an’ if a mountin gits in my way, I jest kick her to one side. I’m a rarin’, tearin’ tornado of chain lightning, the idol of all wimmin and bad news to their men. I hail from Missouri, gentlemen. I’m half horse and half alligator!”
Fellows such as these had women to match. A toughened “soiled dove of the prairie” might announce herself: “I’m the human wildcat! I can lick a mountain lion with one hand tied behind my back! My bonnet is a hornets’ nest garnished with bear claws. My dress is all wolfskin. I can scream like a panther and outdance any gal from here to Californy. I have a baked horny toad for breakfast and can take on ten gentlemen in a single hour and leave ’em limp with exhaustion! They call me Deadwood Dolly!”
The legends of the Old World go back to the dawn of history. They are peopled with gods and heroes of Ancient Greece, Egypt, and Babylon. They carry the traces of deeds of Thor, Odin, and Celtic faeries. By contrast, tales of the American West are newborn, a prod
uct of, at most, a measly two hundred years. They deal, therefore, in many cases with real people and real events, with such backwoods characters and mountain men as Mike Fink, Davy Crockett, Paul Bunyan, Kit Carson, or Killbuck. Some of these men became legends in their own lifetime thanks to the fertile imagination of eastern journalists and writers of penny dreadfuls who had Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett kill three Indians with one bullet, subdue ferocious grizzlies with their fists, swing Tarzan-like from vines and branches to save themselves from savage pursuers. A fanciful article in Harper’s Weekly made Wild Bill Hickok, the King of the Pistoleers, into a culture hero overnight. Other writers manufactured out of whole cloth a love affair between him and an outrageously romanticized Calamity Jane, in reality a horse-faced, alcoholic sometime prostitute. In reality, Wild Bill could not hit the side of a barn at five paces according to those who really knew him.
Buffalo Bill was, 90 percent of him, an invention of Nat Buntline’s creative mind. Deadwood Dick never existed except in the pages of a New York city slicker called Ed Wheeler.
David Crockett pretended to be annoyed with the writer who had made him into a living legend, so annoyed that he decided to write his own autobiography. Crockett complained that the author of his spurious “autobiography” “professed to give my narrative (as he often does) in my own language, and then puts in my mouth such language as would disgrace even an outlandish African. He must himself be sensible of the injustice he has done me, and the trick he has played off on the public. I have met with hundreds, if not thousands of people who have almost in every instance expressed the most profound astonishment at finding me in human shape, and with the countenance, appearance, and common feelings of a human being. It is to correct all these false notions, and to do justice to myself, that I have written.” Thus the irrepressible backwoodsman made his own myths, “full of lies as a dog has fleas,” in the opinion of one contemporary.
The men out of whose lives fairy tales were created did indeed exist. Their legends are history turned upside down; for the overwhelming part they are fiction, but with a microscopic dash of fact to give them verisimilitude. Many of these folk heros were less than imposing in real life. Kit Carson was a diminutive fellow weighing 135 pounds with his boots on. Brooklyn-born Billy the Kid was a buck-toothed juvenile delinquent, Calamity Jane ugly as sin. Many of these supermen and superwomen, by modern standards, were not very attractive personalities. One nineteenth-century author wrote, somewhat apologetically: “If it be objected that many of these worthies seem to lack a sufficient respect for the sacredness of human life, their surroundings should be remembered. If they were apparently too ready with the knife or the trigger it was because their own lives were felt to be held cheaply by many about them who were unrestrained by the law.” The writer added piously: “At least we have glorified no gory outlaws, nor have we painted in alluring colors the road to the penitentiary and the scaffold.”