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Legends and Tall Tales

In general usage the word “legend” implies an exaggerated and colorful account of an event. Legend in this sense differs from historical fact and is indeed disdained by historians. The folklorist attaches a more specific meaning to legend and regards legends with keen interest, for they form one of the staple categories of his subject. To him a legend is a traditional oral narrative regarded as true by its teller and by many members of the society in which it circulates, but containing remarkable or supernatural elements that follow a pattern. The folklorist recognizes these elements as part of the great floating stock of themes and motifs in constant circulation among the peoples of the world. Legends, or Sagen, stand in contrast to fairy tales or Märchen, the German terms brought into wide usage by the Grimm brothers. While the Märchen collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm are well known in English translation as Grimms’ Fairy Tales, the Sagen also collected by the Grimms have never been translated into English. The reason seems to be that Sagen are too local and episodic for the general reader, while the fictional Märchen, with magical adventures and wellconstructed plots, command wider interest.

In the United States, folklorists have paid relatively little attention to collecting or defining the legend. In Japan, for instance, collectors have printed many books of local legends, but not a single book of orally collected American legends has been published. The older works of Charles M. Skinner, Myths and Legends of Our Own Land (1897) and American Myths and Legends (1903), represent the first attempt to report in any systematic way on the regional legends of the United States, but Skinner, a newspaper writer, provided no sources and presented the narratives in a literary style attractive to read but clearly far removed from the original words. Skinner seems to have discovered his most authentic legendary traditions along the Atlantic seaboard in various printed sources, but as he moved into the Midwest and the Far West he depended increasingly on collections of Indian tales, which he called myths. (A myth differs from a legend by being laid in ancient or prehistoric times and dealing with gods or other sacred beings.) More recently, Vance Randolph has published four volumes of Ozark folktales that seem much like legends. They eustomarily begin: “One time there was . . . in contrast to: “Once upon a time . . . which was used for the same plots by an earlier generation of storytellers in the southern Appalachians. There is a world of difference between these two introductions, for the first leads into a world of reality and the second into a world of fantasy. The most adroit rendering of local legendary traditions is The Jonny-Cake Papers of Shepherd Tom Hazard, set in Washington County, Rhode Island, and written in 1880.

Legends deal with persons, places, and events. Because they purport to be historical and factual, they must be associated in the mind of the community with some known individual, geographical landmark, or particular episode. Many or all of the members of a given social group will have heard of the tradition and can recall it in brief or elaborate form. This is indeed one of the main tests of a legend, that it be known to a number of people united by their area of residence or occupation or nationality or faith. These groups keep alive and pass along legends of heroes and badmen, of local visitations from demons and goblins, and of miraculous interpositions in battles and plagues. Printed sources such as town histories and newspaper feature articles often reinforce the spoken tradition. Let us look at these three main kinds of legends.

The personal legend may deal with a nationally famous statesman, an obscure eccentric, a celebrated outlaw, or a high-society wit. It can be divided into the heroic legend recounting the extraordinary feats of a superman, the saint’s legend describing the miraculous cures of a holy man, and the anecdotal legend repeating the clever sayings and odd actions of a comical man.

In the formative years of the United States, pioneer and frontier conditions of living put a premium on the qualities of physical strength and stamina required for clearing the forests and erecting homesteads. Village tales reported remarkable feats of lifting and carrying that verged on the fabulous and incredible. In my Jonathan Draws the Long Bow: New England Popular Tales and Legends, I have brought together some of these strong-man anecdotes. They tell of titans lifting an 800-pound anchor, a 1,600-pound stone, a log thirty-five feet long and nearly a foot square, and barrels of molasses and cider. Once in a while a known incident can be recognized, as in the account of Joe Montferrat of Woonsocket, Rhode Island, credited with raising his plow from the furrow to point a direction to an inquiring passer-by. This feat is also ascribed to Old World folk heroes and to other figures in America, such as farm boys being recruited for college football teams.

Some of these locally renowned strong men achieve a reputation that extends to neighboring communities. As the stories about them accumulate, they take on the character of a whole cycle of legends, comprising a folk biography. This process is observable in the case of Barney Beal of Beal’s Island on the Maine coast, who made his living lobstering and fishing. Barney died in 1899, but all the coast and island folk from Portland to Calais know the name and some of the exploits of Barney and, in 1956, I recorded a number of tales they continue to tell about him. Barney is certainly a real enough person, and I was shown an old tintype of him, standing like an oak alongside his little son, who stood on a chair beside him and reached only to Barney’s waist. In the half century since Barney’s death, caused by overstrain from pulling a fifteen-foot fishing dory over the sea wall, the tales have continued to grow, and some contain international folklore motifs, such as the following taperecorded story of how Barney overawed the bully of Peak’s Island:

Whereas the legend of the strong hero emphasizes his physical prowess, the legend of a saint concentrates on his spiritual power. In the Middle Ages, the peasantry in Europe tended to locate the divine energies of the church in their local saint, to whom they prayed for assistance and to whom they ascribed their miraculous deliverances. Immigrants coming to the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought with them their faith and loyalty to their village saint, and collectors have obtained saints’ legends in profusion from Greek and Italian families now making their permanent home in America. The scene of these legends is the Old Country. They may describe how a Greek town was saved from attack by the Germans when St. Haralampos caused a fog to blanket the town, or how St. Anthony led an Italian girl to a sweetheart when she threw the saint’s image out the window in despair and hit a young man who became enamored of her. But among the Mexicans of Spanish descent living in Texas and New Mexico, the saints’ legends are laid in the New World. The healer of Los Olmos, as Pedro Jaramillo was popularly known throughout south Texas, where he first settled in 1881, effected so many wonderful cures that Mexican families placed pictures and statues of him in their homes beside those of canonized saints. Many stories are told of his cures, which customarily required some action to be performed nine times, such as drinking a bottle of beer for nine consecutive days while taking a bath.

On the frontier, Johnny Appleseed, who was born in Massachusetts in 1774 but spent his mature years planting apple orchards in the Midwest, has taken on the character of an American saint. Himself a Swedenborgian mystic, he is pictured in the guise of a primitive Christian tramping the back country barefoot, wearing a garment made from a coffee sack with a mush pot on his head, accepting the hospitality of frontier families to whom he read his religious tracts. Wild animals and Indians recognized his spiritual nature and allowed him to pass among them unharmed. Yet this conception of Johnny Appleseed seems to bear little relationship to the actual person, who was a rough, hearty fellow married to a Choctaw Indian woman.

The third type of personal legend, the comic anecdote, pervades American life. Anecdotes fasten on eccentric local characters in every country town, drawing their humor from traits of cunning, knavery, indolence, and ignorance exhibited by these odd individuals. The more or less true tales soon become mixed with apocryphal stories. New England is a special breeding ground for legends of eccentrics, due to the longer history of the region and to its settlement from the beginning in compact township units. Some examples may illustrate the main traits of local characters that furnish the humor of the anecdotes.

Stinginess, Meanness. Yankee characters, especially, display a miserly quality. The Yankee’s grief at the death of a loved one is tempered by the fact he has one less mouth to feed. A Maine farmer expressed regret that his wife kicked down so many green apples when she hanged herself on the apple tree.

The family of Joe Swain, who had sent Joe on board a schooner bound for the West Indies with a load of their fowls to sell, crowded to shore when they saw the ship approach. The captain yelled out across the water, “Joe drowned.” Joe’s father called back, “Fowls drowned too?”

Then there was the hired man in Maine who stopped work at noon, saying he had to go to a funeral. “What a shame! Whose?” asked his employer. “My wife’s,” the down-Easter replied.

On his deathbed Hiram requested a piece of ham. His wife refused, saying she planned to serve the ham at his funeral.

A notoriously mean man offered his children a penny if they would go to bed supperless, then sold them nice hot biscuits at breakfast for a penny apiece.

Another miser put a piece of cheese into a glass bottle where his son could see it at dinner. One night he caught the boy rubbing the piece of bread that was his sole repast against the bottle and promptly whipped him, saying, “You can’t eat bread and cheese every night!”

A similar character in Iowa, Mr. Mac, instructed his children to take long steps when wearing new shoes to save shoeleather. He pushed his car when starting it, to save gas, and told his son Willie to take off his glasses when he wasn’t looking at anything, to save wear and tear. In this case the stingy man is verging on the fool.

Stubbornness. Some characters are known for their obdurate refusal to give in on an argument or concede a point, no matter what the cost. Or they may pursue a course of action in spite of all obstacles. Hazard tells in The Jonny-cake Papers how brothers Sylvester and John Hazard fell out and would not speak to each other for ten years. A friend interceded, and Sylvester agreed to speak first. Seeing John on the other side of the street, he yelled out, “When are you going to bring home that iron bar you stole from me, you thief?”

Finally, as Sylvester lay dying, the brothers effected a reconciliation. Sylvester gasped out, “If I recover it’s off.” John concurred, “Yes, I only agreed because I didn’t think you had a chance.”

The Mississippi River overflowed its levees in one of its periodic floods. Two of the flood refugees perched on a housetop surveying the waters below them, on which various household articles floated by. One commented to the other, “Notice how that hat seems to float back and forth in a regular line.” “Oh yes,” replied his companion, “that’s the hired man. He said he was going to mow the yard today come hell or high water.” Here a comic anecdote has merged with a tall tale.

Sometimes two stubborn characters oppose each other. Meeting on a narrow road, two travelers belligerently faced each other, each refusing to move his carriage. One opened a newspaper and began to read. The other asked, “May I read your paper when you’re through?”

In similar fashion, Dan and Dunk took to sea in a boat, quarreled, and divided up their craft. Dan took the wheel, Dunk dropped the anchor, and neither has been seen since.

Ugliness. On the early frontier, the ugly man was a constant figure of fun, since so many frontiersmen were marked and scarred by fever and ague, or eye-gouging, ear-biting brawls. Johnson Jones Hooper, one of the ante-bellum Southern humorists, wrote a sketch of a backwoodsman so ugly that flies would not light on his face; lightning glanced off him; and his wife practiced kissing the cow before she kissed him. Here again the tall-tale element enters into the character anecdote.

A current story tells of the ugly man walking home one night, when he is suddenly accosted by a stranger, who throws him to the ground, plants one knee on his chest, and presses a knife to his throat. The victim begs to know the reason for the assault. His assailant says, “I swore if ever I met a man homelier than myself, I would kill him.” The prostate man peers closely into the face of the other, then sighs, “If I’m homelier than you, kill me.”

The trait of ugliness is a passive attribute of the local character, but it underscores his generally unkempt or grotesque appearance.

Knavery, Rascality. The village eccentric in one role is very much a rogue, given to petty deceptions and cunning tricks. An oft-repeated story relates how the town rascal turned up in the general store, ordered a doughnut, then changed his mind and requested a glass of cider. When the storekeeper asked him to pay for the cider, he said he had exchanged it for the doughnut. Asked to pay for the doughnut, he pointed out that he had not eaten it and walked away, leaving the storekeeper scratching his head.

One widely circulated legendary trick of similar nature is told on village characters around the country who seek to obtain liquor without cash or credit. The scalawag, having filled a gallon jug half full of water, asks the storekeeper to pour two quarts of whisky, rum, or gin into his jug. Then he requests credit, which is denied him, and he is obliged to pour back the two quarts. But he leaves the store with a mixture of water and liquor in his jug.

A vagrant enters a diner and asks if he can have a few potatoes to eat with his cold meat. After he is given them, he asks for a little cold meat to go with his potatoes.

Ignorance, Rusticity. On the other side of the coin, the local character exhibits a childlike naïveté and gullibility that make him the target of tricks and an object of laughter. Ben Hooper in Wisconsin took his first train trip to Chicago. He and his wife bought a bunch of bananas from a train vendor and started to eat them just as the train entered a tunnel. Mrs. Hooper asked Ben how he liked his banana. “I et mine and just went blind,” he told her.

At a funeral Ben substituted for the big-horn player. Suddenly he let out a loud blast during the dirge. When asked why, he said he had played a fly that settled on his music sheet.

Another Wisconsin character, Bluenose Brainerd, was told by his wife to lose their meddlesome cat. He took the cat such a distance into the woods that he himself became lost and had to follow the cat home.

One time Bluenose went into town and had a number of drinks with the boys. Two wags reversed the large rear and small front wheels on his carriage while he was inside the tavern. On returning home he explained his tardiness to his wife by saying that he had had to drive uphill all the way.

A Massachusetts rustic bought a salmon priced at one dollar a pound and put it in his ice chest, waiting till the price went down to twenty-five cents a pound before eating it.

Pat Casey in Colorado was asked to contribute to the purchase of a chandelier for a new Catholic church. “Sure,” he agreed. “But, begorry, I wonder who you can get up here that can play it after ye git it.”

Pat was also confused by the suggestion that the town council buy half a dozen gondolas. “Why not buy one male and one female?” he asked.

Clever Retorts. The tart sayings and smart rejoinders of local characters deflating the pompous and self-righteous pass into oral legend. A summer visitor points knowingly to a tree in the orchard and tells the native, “You won’t get a peck of apples from that tree.” The Yankee replies drily, “Y’r right, it’s ash.”

A character in Maine known as “Uncle Daniel” Decker was asked by a self-important summer renter how he kept the squirrels from eating his corn. “I have no outside rows,” he explained.

Then there is the classic story of the native in the back country accosted by a city visitor who has lost his way. The traveler is unable to elicit any information from the rustic as to where the road leads or how far it is to the next town. All the yokel says is, “I don’t know.” Finally the exasperated traveler asks, “What do you know?” “Well, I know I ain’t lost,” the answer comes back.

A thief in Rhode Island was heard to complain, “There is a great deal stole around here on my credit.”

Dying Obadiah remained the skinflint Yankee to the end. Told his coffin was too short, he commented, “Oh, I can scrooch up a little.”

Degeneracy. In folklore as in real life, the village character frequently is unsound in mind and body, and so the object of sometimes cruel humor. One tale reported in Illinois, Maine, and Canada describes a misshapen and dull-witted fellow, four feet tall and nearly as wide, whose wife yoked him to the family steer to provide a second beast of burden to draw the plow. The steer broke and ran away with the wife chasing after him and whipping both ox and man. The husband called out, “God dammit, don’t hit me. I’ll stand.”

A character in Ohio known as Temporary Thad lived alone in an unheated shack and used to beg for old newspapers, although he couldn’t read. He explained that by burning the newspapers in his sheet-iron stove he could get enough “temporary heat” to change his clothes.

Laziness. A trait both regrettable and yet somehow endearing that leads to anecdotes is the shameless laziness and sloth of the local ne’er-do-well. Lazy Nathan, a Vermont character, hired a man to snore for him. A delegation called him as he was lying in his hammock to award him prize money as the laziest man in town. He asked them to roll him over and stuff the bills in his back pocket. Nathan said he was sorry he had missed seeing the sheriff’s funeral that had passed by his house, but he had been facing the wrong way in his hammock.

One of the best-known American anecdotes concerns the starving man who was offered popcorn. “Is it shelled?” he asks.

Similarly, up in Maine Ab Yancey and his seven strapping sons borrow cordwood from a neighbor, then ask him to chop it for them.

Hazard recalled a Rhode Island lazy man who, told by his doctor that he must exercise, sat in his garden in his rocking chair pulling up weeds with fire tongs.

Then there was shiftless Ezra, who decided to raise hogs because they can mostly raise themselves and Cynthy could fetch the swill.

Absent-mindedness. The quality of absent-mindedness, like that of ugliness, seems to have received more attention from nineteenth-century humorists than from those of the present time. Long sequences of absent-minded actions appear in pre-Civil War newspapers and comic almanacs. We hear of Bill Jones, who placed the bucket alongside the well and lowered himself down and was drowned.

In our own day, the college professor rather than the village crank has become the symbol of absent-mindedness. Classic anecdotes, told of several professors at different universities, including the Harvard professor of transportation, has the preoccupied pedant drive away from the gas station leaving his wife in the rest room, or taking a train back from the city where he has attended a conference, forgetting that he has driven there.

General Eccentricity. The foregoing traits by no means cover every example of odd behavior, thus the broader term, “eccentricity,” is needed to account for all cases. First and foremost the character is eccentric and his legend is built upon his deviations from normal and accepted conduct. He may be an inventor of useless contraptions, such as the Upper Michigan genius who invented a crooked shade, a door that would not open, and a bottle that could not be refilled. Or he can be a persuasive entrepreneur like the Wild Rice King of Grand Rapids, Minnesota, who sold carloads of wildrice seeds to the state of New Jersey. When they did not grow, he sold the state half a carload of mud. According to legend, the Premier of Japan wrote him to come over and teach wild-rice culture to the Japanese. Or the character may be the victim of a lifelong obsession, such as the Old Darn Man of Connecticut, who wandered the roads searching for his bride in his tattered wedding suit, or Thunder River Frank of Wisconsin, who spent seven years digging for gold revealed to him by the Divinity in a vision, and another long stretch building an ark in anticipation of a second flood.

All kinds of anecdotal legends were inspired by Uncle Boney Ridley of Macon County, North Carolina. Such stories were known as “Boneys” and they portrayed his comical mishaps and naïve mistakes. Going to the post office, he inquires for mail. “What is your name?” the postmaster asks him. “Why, you durned old fool, you, if I’ve got any mail, I reckon my name would be on it, wouldn’t it?” sputtered Uncle Boney.

Another time a friend saw Boney at midnight leaning against a brick building writing a letter to himself, and asked him what he was writing. “How do you think I would know?” responded Boney. “I won’t get it till the mail comes tomorrow.”

Once Boney borrowed a quarter from his sister to get a drink in town. On his way he stumbled and dropped it, but he continued to Franklin and scratched around under the one street light there, looking for the coin. The hotel owner standing by asked Boney why he didn’t look on the hill where he had lost the quarter. “It’s dark up there,” said Boney, “and my eyes are failing, so I better look where there is a light.”

After a drinking party one night, Boney and his friend Dr. Snipe McCloud mounted the same horse. Boney fell off and remarked, “Shnipe, if I ain’t the worsh mishtaken I ever wuz, I believe I heard something drap!” He remounted backward, bumped against Snipe, felt for the bridle, and said, “Shnipe, if I ain’t the worsh mishtaken I ever wuz, it wuz this horse’s head that I heard drap, for I shore can’t find it on this end! “

On his deathbed Boney felt remorse and asked his wife Polly to pray for him. She knelt down and intoned. “O Lord, please have mercy on my poor old drunken husband.” Boney remonstrated, “Oh, damn it, Polly, don’t tell Him I’m drunk; tell Him I’m sick.”

Place legends are connected with a locality rather than with a person. The story behind a haunted house or other haunted spot is such a legend, and when Cotton Mather wrote his Magnalia Christi Americana in 1702 he was able already to record well-established traditions of New England houses afflicted with spectral disturbances. Enticing accounts of buried treasure, sometimes left by Captain Kidd, along with the corpse of a murdered Negro slave whose spirit would guard the treasure, abound on the New England coast, while in the Southwest fabulous reports of lost mines keep alluring prospectors. These traditions, too, belong with place legends. Throughout many states one hears of a cliff or a mountainside known as Lovers’ Leap from which two distraught Indian lovers, prevented from marrying by their tribal allegiances, jump to their doom. These Lovers’ Leaps belong to a class of pseudo-legends, based on the white man’s poetic misconception of the “noble savage” and promoted by Chambers of Commerce to titillate tourists.

Sometimes the name given a locality memorializes and also renews a tradition. Or a picturesque name may lead to apocryphal folk etymologies. One explanation for the naming of Gnawbone in Indiana is the poverty of the inhabitants, one of whom was seen by a passer-by to be gnawing a discarded bone for his supper. But a more prosaic version says simply that Gnawbone is a corruption of the French Narbonne, whence some of the settlers came. An example of a genuine folk tradition preserved in a place name can be seen in the legend of Yoho Cove, Maine. Here is the story of Yoho Cove as told by a retired lobsterman, Curt Morse, living on a country road near the coast:

Folklorists know that this is a floating legend, because they have found closely similar traditions of a wild man mating with a local woman in Kentucky, Canada, and Persia.

Legends of events do of course involve persons and places, but their interest focuses on an action or a deed that excites the community. Such legends have not been well collected in the United States, because they fall between history and folklore, but the dramatic settlement and rise in power of the American people within a short three centuries has created a host of local historical legends.

The lynching of the McDonald boys in 1881 in Menominee, a town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula on the Wisconsin border, is a historical event that rapidly grew into legend. Menominee was then a rough sawmill settlement where pioneer conditions still prevailed. A feud had flared between Billy Kittson and the McDonalds that ended, after a train of ugly incidents (described in my Bloodstoppers and Bearwalkers), in the fatal stabbing of Billy. Two McDonaids were jailed. A group of irate townspeople took the law into their own hands, entered the jail, and seized the accused pair whom they mauled and hanged. No trial was held, but the story spread that all the ringleaders would die with their boots on. In the Catholie version, a priest had uttered this prophecy as lynchers careened down the main street with their victims.

That a lynching took place is fact. The additions that produced a legend lie in the curse of retribution—a universal motif in folklore; the ballad that commemorated the event; and the tales of the mysterious deaths that befell the lynchers. One was burned to death in his lumber yard, one tipped over in a boat and drowned, one was bitten by a rattlesnake, one was cut in two by a saw. Even those who lived longest and swore they would beat the curse died with their boots on. But the crowning proof of the presence of legend appears in a parallel event reported as taking place in Gouger’s Neck, in northern California, in 1901. Bizarre deaths overtook a group of men who broke into a jail and lynched a family of half-breed ruffians. According to the townspeople, “Hell overtook ‘em, every one of ‘em.” The folk imagination has fitted episodes into a mythic pattern.

A number of legends of supposedly actual happenings circulate in modern society—in fact, the coming of the automobile has given legend new wings. Ubiquitous urban legends deal with the ghostly hitchhiker, the maiden given a ride by a passing motorist who finds her gone when he reaches her destination, and learns from a photograph that she had died some years before; the stolen grandmother, who died while traveling with her daughter and son-in-law, and whose corpse, strapped to the roof of their car, vanished while they were in a restaurant; and the death car, offered for sale at fifty dollars because the death smell of its former owner, who had committed suicide or had been accidentally killed inside it, could not be removed. In spite of the factual reports of these cases, no one has personally seen the hitchhiking damsel, or the deceased grandmother, or the ill-smelling car. The stories are told at second-hand.

A further word should be said about the categories of American legends. They need to be considered from two points of view: that of their themes and that of their sources. We can distinguish between folk legends, popular legends, and literary legends according to whether they are known chiefly through oral tradition, through a mixture of oral and printed sources, or chiefly through print and other mass media. Barney Beal can be called a hero of folk legend because the tales told about him are distributed chiefly by word of mouth. Mike Fink in the early nineteenth century was a hero of popular legend who benefited from campfire yarns and from stories in newspapers, almanacs, and giftbook annuals relating his feats as a brawling Mississippi keelboatman. Johnny Appleseed is today a hero of literary legend, known to the public through the poems of Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay, the Walt Disney film, stories of his life written for children, countless newspaper feature articles, and a United States postage stamp. But no folk groups tell legends about Johnny Appleseed today.

It should be noted that the nature of the folk hero, whether historical or mythical, has no bearing on his legend, so long as the folk believe he exists.

Already in our glance at anecdotal legends we have seen tall-tale elements appearing. Barney Beal is well on his way to becoming a hero of humorous exaggeration, and some local characters are credited with impossible performances. Still the legend and the tall tale belong to different realms, for the legend, however remarkable and fantastic, is meant to be believed, and the tall tale, however specific and solemn in presentation, is intended as a deception.

The tall tale grew naturally out of the travelers’ tales that flourished in the seventeenth century when curious explorers visited the Americas and the Far East. In their writings for the home market, the travelers intended to convey the truth, but they also wished to satisfy the thirst of their readers for marvels, in the vein introduced by Marco Polo three centuries earlier. Then, too, the travelers had truly beheld strange savages and beasts and plants and landscapes. Early chroniclers of the American colonies described a horn snake which struck a locust tree with its venomous tail and caused it to wither within eight hours; bears who slept during the whole winter, sucking their paws for nourishment; a tulip or poplar tree so large that a settler lived inside one with his house and furniture; an oyster as big as a ship’s cabin; a whirlpool at the mouth of the Mississippi that swallowed up every craft on the river and even the river itself.

These and similar wonders were written down as true travelers’ tales in colonial times, but by the nineteenth century these marvels are being told as tongue-in-cheek tall tales. A jestbook of 1808 contains a piece called “The Diverting Club” which describes a liars’ contest, the institution that has stimulated the competitive telling of unlikely stories. One raconteur related the wondrous incident of the Split Dog, which ran into a sapling and cut himself in two, whereupon the owner patched him together again, but in his haste placed two legs up and two down. Thereafter the dog proved a tireless hunter, for when weary on the first set of legs he flipped over onto the other two. This has proved one of the most popular American windies.

The most celebrated of all made its first appearance in print in the United States in The Farmer’s Almanack for 1809. It was titled a “Wonderful Story related by George Howell, a mighty Hunter, and known in that part of the country where he lived by the name of the Vermont Nimrod.” Howell reported how he had with one lucky shot brought down a deer, a sturgeon, a rabbit, three partridges, and a woodcock, while honey was oozing out of the hole in the tree where the bullet had lodged. This feat would be duplicated many times throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and we can trace the tale through printed sources up to the field collections of recent times. It is an international folktale, identified by the number 1890, The Wonderful Hunt in Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson’s The Types of the Folktale, but particularly cherished by American sportsmen and backwoodsmen.

The free-and-easy masculine society of the frontier and the back country relished tall tales of hunting, fishing, changeable weather, fast-growing crops, mythical animals, and the reversal of natural laws. Before the Civil War the daily and weekly press often printed tall tales and humorous anecdotes, and a type of journalistic fiction, customarily referred to as the humor of the Old Southwest, drew themes and characters from this folk humor. In the figure of Davy Crockett, born on the Tennessee frontier in 1786, elected to Congress in 1827, and killed at the Alamo in 1836 defending the mission fort against the Mexicans, the currents of tall-tale humor and anecdotal legend mingled and produced a comic legendary hero. Davy was both a storyteller and a subject of stories; he was both an eccentric character and a superman. In these respects he differed from other personalities in American folklore, who tend to be either the teller of tall tales or the subject of local anecdotes. On a field trip to Maine in 1942 I collected a number of tall tales, including “The Wonderful Hunt,” from Slick MacQuoid, who at one point took me to see the town character, old John Soule, a wisp of a man. Slick told windies about Old John, saying he was so light he always carried a rake on his shoulder to keep from floating off the earth, and that once when Old John was shingling his roof, he sailed twenty feet into the air and Slick had to lasso him to bring him down. But Old John himself told no stories.

The comic legend of Crockett is known to us through a series of humorous almanacs that entertained readers from 1835 to 1856. There is good evidence that these almanac tall tales did derive from oral stories told in barrooms, general stores, hotel lobbies, and other meeting places. In the case of such twentieth century tall-tale heroes as Paul Bunyan, the giant lumberjack of the north woods, and Pecos Bill, the giant cowboy of the Southwest, the evidence points to only a slender thread of oral folk legend underneath the literary and mass-culture adornments. Lumberjacks tell very few yarns about Paul Bunyan and cowboys very few about Pecos Bill. The incentive to write about these whimsical titans has come from authors sensing a market—mainly a children’s market—for fiction about made-up American gods and heroes. From the folklore viewpoint, these accounts are neither genuine legends nor genuine tall tales.

A Note on Sources for Anecdotes of Local Characters

Reprinted from Our Living Traditions, edited by Tristram Potter Coffin (New York and London: Basic Books, 1968), pp. 154-69. The Note on Sources is new material.