7 /

How Shall We Rewrite Charles M. Skinner Today?

Consideration of American folk legends should begin with the clever volumes that Charles M. Skinner, once a correspondent on the Brooklyn Eagle, published at the turn of the present century. Folklorists have paid him no heed, perhaps because we have done so little with the legend and, too, because he was so frankly the popularizer. Still we must admire the scope of his enterprise that led him to set forth 266 narratives in regional clusters in the two volumes of Myths and Legends of Our Chvn Land in 1896 and to follow these with 171 more, traversing the same terrain in the two volumes of American Myths and Legends in 1903. Between these he sandwiched in an 1899 swatch of 78 Caribbean and Pacific traditions, hard upon the imperialistic gains accruing from the SpanishAmerican War, in Myths and Legends of Our New Possessions & Protectorate. We can admire also his limpid Hawthornesque prose, evoking tinted landscapes and dark deeds in little masterpieces of mood painting. Meanwhile, we are vastly irritated by the suppression of all sources and almost all clues to sources. Yet Skinner knew his public and gave them what they wanted: pretty tales cloaking the American hills, coasts, rivers, and prairies with romantic associations culled from a past skimpy by European standards but approaching a respectable three centuries in his day.

Operating by instinct, Skinner did grasp part of the concept of American legend. He understood what we might call “Legends on the Land,” in paraphrase of George R. Stewart’s much later book, Names on the Land. The course of American history, from its colonizing footholds through its westward march to the Pacific, had left in its wake local events remembered in tradition. Regional cultures and the moving frontier thus are acknowledged as regulating elements in legend-making. Not of course that Skinner indulged in any overt theory. But he provided brief prefaces indicating that he had a fair idea what he was up to and felt, if not misgivings, some sense of responsibility. “The bibliography of American legends is slight,” he wrote in 1896, “and these tales have been gathered from sources the most diverse: records, histories, newspapers, magazines, oral narrative—in every case reconstructed.”¹ He adds that he has devoted so much time to the pursuit of these materials that he believes they are reasonably complete. But seven years later he retracts this claim in the preface to a second series, and alludes to “many stories, poems, and essays that have for their subjects these transmitted by unverified histories.”²

From whence these legends? One indication of provenance is geographical; they are linked to places. The first of the four volumes, and the first section of the second volume, deal with the Middle Atlantic and New England states, leaving less than half the total contents for the South, the Central States and Great Lakes, and the Rocky Mountain and Pacific states and territories. The balance shifts in the second series (which is not divided by regional headings, although the tales are presented in the same geographical arrangement), with the Southeast wedging into the first volume, and the second commencing with Mississippi. As he moved West where the pickings were leaner, Skinner had to rely increasingly on Indian tales, and the vignettes cease to represent the coagulating lore of white settlements. Yet even with his overdone Indian narrations he sought out those rooted in the soil. “Many are the legends that account for the presence of Indians on this continent,” he noted, “but few of these traditions have any interest of locality.”³

It is this feeling for locality, for the terrain of the vast, varied American continent, that gives much of the power to Skinner’s editions. He sensed, what folklorists have often commented on, the connection between topography and legendry, and his prize specimens illustrate the close linkage. Thus he introduces “The Walled Herd of Colorado” with one of his deft word pictures.

Here is an arresting natural formation, symbolic of the rugged West, and set in the historical frontier with an allusion to an Indian uprising. The legend then tells of a fleeing Mormon group who with their stolen cattle were stampeded over the cliffs into this sequestered valley, where only the last to fall survived, thanks to the cushion of dead beasts beneath them. A thousand head of cattle supposedly now roam this valley, “Lower Earth” as the Utes called it, secure from bears or mountain lions, and harmed only by an occasional hunter who fires on them wantonly from the cliffs.

In his attachment to place, Skinner necessarily foreswore those kinds of legends not strongly affixed to the soil, particularly those of celebrated persons who did not stay put. So strong was his urge to localize that, coming across “A Travelled Narrative,” as he properly called it, he set it in a crossroads grocery store in Rutland, Vermont, simply to give it a specific home among numerous claimants.⁵ This story stands out as a unique example in Skinner’s repertoire of the antebellum Yankee trickster yarn so popular in the periodical press of the 1830’s, 1840’s, and 1850’s; there is a text in my Jonathan Draws the Long Bow from the Spirit of the Times of January 23, 1841, credited to the New Orleans Picayune,⁶ with the same plot of a Vermont storekeeper who spies a hanger-on filch a pound of butter and pop it under his hat and exacts revenge by seating the fellow close to the stove and detaining him until the butter oozed over his face and clothes. Skinner speaks of the prank as “formerly common in school-readers, in collections of moral tales for youth, and in the miscellany columns of newspapers.” He had, of course, access to hundreds of such jocularities, but the wonder is that he included even one, for Yankee and frontier humor were not his style and furthermore, as he recognized, these new strains of American comedy did not anchor in special localities so much as in regions. In another Vermont legend, from Cavendish, roguishly titled “Yet They Call It Lover’s Leap,”⁷ Skinner does make the connection between local landmark and Yankee understatement. In typical fashion, he describes a sheer, rugged precipice over which fated lovers might well have jumped, but for once it was an unromantic farmer who lost his footing while quarrying rock and was saved from a jellied end by landing on a projecting table of stone directly beneath; all he called up to his companion was, “Waal, I ain’t hurt much, but I’ll be durned if I haven’t lost my jack-knife.” “Ask any good villager thereabout to relate the legend of the place and he will tell you this,” recommends Skinner in a rare reference to oral sources. These examples need stressing because they are so uncharacteristic of the wild, somber, mournful mood that Skinner delights in; all his other Lovers’ Leaps are dead serious.

Accompanying the firm sense of place is an equally definite sense of time. The legends occurred in the receding past, beyond the memory of living man, “for the past is ever more picturesque than the present.”⁸ Colonial and Revolutionary times best suit Skinner. He clearly relishes the Puritan era and the Dutch days of New Netherlands. The Indians always loom large in his pages, both in relation to the white man in the early days of settlement, and in their own historical and mythological traditions. Most of the nineteenth century he eliminates; legends originate in the American Revolution but not, for his readers, in the Civil War. Tales of the Gold Rush and the forty-niners are suppressed in favor of creation myths of the western Indians and an occasional miracle reported by a Catholic priest in New Spain. When he does allude in one or two instances to the Civil War, the scenes are far from the main fields of battle. A longish involved legend, “Spell Tree of the Muskingum,”⁹ tied to Tick Hill in Federal Bottom on the Muskingum River in Ohio, concerns a spectral scare put into the local farmers by a Confederate guerrilla named Jim Crow. “The gallant defense of the Bottom is still recounted at the cross-roads grocery, but it is not included in the official records of the war.”¹⁰ Every once in a while Skinner will bring traditions up to his own time. “The Barge of Defeat”¹¹ deals with a spectral vessel loaded with gigantic dancing Negroes seen on the Rappahannock River in Virginia shortly after the Civil War, prior to a Democratic party meeting at Rappahannock. Next day the Democrats were defeated at the polls, chiefly by the Negro vote, and again in 1880 and 1886 the sight of the ominous vessel preceded a Republican victory. In addition Skinner mentions the appearance of the Virgin in 1889 in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on the occasion of the celebrated Johnstown flood, for the purpose of protecting her image in the local Catholic church.¹² He speaks of a cursed treasure in Columbia City, Oregon, dating from a mutiny in 1841 on a Spanish ship that came to harbor, and continuing through a spiritualist seance to uncover the loot forty years later, until the search was abandoned in March, 1890, when one of the diggers went mad.¹³ Spirits in the air, said by the red men of Tishimongo, Indian Territory, to presage disasters, were seen in May, 1892, by John Willis, a United States marshal hunting horse thieves.¹⁴ These are rare excursions into the nearpresent for Skinner, who by and large holds to his self-denying ordinance that traditions must have weathered a century or more, and acquired an aura of the remote and impalpable.

Even with elements of space and time thus defined, Skinner still possessed some range of choice, but he imposed other limiting factors in determining the subject matter of his legends. They should involve the tragically romantic, the supernaturalistic, and the moralistic, preferably in conjunction. Romantic is here meant literally, as the blighted romance of star-crossed lovers. An endless array of ill-fated swains march across Skinner’s pages: the couples may be Indian, or Spanish, or Indian and white, or Tory and patriot, or English and American, or French and American, or highborn and lowborn. Much of the time a jealous third party seeks to wreak vengeance on his rival. Skinner appears happiest when one lover dies, through foul play or mischance, and the other goes witless and pines to an early death. Where he dug up all his enamored pairs will probably remain an unfathomed mystery. The net effect is to make the path of true love in America appear unbearably tortuous and leading only to a memorial cliff, or cave, or pond where one or both of the tormented duo met their untimely end. He himself comments in one such affair, “As so often happened in Indian history, the return of these lovers was seen by a disappointed rival.”¹⁵ Not that he was unduly sentimental; deriding the excessive sentimentalities of Susannah Rowson’s Charlotte Temple and Chateaubriand’s Atala, he shows no qualms in relating the sadistic punishments inflicted on an adulterer by a grieving husband. In “A Trapper’s Ghastly Revenge,” a hunter and trapper of Coxsackie on the Hudson, Nick Wolsey, returns to his cabin one day to find his babe beheaded and his Indian wife witless. She dies within two days. The trapper requests from the tribe the jealous Indian who has committed the deed, and forces him back to the cabin.

Nick Wolsey left his cabin never to return, but passersby were said to hear the steed crashing through the woods along the Hudson and the Mohawk to the accompaniment of curses and maniacal laughter. This requital seems harsh enough, but Skinner presents a still more ghoulish variation on the theme—and in reading his legends one has a continual sense of déjà vu, or perhaps more accurately déjà lu, as the same episodes recur with different nomenclature. In “Riders of the Desert,” a Spanish trader betrays the trust of Ta-inga-ro (First Falling Thunder) who has been living happily with his wife Zecana (The Bird) in the Colorado foothills. Zecana, bereft of reason, plunges a knife into her bosom. When Ta-in-ga-ro catches up with the Spaniard, he strips him, ties him naked with wooden thongs astride a wooden saddle on a half-trained horse, and then binds Zecana’s corpse to him face to face. Ta-in-ga-ro follows him on his own mount, watching the Spaniard alternately sweat from the sun and bleed from the cords, shiver from cold at night and moan from hunger at day, until he was forced to eat the flesh of The Bird. When the Spaniard at length went mad, Ta-in-ga-ro lashed the horse into the plains, where the ghost riders yet wander.¹⁷ This revolting torture should be counted on the credit side of Skinner’s ledger, showing that he was not wedded simply to the picturesque, the pathetic, the scenic, but could stomach, and perhaps even savor, a brutal legend.

Crowding the unlucky lovers in the legend books are gibbering ghosts. Skinner’s ghosts usually gibber—one of his favorite words —at the scene of a murder or suicide, and they fail to assume the personal and nonmalevolent roles we find in modern collections of ghost stories. It is not the ghost story as such that interests Skinner, but the haunted spot that serves as reminder of a gruesome or macabre happening. Throughout the legends he strives to create an atmosphere of the unearthly, whether he deals with the Great Spirit of the Indian tribes, Indian wizards, colonial witches, or recluse alchemists who make magic, or the fevered visions of ordinary mortals who behold apparitions and hear uncanny sounds. Thunderous reports from the heavens, exploding blue lights, midnight revels of spectral hordes, and shimmering mists that take on human forms continually adorn the legends and engender some suspicion as to how much is tradition and how much is atmosphere. When Skinner has definite supernatural materials to work with, as in his exposition of “Salem and other Witchcraft,”¹⁸ he is particularly effective in conveying the sense of foreboding and awe that clung to hags scattered throughout New England. One surmises that Skinner yearned for the lower mythology and demonology so available in Europe, and he made a few gestures toward vampires, werewolves, and Indian fairies and mermaids, but for the most part he relied on the prevalent if less exotic English ghost, witch, and devil to carry the burden of his supernatural needs. One of his most striking legends recounts the sighting of a phantom train at Marshall Pass, Colorado, twelve thousand feet above the sea, barreling down upon a real enough train.¹⁹ But this is a lone departure from his antique ghosts.

A strong moralistic tone pervades the legends and raises them above the level of the merely picturesque. Pride is humbled, courage rewarded, faith upheld, faithlessness punished. They are in good part cautionary tales whose message is writ clear. The patriot farmer’s son who joins the British redcoats and kills his father unwittingly atones for the acts of parricide and treason by trampling his uniform in the dust and spurring his horse off a cliff.²⁰ A fisherman’s son on Cape Cod braves the rolling surf to rescue a stormtossed British ship on Thanksgiving eve of 1778 and leads the hated foe to shore; the captain sups at the father’s table next day in amity.²¹ Fairplay, Colorado, enjoys its name in memory of an incident when Bob Lee, a miner’s son, pointed a gun to shoot his partner, Luke Purdy, who had gotten Bob’s sister in the family way; Bob asked for fair play and a gun of his own, and went on to say that he had struck it rich and meant to do right by Rosie. Now Luke asks for fair play, and all three lived happily ever after in Fairplay.²² While Skinner gives nothing as hackneyed as the cherry tree legend about Washington, he does offer several pieces portraying the commander-in-chief of the Continental Army in a manly and gentlemanly light. As a young officer with Braddock’s troops, George chased a rascally half-breed from the cabin of the damsel Marion, and tarried under her roof while she nursed away his fever. He promised to return, and did, only to find her cabin in ashes, but he kept until his own death a brown tress folded in a paper marked “Marion, July 11, 1755.”²³ Another maiden, a Tory’s daughter betrothed to an American soldier at Valley Forge, saves Washington’s life when he stays at their dwelling for the night. The Tory stabs his guest as he sleeps, only to discover next morning that it is his daughter, who has deliberately switched bedrooms with the general, whom he has killed. We recall Type 1119, “The Ogre Kills His Own Children,” wherein the bogeyman murders his own offspring with whom the hero has changed beds.²⁴ Even Indian polytheism is condemned. Because the red men honored lesser gods instead of the one Master of Life, signs of heavenly anger ruffled the waters of Lake Initou, Massachusetts, and the game and fish fled. A spirit told Chief Wakima in a vision to pray to the Great Spirit instead of permitting his medicine men to indulge in their follies. As a sign of his goodwill, the Great Spirit sent a giant swan to the lake whose wings covered all the tribe assembled there in boats; when the swan left, an island arose in the lake, since called the Swan.²⁵

These examples could be almost indefinitely expanded, but the point is clear enough that Skinner selected his legends with a view to reinforcing Christian morality and Yankee patriotism.

Sooner or later we must come to the question of Skinner’s sources. If he is to be taken with any degree of seriousness, we need assurance that he has dredged up and not dreamed up these legends, and dealt with them fairly. On this score we can to some extent be set at ease. A number of well-established American folk traditions appear in his pages in versions that, allowing for Skinner’s deft style, convey their story justly. Here are “The New Haven Storm Ship,” sighted in the air by a throng of Puritans in 1648 and reported by John Winthrop and Cotton Mather; “The Windham Frogs,” that notorious business of thirsty frogs who startled the Connecticut villagers from their beds thinking Indians were attacking; “Micah Rood Apples,” whose red centers betray the murder of a peddler in the orchard of farmer Rood in Franklin, Connecticut, in 1693; “General Moulton and the Devil,” commemorating the pact that Jonathan Moulton made with Satan in Hampton, New Hampshire, to sell his soul for all the gold his Sable Majesty could pour down the chimney into Moulton’s boots—whereon the wily Yankee cut off the soles of his boots; “The Leeds Devil,” the monster that rampaged the New Jersey piney woods until it was exorcised by a minister in 1740 for a hundred years, reappearing duly in 1840 and seen as late as 1899. These and other hardy traditions had taken firm root in the American soil, and we can judge pretty well where Skinner plucked them. In my own researches for Jonathan Draws the Long Bow I came across a number of early printings of these and other legendary narratives available to him. For instance, a long lineage of sources lies behind his telling of “Passaconaway’s Ride to Heaven,”²⁶ the wizard chief of the Merrimacs, sometimes identified with the missionary Saint Aspenquid, and credited with many marvels. As early as 1635, the transient colonist William Wood reported in New England’s Prospect the Indian’s belief in “one Passacannawa that he can make the water burn, the rocks move, the trees dance, metamorphize himself into a flaming man,” with other like wonders.²⁷ Two years later Thomas Morton echoes the report in his New-English Canaan. The town histories of Barnstead, Concord, Manchester, and Warren, New Hampshire, and Kennebunkport, Maine, published between 1837 and 1872, referred to the shaman. Whittier wove Passaconaway into his extended poem “The Bridal of Penacook.” For the strange phenomenon of “The Gloucester Leaguers,”²⁸ the spectral force of French and Indians that plagued Cape Ann throughout the 1690’s, Skinner could have had recourse to Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana of 1702, Niles’s “History of the Indian and French Wars,” and the 1860 town history of Gloucester. Among the possible accounts of Moll Pitcher that Skinner could have tapped were stories about the fortune-telling witch in the Avierican Comic Almanac for 1837, in the Granite Monthly for 1879, in the Life, Letters and Wayside Gleanings for the Folks at Home that Mrs. Bathsheba H. Crane published in 1880, and in the town history of Brookline, New Hampshire. Certain prominent landmarks, like the White Mountains of New Hampshire, have continually attracted montane biographers of lore and legends, before and since Skinner’s day, and he would have had no trouble securing his choice sheaf of traditions associated with “The White Mountains,”²⁹ from such a work as John H. Spaulding’s Historical Relics of the White Mountains, published in 1855.

One obvious source to which Skinner sometimes points, and which even he could not readily conceal, is literature. Some literary treatments of what might or might not have been bona fide traditions did undeniably give an impetus to subsequent tradition. He levies upon Hawthorne for colonial legends of the Province House in Boston, the Maypole of Merrymount, and the Gray Champion; upon Longfellow for Evangeline and the courtship of Myles Standish; upon Irving for Rip Van Winkle, the Devil and Tom Walker, and the legend of Sleepy Hollow (titled “The Galloping Hessian”); upon Whittier for the ghost-vessels of the “Palatine” and the Dead Ship of Harpswell, and Skipper Ireson’s Ride; upon Susannah Rowson for Charlotte Temple. Skinner recognizes the potency of literature and the arts in establishing legends in the popular imagination. He begins his series by stating forthrightly, “The story of Rip Van Winkle, told by Irving, dramatized by Boucicault, acted by Jefferson, pictured by Darley, set to music by Bristow, is the best known of American legends.” As to the tradition behind Irving, he does not speculate. In utilizing Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, he does refer to the “alleged foundation” behind the romance in charges of adultery which two of his parishioners leveled against the Reverend Hanserd Knollys of Dover, New Hampshire; and similarly he presents a legend of cursed pirate’s gold supposed to have suggested “The Gold Bug” to Poe.³⁰ One wonders why Skinner did not follow the trail of local-color writers in the South and West leading to local traditions. An incident in the Miami Valley, Ohio, when a soldier fleeing Indians in 1791 hid in a deep hollow oak, there to perish until a cyclone tipped over the tree and revealed the skeleton inside, along with a pitiful diary of eleven days, leads Skinner to remark how the novelist James Payn had used such an episode in Lost Sir Massingberd. Hearing of the skeleton in the tree, Payn complained against “Nature’s acts of plagiarism.”³¹

Reconstructing Skinner’s sources is probably a hopeless and un־ profitable venture, but one comes away with a grudging respect for his legend-books as a source in themselves. Tucked away in a passing reference within his extended account of “Lost Mines” is the name of Packer, the prospector of San Juan County in Colorado supposed to have eaten his comrades during a hard winter, a name revived recently on the national news media when the students of the University of Colorado changed the name of their cafeteria in his honor, or dishonor.³² Mary Richardson in Calvin, Michigan, told me how her father in slavery times belled a buzzard, which then flew in distress from North Carolina to South Carolina; Vance Randolph knows the tradition in the Ozarks, and Ira Ford in Traditional Music of America (1940) speaks of a hoodoo buzzard with a tinkling bell heralding an epidemic of typhoid fever, and he supplies a fiddle tune that simulates the sound of the bell. But Skinner antedates these reports with his own of “The Belled Buzzard” that settied in Roxbury Mills, Maryland, shortly after the Civil War and, spoiled by the feasts from that carnage, would thereafter eat only human flesh; its bell foretold some disaster that would enable the bird to gratify its appetite.³³ The pseudo-Indian Nebraska legend of the salt pillar, so suggestive of the biblical story of Lot and so cleverly unraveled by Louise Pound, has a version, which apparently she missed, in Myths and Legends of Our Own Land.³⁴ For the murdered peddler cycle, Skinner offers, besides the Micah Rood apple, the gruesome tale of “the crab-clawed Zoarites” of upstate New York, who bore the deformities on their hands and feet which their forebears had caused to a hapless peddler; the ghost of a Hebrew peddler dispatched in 1853 near Lebanon, Missouri, which, seven years later, shocked his murderer into suicide; and the haunting of Orleans Cross-roads, Maryland, until the ghost of the peddler slain there was laid by branches thrown on his grave.³⁵ In short, Skinner’s compilations are not to be overlooked when one traces histories of American folk legends.

Still we recognize at the same time how much must have been omitted. He is wanting particularly in the field of the post-Revolutionary historical folk legend. One example that he does include suggests the possibilities. This is “The Escaped Nun,” dealing with the notorious burning of the Ursuline convent in Somerville, Massachusetts, in 1834 by neighbors outraged by rumors of disobedient nuns walled alive, Protestant girls seduced by priests and critics sealed in dark dungeons. When Sister Mary John fled the convent and spread these stories, a mob broke in and set fire to the building. This ugly chapter in what historian Ray Billington has called The Protestant Crusade usually receives passing mention in general American histories, and it belongs squarely in the middle ground between historical fact and fictional folklore where traditional prejudices, bogies, slanders, and horror tales flourish. Skinner recognized the genre, saying “this story of the convent has already become a tradition rather than a history.”³⁶ We would vastly prefer that Skinner had substituted more of these mainstream American legends for his interminable Indian romances and myths.

At the end of both of his two-volume editions, Skinner departs from his strictly geographical scheme to pursue topical themes, still related to the land but crossing state lines. In these, perhaps his most interesting and forward-looking sections, he glances at Buried Treasure, Lost Mines, Snakes and Sea-Serpents, Storied Cliffs and Waters and Trees and Mountains, with special attention to Captain Kidd and the Wandering Jew. “Every Western State has its lost mine,” he observes, “as every Atlantic State has a part of Kidd’s or Blackbeard’s treasure.”³⁷ Commenting on “How Some Places Were Named,” he remarks, in appropriate folkloric vein, that the classical names affixed by scholars to towns and cities have far less appeal than the “Doodletowns that are indigenous to the soil.”³⁸And he allows himself some humorous etymologies of New Jersey towns. “We are entitled to have doubts when we are told that Beatyestown is Irish; that Boilsville was named in commemoration of Sufferin’ Job Hitchins, who stood it as long as he could and then died there; that six of the most ancient settlers named Feebletown for themselves, just before they shuffled off the coil.”³⁹ This rather unexpected light touch is best displayed in the one entry that departs from places, on “Deadheads,” “Crackers,” “Hoodlums,” and “Panhandlers,” although here too he ties their origins to Michigan, Georgia and Florida, and San Francisco. “Hoodlum” is supposed to have originated with rowdies, drifting to California after the Gold Rush, who gained their name from the misspelling of the name of their leader, the bully Muldoon, by a San Francisco newspaper editor, who spelled the name backward, but slipped in an h for an n.⁴⁰ In Mitford Mathews’s A Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles, entries for 1871 and 1881 associate “hoodlums” with San Francisco, although not with Muldoon. Mathews lacks the anecdotal origin Skinner gives for deadhead.

This kind of anecdotal legend, so characteristic of the American scene, is, regrettably, quite out of character for Skinner, but here too, as in other matters, he surprises us with an occasional deviation.

We have one last series of questions to consider about Skinner’s legend-books: the extent to which he consciously recognized folkloric patterns. More specifically, how aware was he of the migratory legend, or of the folktale that assumes the guise of a unique local event, or of variant versions? As his terminal essays show, he certainly perceived some of the recurrent themes in American landscape legendry. Sometimes he also indicates a sensitivity to traditional narratives, and alludes to likenesses of Endymion and Diana among the Ojibways, and to the “Helen of a New-World Troy” among the Zunis and the Wintus; a New York Dutch tradition makes him think of the Hat Rogue of the Devil’s Bridge in Switzerland; he rejects a relationship between the lost tribes of Israel and the northern Indians on the basis of flood legends, but sees other analogies, for instance between biblical patriarchs and the medicine men.⁴² Once he remarks drily on “Folk-lorists who take their work very seriously” interpreting Helen as a moon myth because her name means “shining,” as if the siege of Troy never took place.⁴³ This solitary acknowledgment of the swirling controversies in folklore theory places Skinner on the side of the euhemerists, as we might expect from a dealer in physically based legends. The question of variation did not seem to disturb him, and every once in a while instead of synthesizing a narrative he sets down the options. Under the caption “Various Grindstone Hill,” he relates distinctive Indian, Yankee, Irish, and French-Canadian explanations for the odd-shaped hill on Maine’s Penobscot River.⁴⁴ (To the Indian, it was a moon peopled with imps that Melgasoway shot down from the sky; to the Yankee, a wizard’s conjuration to enable mowers to sharpen their scythes; to the Irish, the wheel of a barrow on which a “stout fellow” was pushing a monument up to the North Pole; to the habitant, the devil’s response to a lusty oath of a captain of French troops marching to reinforce Montcalm in Quebec, who swore that he wished it would rain grindstones and harrowteeth.) He gives two forms of the celebrated legend of the tribal suicide of the Biloxi. In one, the remnants of the Biloxi, besieged by the Choctaws, march into the Pascagoula River in Mississippi. In the other, a postcontact version, the Biloxi, who have willy-nilly accepted Catholicism, hear a mermaid singing atop a mound of the Pascagoula waters; they encircle the mound, entranced, and the waters recede and drown them. A dying priest, taking the blame on himself for this pagan lapse, declared that if a fellow clergyman would row to the spot in the bay where music was heard in the deeps, and drop a crucifix at midnight on Christmas, he could save the souls below, at the cost of his own life.⁴⁵ While not pausing to speculate on these discrepancies, Skinner did recognize that some geographically separated legends showed closer community than variants in the same locale, and he treats “Besieged by Starvation” under one head, although he discovered places in three different states where Indian forces made their last stand on rock formations since associated with their lost cause.⁴⁶ By and large, origins did not concern the adroit legend-spinner, yet he does cite as “an example of the way in which legends sometimes grow” the case of No-Head Pond, about which Thomas Nelson Page wrote his story “No Haid Pawn.” Fed by underground springs, the pond seemed to have no source, and the blacks on Page’s plantation attributed its existence to a headless ghost.⁴⁷ As for the reverse process, where the itinerant tale finds a congenial roost, Skinner sometimes perceived its workings. In the account of farmer Lovel capturing six Indians with the old trick of knocking out a wedge in a cleft log they were holding (Type 38), he observes that Lovel, for whom Lovel Mountain in New Hampshire is named, must have read ancient history to be so prepared.⁴⁸ On the other hand, while he uses the title “The Singing Bones” for a graphic rendition of Type 720, My Father Slew Me, My Mother Ate Me, and ends it with the terse statement, “A Louisiana negro legend,” he gives no indication of its folktale nature.⁴⁹ Skinner introduces dialogue of a literary turn of phrase particularly ill suited to his characters and develops a personality conflict between the hard-pressed husband and evasive wife in the manner of the short story rather than the folktale. In one apocryphal legend, Skinner invents a place called Lonetown, New Jersey, as the setting of what he concedes is a “quip of long endurance” that might indeed have originated in the courts of Egypt or the caves of the Stone Age. It is the plaint of the stranger in town—the towns vary—who was sentenced to death by hanging or six months in Lonetown. After a spell in Lonetown, he publicly admits the error of his choice.⁵⁰ This kind of prank on the reader, revealed in the final paragraph, reveals Skinner in a lighter moment that he could not indulge in more than once or twice without destroying his reader’s faith, but it does show his alertness to migrating legends, and even his willingness to give them a little push. His open-mindedness on origins appears in his observation on Lovers’ Leaps, that “while in some cases the legend has been made to fit the place, there is no doubt that in many instances the story antedates the arrival of the white man.”⁵¹ Occasionally, he lets drop provocative generalizations on the matter of American legendry, such as the view that American witches for all their magic live in poverty compared to their European counterparts, or the perception of an odd recurrence of assaults on people and their homes by “imps of darkness”—this latter comment as a preface to the poltergeist legend of the George Walton house in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.⁵² We must however score him down for alleging that “ghosts cannot abide factories, locomotives, breweries and trolley-cars.”⁵³

On the mechanism of legend transmission, Skinner again has little to say, but here too he suddenly surprises us by declaring that the school and college around Bryn Mawr and Haverford have kept alive the traditions and superstitions of early Pennsylvania settiers. Somehow Skinner does not seem the man to appreciate the vitality of collegiate lore. He then proceeds to tell the undergraduate legend of “The Man With the Skates,” anticipating such current dormitory horror legends as “The Pickled Hand” and “The Hook.” In this earlier prototype, one student accidentally throttles another, and in panic clothes the corpse with overcoat and hat, ties skates to its feet, and drops it through a hole he breaks in a frozen pond. The coroner returns a verdict of accidental death by drowning, but each night thereafter the killer hears a dragging, shuffling sound, and sees his victim climb over the transom. On the third night the killer is found dead, with finger marks on his throat.⁵⁴

Further to his credit, Skinner did recognize and give space to what we might call the impostor legend. One longish narrative concerns a scamp named Ransford Rogers who came to Morristown, New Jersey, in 1788 and organized the local citizenry to seek for Kidd’s treasure on Schooley’s Mountain, selling them shares in the enterprise in return for his guarantee to lay the guardian ghost, which turned out to be Rogers himself.⁵⁵ The whimsical and even irreverent manner in which Skinner relates this and some other traditional escapes—such as Captain Kidd’s unintentional bequest of a magic gold tooth to a Dutch goodwife⁵⁶—provides a welcome change of pace to the romantic tragedies, even if they seem too lighthearted for genuine legends. In his boyhood in New England, Skinner tells us, in an unexpected confidence, he had once played the poltergeist himself, until rudely apprehended by the “unpopular gentleman” whose house he was plaguing.⁵⁷

What progress have we made since Skinner? The answer would seem to be, surprisingly little. Field collections of American folk narratives have pleasantly multiplied since the 1920’s, but the legend remains still pretty much an orphan, ill defined, poorly collected, unheralded—I was about to say unsung. One looks hopefully through the major field books—Frank C. Brown, Vance Randolph, Emelyn Gardner, Leonard Roberts—and finds small pickings. The Legends of Texas in the Publications of the Texas Folklore Society offer mostly retold texts on trite themes. An example of what appears to me a representative American place legend is the account of Everlasting Water at High Knob, Kentucky, in Leonard Roberts’s South from Hell-fer-Sartin. There is a literal, and dramatic, text told by Felix Turner, 60, of Burning Springs, Clay County, Kentucky, of how an old Baptist preacher, denied the use of a well by his brother-in-law, prayed on a dry bank by his home for God to send him everlasting water. After three tries the section of a hollow black gum tree he had cut down overflowed with water.

Here are combined the ingredients of the oral folk legend, as opposed to the well-publicized mass media legend: a remarkable local happening, accepted as fact, with an identifiable motif at its core (D1766.1, “Magic fountain produced by prayer”), a specific locale, and a general knowledge by the community of the episode. What we would like, however, are the statements of the score of persons to whom Felix Turner refers. A local legend, to my thinking, can never be accepted in one text, for the proof is on the legend collector to demonstrate that it pervades the social group. We are not dealing here with folktale variants, but with awareness of the tradition, perhaps in something like entirety, more frequently in fragments. Consequently, there arises a publishing problem: how are these fuzzy bits and pieces to be presented? My answer is, just as they are told, without any attempt at reconstructing a synthetic —truly a synthetic—narrative. The publishing outlet will have to be, and should be, a scholarly monograph. Vance Randolph once told me that he had collected many tales of so local and disjointed a nature that he never attempted to print them. Charles Neely did set down eighteen narratives he called “Local Legends” in Tales and Songs of Southern Illinois, and they ring true because they are formless, filled with local references, personal and anecdotal, and not particularly interesting as story stuff. But they are rich in the stuff of human experience in a backcountry setting, with their accounts of wolf and panther scares; the self-strangling of a hog thief; the escape of a Confederate sympathizer who kissed a pretty girl on his way out the window; the execution during the Civil War of a government informer by a group of deserters, at lonely Dug Hill, thereafter said to be haunted; the recovery of a stolen horse with the aid of a herb doctor. Neely was on the right track.

On the basis of my earlier paper, “Defining the American Folk Legend,” and the present review of Skinner’s two series, I would like to throw open for consideration the following general propositions.

1. American folk legends belong in large part to a different universe from the Sagen of the Old World. The fairies, trolls, nissen, and sea-spirits of Christiansen’s The Migratory Legends, or the kappa, tengu, oni, and fox-demons of my Folk Legends of Japan, have no counterparts in the United States. Skinner sought to cover the American land with legendary associations like those in Germany and Japan, chiefly on the basis of Indian spirit-beings, but this scheme simply does not work in America. Indian mythology, or legendry, does not carry over into American life. American legends begin with colonization.

2. Many American folk legends can be divided into three large divisions: those connected with the land and with communities, according to Skinner’s premise; those attached to legendary individuals, whether strong heroes, badmen, healers, saints, characters, or celebrities; and those involving experiences alleged to have occurred to a given individual but connected with many persons in different places. These three classes of traditions, while all falling under the head of believed narratives, are so dissimilar that perhaps they deserve distinguishing labels. Category one covers events of local history that have struck the imagination of the townspeople; from my fieldwork in upper Michigan, I think of the Lynching of the MacDonald Boys in Menominee, How Crystal Falls Stole the Courthouse from Iron River, and Pat Sheridan’s Speech at Escanaba. Category two covers cycles of legendary anecdotes, such as those about the Three Nephites, or John Darling, or Barney Beal, or the Healer of Los Olmos. Ballad heroes like John Henry may actually not be heroes of prose legends. Political figures in the United States have never attained the legendary status, say, of Mexican leaders like Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa. A character may sometimes be local, or he may belong to an occupation or profession, like the late Stephen Visscher, professor of geography at Indiana University, and the subject of jovial anecdotes among his colleagues in Bloomington and in the national fraternity of geographers concerning his niggardly habits, such as retrieving the Sunday New York Times from his neighbor’s garbage can, or attempting to cart his mother-in-law’s corpse across the state line from Indiana to Kentucky to save a burial fee. Category three covers floating single-episode legends, like the Vanishing Hitchhiker, the Stolen Grandmother, the Dead Cat in the Package, the Hook, the Killer in the Back Seat, the Graveyard Wager, and the Death Car. These are usually told as second-hand memorats, and this genre is represented in four of the eighteen “Folk Legends of Indiana” in the first issue of Indiana Folklore (1968). The same tradition may of course take a “free floating” or “bound place” form, in the words of de Caro and Lunt commenting on the unusual legend in that issue of “The Face on the Tombstone,” but a decision can be rendered as to its basic emphasis; in that case, involving the theme of the ineradicable likeness on the stone, the element of place predominates.

3. Other categories of American legends are required to deal with urban, ethnic, and Negro traditions. Immigrants, slaves, and city dwellers bear a different relation to the land from the direct possession and cultivation of farmer-settlers; they are often, as John Higham has titled his history of immigration, Strangers in the Land. We are only beginning to investigate the folklore of cities, but one omnipresent city legend, sinister and foreboding, and defying any existing classification, is already visible, that of the Mafia or the Syndicate. Ethnic societies frequently cherish legends and heroes of their homelands, which they renew and reinforce by visits and artifacts. Negro narratives of slavery and postslavery atrocities and terrorism, such as the bogey of the night riders uncovered by Gladys Fry, also transcend the simple categories of place and person.

4. Regionally limited depth collecting is needed to excavate historical or community place legends. Our model here can be the Folklore of Adams County, Illinois, by Harry M. Hyatt, who turned up eleven thousand beliefs and memorats within an area of ten square miles around Quincy. The current enterprise of one folklorist, to write his brethren for the most popular legend in their respective states, will simply perpetuate mass-culture pseudolegendry. Besides we need more than legend texts; we need their ethnographic, historical, and psychological settings.

5. American folk legends should be published with a maximum of variant texts and annotation, and with no attempt to appeal to the general reader. Social scientists have gently warned us about succumbing to the intrinsic appeal of our materials at the cost of scientific detachment. The legend issue of Indiana Folklore moves in the direction of scholarly faithfulness.

6. In speaking about American folk legends, we will have to differentiate between the forty-eight contiguous states and other territory flying the American flag. Here too Skinner has anticipated us. The cultural history of Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, and other odd islets deviates so widely from the story of colonization and the westward movement that we will have to look at their legends with different binoculars.

7. The vitality of American folk legends is directly related to the epochs of American history. Times have changed since Skinner’s day; the population has doubled, and its ways are profoundly altered by the automobile, airplane, radio, television. But times had changed before Skinner’s day. Legends that he revived had already lost their force, and legends that he excluded were in full vigor. In a society as dynamic as that of the United States, legends continually grow and wither, to be embalmed in tourist books and brochures. Any presentation of American folk legends should take into account these temporal periods.

Notes

1. Charles M. Skinner, Myths and Legends of Our Own Land, 2 vols. (Philadelphia and London: J. B. Lippincott, 1896), I, 5. (Hereinafter cited: Own Land.)

2. Skinner, American Myths and Legends, 2 vols. (Philadelphia and London: J. B. Lippincott, 1903), I, 5.

3. Ibid., II, 146.

4. Ibid., II, 122-23.

5. Ibid., I, 54.

6. Richard M. Dorson, Jonathan Draws the Long Bow (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1946), pp. 89-91, “A Melting Story.”

7. Skinner, Own Land, I, 225-26.

8. Ibid., I, 257.

9. Skinner, American Myths and Legends, II, 49-54.

10. Ibid., II, 54.

11. Skinner, Own Land, II, 71.

12. Ibid., II, 210.

13. Ibid., II, 292-93.

14. Ibid., II, 237-38.

15. Skinner, American Myths and Legends, I, 86.

16. Skinner, Own Land, I, 45.

17. Ibid., II, 197-200.

18. Ibid., I, 226-38.

19. Ibid., II, 192-95.

20. “Parricide of the Wissahickon,” Own Land, I, 162-64.

21. “The Revenge of Josiah Breeze,” Own Land, I, 269-72.

22. “Fairplay,” American Myths and Legends, II, 116-20.

23. “Marion,” Own Land, I, 180-81.

24. “A Blow in the Dark,” Own Land, I, 153-55.

25. “The Swan of Light,” American Myths and Legends, I, 83-85.

26. Own Land, I, 212-13.

27. Dorson, ed., America Begins (New York: Fawcett World Library, 1966), p. 285.

28. Own Land, I, 238-41.

29. Ibid., I, 215-20.

30. Skinner, American Myths and Legends, I, 49-52, “The Confession of Hanserd Knollys”; cf. II, 292-94.

31. Ibid., II, 248.

32. Ibid., II, 318-19.

33. Ibid., I, 274-75; Dorson, Negro Folktales in Michigan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956), pp. 46, 207.

34. Skinner, Own Land, II, 186-88, “The Salt Witch.”

35. Ibid., I, 63-65, “The Deformed of Zoar”; ibid., II, 182-83, “How the Crime Was Revealed”; and Skinner, American Myths and Legends, I, 275-78, “Stick Pile Hill.”

36. Skinner, American Myths and Legends, I, 59.

37. Ibid., II, 301.

38. Ibid., II, 228.

39. Ibid., II, 223.

40. Ibid., II, 215.

41. Ibid., II, 212-13.

42. Skinner, Own Land, II, 119; ibid., II, 219; Skinner, American Myths and Legends, II, 195; Skinner, Own Land, I, 38; Skinner, American Myths and Legends, I, 194.

43. Skinner, American Myths and Legends, II, 195.

44. Ibid., I, 15-19.

45. Skinner, Own Land, II, 90-92, “Last Stand of the Biloxi.”

46. Ibid., II, 203-4.

47. Skinner, American Myths and Legends, II, 266.

48. Skinner, Own Land, I, 207-8, “A Chestnut Log.”

49. Skinner, American Myths and Legends, II, 33-36.

50. Ibid., I, 238-40, “The Lonetown Mystery.”

51. Skinner, Own Land, II, 318.

52. Skinner, American Myths and Legends, I, 270; Skinner, Own Land, II, 305.

53. Skinner, American Myths and Legends, I, 226.

54. Ibid., I, 260-64.

55. Ibid., I, 224-34, “The Spooks of Schooley’s Mountain.”

56. “The Golden Tooth,” American Myths and Legends, I, 176-86.

57. Skinner, Own Land, II, 310.

58. Leonard Roberts, South from Hell-fer-Sartin (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1955), p. 173.

Originally published in American Folk Legend, A Symposium, edited by Wayland D. Hand (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 69-88. The whole original article extended to page 95. Reprinted by permission of The Regents of the University of California.