A PREFACE ON AUTHENTIC LIARSAn authentic liar knows what he is lying about, knows that his listeners—unless they are tenderfeet, greenhorns—know also, and hence makes no pretense of fooling either himself or them. At his best he is as grave as a historian of the Roman Empire; yet what he is after is neither credulity nor the establishment of truth. He does not take himself too seriously, but he does regard himself as an artist and yearns for recognition of his art. He may lie with satiric intent; he may lie merely to make the time pass pleasantly; he may lie in order to take the wind out of some egotistic fellow of his own tribe or to take in some greener; again, without any purpose at all and directed only by his ebullient and companion-loving nature, he may “stretch the blanket” merely because, like the redoubtable Tom Ochiltree, he had “rather lie on credit than tell truth for cash.” His generous nature revolts at the monotony of everyday facts and overflows with desire to make his company joyful.Certainly the telling of “windies” flourished in the Old World long before America was discovered; nevertheless the tall tale both in subject matter and in manner of telling has been peculiar to the frontiers of America, whether in the backwoods of the Old South, in the mining camps of the Far West, amid the logging camps presided over by Paul Bunyan, or on the range lands stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian line. Very likely the Pilgrim Fathers did not indulge much in the art of yarning, and the stately Cavaliers pretty much left that sort of entertainment to the poor—“poor but honest”—settlers. As to whether the “decay in the art of lying” that OscarWilde observed in literary fiction has blighted that to be heard around camp fires and on the galleries of ranch houses, we need not here inquire. The “big uns” that Mody Boatright has gathered together in this book are not altogether out of the past.They express a way that range folk talked and they express also a way in which these folk cartooned objects familiar to them like rattlesnakes, sand storms, jack rabbits, the expanding and contracting powers of rawhide, the suddenness of Texas northers, “killings” according to a code that clearly distinguished a killing from a murder, and other things. They are, in short, authentic both as to the characters represented and the subjects discoursed upon.When in the old days two cow outfits met upon the range, and there was “ample time,” as Andy Adams would say, they sometimes arranged what was known as an “auguring match.” Each outfit would pit its prime yarn-spinner against the other and there followed a contest not only of invention but of endurance. John Palliser inThe Solitary Hunter; or, Sporting Adventures of the Prairies(London, 1856) relates how after an all-night talking contest between a Missourian and a Kentuckian, the umpire “at a quarter past five” found the Kentucky man fast asleep, his opponent “sitting up close beside him and whispering in his ear.” What the contestants talked about, Palliser does not say, but there is ample testimony to prove that the “auguring matches” on the range had as precedent among the backwoodsmen of the South who were to push out upon the ranges a kind of round table talk in which each talker sought to cap the tall tales of his fellow with one a little taller.For genuine artists a solitary opponent is sufficient; art is substantive.In Piney Woods Tavern; or, SamSlick in Texas(Philadelphia, 1858), by Samuel A. Hammett, the narrator in traveling from the Brazos to the Trinity rivers found the San Jacinto “a roarin’ and a hummin’ it.... Free soil movements was a-goin’ on, and trees a-tumblin’ in all along the banks.”I see thar war no help for it [the narrator goes on]. So I took my feet outen the stirrups, threw my saddle-bags over my shoulder, and in me and the mar went.We war in a awful tight place for a time, but we soon landed safe. I’d jest got my critter tied out, and a fire started to dry myself with when I see a chap come ridin’ up the hill on a smart chunk of a pony....“Hoopee! stranger”—sings out my beauty—“How d’ye? Kept your fireworks dry, eh? How in thunder did ye get over?”“Oh!” says I, “mighty easy. Ye see, stranger, I’m powerful on a pirogue; so I waited till I see a big log a-driftin’ nigh the shore, when I fastened to it, set my critter a-straddle on it, got into the saddle, paddled over with my saddle-bags, and steered with the mare’s tail.”“Ye didn’t, though, by Ned!” says he, “did ye?”“Mighty apt to”—says I—“but arter ye’ve sucked all that in and got yer breath agin, let’s know howyoucrossed?”“Oh!” says he, settin’ his pig’s eyes on me, “I’ve been a-riding all day with a consarned ager, and orful dry, and afeard to drink at the prairie water holes; so when I got to the river I jest went in fer a big drink, swallered half a mile of water, and come over dry shod.”“Stranger,” says I, “ye’r just one huckleberry above my persimmon. Light and take some red-eye. I thought ye looked green, but I were barkin’ up the wrong tree.”Story-telling in Texas was so popular that at times it interfered with religion. The pioneer Baptistpreacher, Z. N. Morrell, relates in his autobiographicFlowers and Fruits in the Wilderness(Dallas, 1886) that on one occasion while he was preaching in a log cabin in East Texas his sermon was drowned by the voices of men outside “telling anecdotes.” After an ineffectual reprimand, the preacher finally told his interrupters that if they would give him a chance he would tell an anecdote and that then, if it was not better than any of theirs, he would “take down his sign and listen to them.” They agreed to the challenge. The anecdote he proceeded to relate about Sam Houston and the battle of San Jacinto won him the right to keep on talking without interruption. The triumph was but a repetition of David Crockett’s election to Congress through his b’ar stories.An anecdote is not by any means necessarily a windy, but people who cultivate the art of oral narration will sooner or later indulge in exaggerative invention. Some candidate for the Ph.D. degree should write a thesis on the interrelationship of the anecdote, the tall tale, and the short story in America. What is probably the most widely known story that the nation has produced, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” is all three—and it is mostly just a yarn in which the frontier character, Jim Smiley, character being the essence of good anecdote, is more important than the frog.Sixty years or so ago at Covey’s college for ranch boys, located at Concrete, Texas, near Cuero, the “scholars” organized a liar’s club. According to the rules of the club every boy present at a session must tell a story. The teller of what was adjudged the best yarn was habitually awarded as a prize a dozen hot tamales cooked by one of the Mexican women about the premises.One night a certain lad of few words who had been drawn into the club was called upon to contribute.“Wall,” he drawled, “I was raised away out in the bresh up whur I never heared nobody talk, and I jes’ ain’t got no story to tell.”“Oh, go on and tell something,” the other club members urged.“No,” the diffident youth remonstrated, “it ain’t no use fer me to try to make up anything. I jest can’t do it. I’ve been a-trying to figger up something while you all was telling your stories, and the pump won’t even prime.”There was more urging and encouraging. But still the boy from up the creek hung back. As a member of the club, however, he simply had to tell something—or “take the leggins.” Finally the leader of the group suggested, “I guess we can let you off from lying if you’re so much like George Washington. Just go ahead and tell us about some interesting happening. It don’t have to be a lie.”“Wall,” the drawly tongue started off, “I’ll tell you about something that happened to me. One morning I was a-leaving the ranch to look out for wormy calves. I was going to be gone all day, and jest as I throwed my leg over the saddle, a Meskin girl that lived with her people in a jacal close to the corral came a-running out. ‘Here,’ says she, ‘we’ve jest been making tamales out of the cow that got her leg broke yesterday and you all had to kill. The meat is fat and the corn is new, and the tamales aremuy sabroso. You must take some of them with you.’“Now I would do nearly anything this little Meskin girl suggested. So I told her all right, to wrop the tamales up in some paper and a flour sack and I’d put ’em in my morral with the hank of dried beef and the bottle of worm medicine. Which she did. Tamales ain’tmuch good unless they are hot, you know, and I figgered the wropping would keep these warm.“Well, after I’d gone about six miles, I struck a bull that I decided to rope. Which I did. The bull he kept on going after he hit the end of the rope and my horse he could not stop him. He dragged me about forty miles more or less, I guess, before I hung up in a mesquite tree with my chin between the forks of a limb. I don’t know how long I hung there, but it was some time. People differ as to how long it was. Anyway, it was until the limb rotted down and I dropped to the ground.“I didn’t want to go back to the ranch afoot, and so I hit out follering the horse’s tracks. I found him a good piece out looking purty gant but still saddled and the rope that had rotted off the bull’s neck still tied to the horn of the saddle. I went right up to the morral, for it was still on the saddle, and untied it. I was a little gant myself. Then I felt of the sacking around the tamales, and I couldn’t feel no heat. Says I to myself, ‘I bet that Meskin girl didn’t wrop ’em right and the danged things have got so cold they won’t be no count to eat.’ But I went on and unwropped the paper, and when I got to the shucks, danged if they didn’t burn my fingers. Them tamales shore tasted good after all that bull running and then hoofing it after the horse. It is remarkable the way tamales hold the heat when they are well wropped.”Even the schools for ranch boys in Texas included “windjamming” among their activities. But many a frontiersman who had not had the advantage of an education must have been forced by circumstances to “make it strong” in telling about the Wild West to gentle Easterners. Every new land has marvels; hence “traveler’s tales.” When facts are taken for fabrications, then the narrator is tempted to “cutloose” sure enough. One of the most honest-hearted and reliable frontiersmen that ever boiled coffee over mesquite coals was Bigfoot Wallace. He came to Texas from Virginia long before barbed wire “played hell” with the longhorns. After he had himself become a regular Longhorn he went back to his old home for a visit. As John C. Duval in the delightfulAdventures of Bigfoot Wallace(1870) has the old frontiersman describe his reception, he was egged on in the following manner to take the bridle off and let out the last kink.A few weeks after my arrival I went to a fandango that was given for my special benefit. There was a great crowd there, and everybody was anxious to see the “Wild Texan,” as they called me. I was the lion of the evening, particularly for the young ladies, who never tired of asking me questions about Mexico, Texas, the Indians, prairies, etc. I at first answered truthfully all the questions they asked me; but when I found they evidently doubted some of the stories I told them which were facts, then I branched out and gave them some whoppers. These they swallowed down without gagging. For instance, one young woman wanted to know how many wild horses I had ever seen in a drove. I told her perhaps thirty or forty thousand.“Oh, now! Mr. Wallace,” said she, “don’t try to make game of me in that way. Forty thousand horses in one drove! Well, I declare you are a second Munchausen!”[1]“Well, then,” said I, “maybe you won’t believe mewhen I tell you there is a sort of spider in Texas as big as a peck measure, the bite of which can only be cured by music.”“Oh, yes,” she answered, “I believe that’s all so, for I have read about them in a book.”“Among other whoppers, I told her there was a varmint in Texas called the Santa Fé, that was still worse than the tarantula, for the best brass band in the country couldn’t cure their sting; that the creature had a hundred legs and a sting on every one of them, besides two large stings in its forked tail, and fangs as big as a rattlesnake’s. When they sting you with their legs alone, you might possibly live an hour; when with all their stings, perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes; but when they sting and bite you at the same time, you first turn blue, then yellow, and then a beautiful bottle-green, when your hair all falls out, and your finger nails drop off, and in five minutes you are as dead as a door nail, in spite of all the doctors in America.”“Oh! My! Mr. Wallace!” said she. “How have you managed to live so long in that horrible country?”“Why, you see,” said I, “with my tarantula boots made of alligator skin, and my centipede hunting-shirt made of tanned rattlesnake hides, I have escaped pretty well; but these don’t protect you against the stinging scorpions, cow-killers, and scaly-back chinches, that crawl about at night when you are asleep! The only way to keep them at a distance is to chaw tobacco and drink whiskey, and that is the reason the Temperance Society never flourished much in Texas.”“Oh!” said she, “what a horrible country that must be, where the people have to be stung to death, or else chaw tobacco and drink whiskey! I don’t know which is the worst.”“Well,” said I, “the people out there don’t seem to mind it much; they get used to it after a while. In fact, they seem rather to like it, for they chaw tobaccoand drink whiskey even in the winter time, when the cow-killers and stinging lizards are all frozen up!”What gusto, what warmth of natural sympathy, what genial expansion! Here the authentic liar has been translated by circumstances and by his own genius into the pure aura of truth. There is no distortion, no “wrenching the true cause the wrong way,” no base intent to win by arousing false fears or to defraud through false hopes. The artist has but arranged the objects of his scene and then handed the spectator a magnifying glass that is flawlessly translucent. The magnified vision, like that of Tartarin of Tarascon, seems but the effect of a sunlight transilluminating all other sunlights—the sunlight of Tartarin’s Midi country, “the only liar in the Midi.” Only here it is the sunlight of the West, which brings mountain ranges a hundred miles away within apparent touching distance and through its mirages makes antelopes stalk as tall as giraffes, gives to buffalo bulls far out on the prairies the proportions of hay wagons, and reveals spired cities and tree-shadowed lakes reposing in deserts actually so devoid of life that not even a single blade of green grass can there be found.Occasionally one of these authentic liars of the West falls a prey to his own lying. Frank Root (The Overland Stage to California) relates that one time after a Gargantuan story-teller named Ranger Jones had finished narrating a particularly blood-curdling “personal experience,” a stage driver who happened to be among the listeners looked him squarely in the eye and said, “I hope, Ranger Jones, that you don’t expect me to believe this story.”“Well—er—no—really, I don’t,” the narrator answered. “The fact is, I have lied out here in this Western country so long and have been in the habit of tellingso many damned lies, the truth of it is now that I don’t know when I can believe myself.” InTrails Plowed UnderCharles M. Russell has a delicious chapter on “Some Liars of the Old West.”“These men weren’t vicious liars,” he comments. “It was love of romance, lack of reading matter, and the wish to be entertainin’ that makes ’em stretch facts and invent yarns.” Among the most famous of these liars was a man known as Lyin’ Jack, and his favorite tale was on an elk he once killed that had a spread of antlers fifteen feet wide. He always kept these, as he told the story, in the loft of his cabin.One time after a long absence Lyin’ Jack showed up in Benton. “The boys” were all glad to see him and, after a round or two of drinks, asked him for a yarn.“No, boys,” said Jack, “I’m through. For years I’ve been tellin’ these lies—told ’em so often I got to believin’ ’em myself. That story of mine about the elk with the fifteen-foot horns is what cured me. I told about that elk so often that I knowed the place I killed it. One night I lit a candle and crawled up in the loft to view the horns—an’ I’m damned if they weren’t there.”In a book of not enough consequence to warrant the naming of its title, the author, writing through hearsay and attempting to be veracious, describes the Texas norther—which comes “sudden and soon in the dead of night or the blaze of noon”—as being so swift in descent, so terrible in force, and so bitterly cold that “no old Texan would trust himself out on the prairies in July or August with the thermometer at ninety-six degrees, without two blankets strapped at the saddlebow to keep him from freezing to death should a norther blow up.” Of course no man of the range carries his blankets on the horn of a saddle and noTexan ever experienced a genuine norther in July or August. The description is utterly false, utterly lacking in authenticity. On the other hand, when “Mr. Fishback of the Sulphurs” relates how one hot day in December when he was riding home he saw a blue norther coming behind him, put spurs to his horse, and, racing for miles with the nose of the wind at his very backbone, arrived at the stable to find the hind-quarters of his horse frozen stiff whereas the fore-quarters were in a lather of sweat—such a hair’s breadth doth divide the hot prelude to a norther from the iciness of the norther itself—we realize that we are in the company of a liar as authentic as he is accomplished. Surely such do not violate the ninth commandment; indeed they have become as little children.—J. Frank Dobie,Austin, Texas,Cinco de Mayo, 1934.[1]Forty thousand, even thirty thousand, mustangs are a lot of mustangs. InThe Young Explorers, a book privately printed in Austin, Texas, about 1892, Duval,pp.111-112, defends this extraordinary assertion. The wild horses were encountered between the Nueces River and the Río Grande. Corroborative of the enormous numbers to be found in that region is the testimony of William A. McClintock, “Journal of a Trip Through Texas and Northern Mexico,”Southwestern Historical Quarterly,Vol. XXXIV, pp.232-233. Bigfoot Wallace was not lying about the wild horses.
An authentic liar knows what he is lying about, knows that his listeners—unless they are tenderfeet, greenhorns—know also, and hence makes no pretense of fooling either himself or them. At his best he is as grave as a historian of the Roman Empire; yet what he is after is neither credulity nor the establishment of truth. He does not take himself too seriously, but he does regard himself as an artist and yearns for recognition of his art. He may lie with satiric intent; he may lie merely to make the time pass pleasantly; he may lie in order to take the wind out of some egotistic fellow of his own tribe or to take in some greener; again, without any purpose at all and directed only by his ebullient and companion-loving nature, he may “stretch the blanket” merely because, like the redoubtable Tom Ochiltree, he had “rather lie on credit than tell truth for cash.” His generous nature revolts at the monotony of everyday facts and overflows with desire to make his company joyful.
Certainly the telling of “windies” flourished in the Old World long before America was discovered; nevertheless the tall tale both in subject matter and in manner of telling has been peculiar to the frontiers of America, whether in the backwoods of the Old South, in the mining camps of the Far West, amid the logging camps presided over by Paul Bunyan, or on the range lands stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian line. Very likely the Pilgrim Fathers did not indulge much in the art of yarning, and the stately Cavaliers pretty much left that sort of entertainment to the poor—“poor but honest”—settlers. As to whether the “decay in the art of lying” that OscarWilde observed in literary fiction has blighted that to be heard around camp fires and on the galleries of ranch houses, we need not here inquire. The “big uns” that Mody Boatright has gathered together in this book are not altogether out of the past.
They express a way that range folk talked and they express also a way in which these folk cartooned objects familiar to them like rattlesnakes, sand storms, jack rabbits, the expanding and contracting powers of rawhide, the suddenness of Texas northers, “killings” according to a code that clearly distinguished a killing from a murder, and other things. They are, in short, authentic both as to the characters represented and the subjects discoursed upon.
When in the old days two cow outfits met upon the range, and there was “ample time,” as Andy Adams would say, they sometimes arranged what was known as an “auguring match.” Each outfit would pit its prime yarn-spinner against the other and there followed a contest not only of invention but of endurance. John Palliser inThe Solitary Hunter; or, Sporting Adventures of the Prairies(London, 1856) relates how after an all-night talking contest between a Missourian and a Kentuckian, the umpire “at a quarter past five” found the Kentucky man fast asleep, his opponent “sitting up close beside him and whispering in his ear.” What the contestants talked about, Palliser does not say, but there is ample testimony to prove that the “auguring matches” on the range had as precedent among the backwoodsmen of the South who were to push out upon the ranges a kind of round table talk in which each talker sought to cap the tall tales of his fellow with one a little taller.
For genuine artists a solitary opponent is sufficient; art is substantive.In Piney Woods Tavern; or, SamSlick in Texas(Philadelphia, 1858), by Samuel A. Hammett, the narrator in traveling from the Brazos to the Trinity rivers found the San Jacinto “a roarin’ and a hummin’ it.... Free soil movements was a-goin’ on, and trees a-tumblin’ in all along the banks.”
I see thar war no help for it [the narrator goes on]. So I took my feet outen the stirrups, threw my saddle-bags over my shoulder, and in me and the mar went.We war in a awful tight place for a time, but we soon landed safe. I’d jest got my critter tied out, and a fire started to dry myself with when I see a chap come ridin’ up the hill on a smart chunk of a pony....“Hoopee! stranger”—sings out my beauty—“How d’ye? Kept your fireworks dry, eh? How in thunder did ye get over?”“Oh!” says I, “mighty easy. Ye see, stranger, I’m powerful on a pirogue; so I waited till I see a big log a-driftin’ nigh the shore, when I fastened to it, set my critter a-straddle on it, got into the saddle, paddled over with my saddle-bags, and steered with the mare’s tail.”“Ye didn’t, though, by Ned!” says he, “did ye?”“Mighty apt to”—says I—“but arter ye’ve sucked all that in and got yer breath agin, let’s know howyoucrossed?”“Oh!” says he, settin’ his pig’s eyes on me, “I’ve been a-riding all day with a consarned ager, and orful dry, and afeard to drink at the prairie water holes; so when I got to the river I jest went in fer a big drink, swallered half a mile of water, and come over dry shod.”“Stranger,” says I, “ye’r just one huckleberry above my persimmon. Light and take some red-eye. I thought ye looked green, but I were barkin’ up the wrong tree.”
I see thar war no help for it [the narrator goes on]. So I took my feet outen the stirrups, threw my saddle-bags over my shoulder, and in me and the mar went.
We war in a awful tight place for a time, but we soon landed safe. I’d jest got my critter tied out, and a fire started to dry myself with when I see a chap come ridin’ up the hill on a smart chunk of a pony....
“Hoopee! stranger”—sings out my beauty—“How d’ye? Kept your fireworks dry, eh? How in thunder did ye get over?”
“Oh!” says I, “mighty easy. Ye see, stranger, I’m powerful on a pirogue; so I waited till I see a big log a-driftin’ nigh the shore, when I fastened to it, set my critter a-straddle on it, got into the saddle, paddled over with my saddle-bags, and steered with the mare’s tail.”
“Ye didn’t, though, by Ned!” says he, “did ye?”
“Mighty apt to”—says I—“but arter ye’ve sucked all that in and got yer breath agin, let’s know howyoucrossed?”
“Oh!” says he, settin’ his pig’s eyes on me, “I’ve been a-riding all day with a consarned ager, and orful dry, and afeard to drink at the prairie water holes; so when I got to the river I jest went in fer a big drink, swallered half a mile of water, and come over dry shod.”
“Stranger,” says I, “ye’r just one huckleberry above my persimmon. Light and take some red-eye. I thought ye looked green, but I were barkin’ up the wrong tree.”
Story-telling in Texas was so popular that at times it interfered with religion. The pioneer Baptistpreacher, Z. N. Morrell, relates in his autobiographicFlowers and Fruits in the Wilderness(Dallas, 1886) that on one occasion while he was preaching in a log cabin in East Texas his sermon was drowned by the voices of men outside “telling anecdotes.” After an ineffectual reprimand, the preacher finally told his interrupters that if they would give him a chance he would tell an anecdote and that then, if it was not better than any of theirs, he would “take down his sign and listen to them.” They agreed to the challenge. The anecdote he proceeded to relate about Sam Houston and the battle of San Jacinto won him the right to keep on talking without interruption. The triumph was but a repetition of David Crockett’s election to Congress through his b’ar stories.
An anecdote is not by any means necessarily a windy, but people who cultivate the art of oral narration will sooner or later indulge in exaggerative invention. Some candidate for the Ph.D. degree should write a thesis on the interrelationship of the anecdote, the tall tale, and the short story in America. What is probably the most widely known story that the nation has produced, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” is all three—and it is mostly just a yarn in which the frontier character, Jim Smiley, character being the essence of good anecdote, is more important than the frog.
Sixty years or so ago at Covey’s college for ranch boys, located at Concrete, Texas, near Cuero, the “scholars” organized a liar’s club. According to the rules of the club every boy present at a session must tell a story. The teller of what was adjudged the best yarn was habitually awarded as a prize a dozen hot tamales cooked by one of the Mexican women about the premises.
One night a certain lad of few words who had been drawn into the club was called upon to contribute.
“Wall,” he drawled, “I was raised away out in the bresh up whur I never heared nobody talk, and I jes’ ain’t got no story to tell.”
“Oh, go on and tell something,” the other club members urged.
“No,” the diffident youth remonstrated, “it ain’t no use fer me to try to make up anything. I jest can’t do it. I’ve been a-trying to figger up something while you all was telling your stories, and the pump won’t even prime.”
There was more urging and encouraging. But still the boy from up the creek hung back. As a member of the club, however, he simply had to tell something—or “take the leggins.” Finally the leader of the group suggested, “I guess we can let you off from lying if you’re so much like George Washington. Just go ahead and tell us about some interesting happening. It don’t have to be a lie.”
“Wall,” the drawly tongue started off, “I’ll tell you about something that happened to me. One morning I was a-leaving the ranch to look out for wormy calves. I was going to be gone all day, and jest as I throwed my leg over the saddle, a Meskin girl that lived with her people in a jacal close to the corral came a-running out. ‘Here,’ says she, ‘we’ve jest been making tamales out of the cow that got her leg broke yesterday and you all had to kill. The meat is fat and the corn is new, and the tamales aremuy sabroso. You must take some of them with you.’
“Now I would do nearly anything this little Meskin girl suggested. So I told her all right, to wrop the tamales up in some paper and a flour sack and I’d put ’em in my morral with the hank of dried beef and the bottle of worm medicine. Which she did. Tamales ain’tmuch good unless they are hot, you know, and I figgered the wropping would keep these warm.
“Well, after I’d gone about six miles, I struck a bull that I decided to rope. Which I did. The bull he kept on going after he hit the end of the rope and my horse he could not stop him. He dragged me about forty miles more or less, I guess, before I hung up in a mesquite tree with my chin between the forks of a limb. I don’t know how long I hung there, but it was some time. People differ as to how long it was. Anyway, it was until the limb rotted down and I dropped to the ground.
“I didn’t want to go back to the ranch afoot, and so I hit out follering the horse’s tracks. I found him a good piece out looking purty gant but still saddled and the rope that had rotted off the bull’s neck still tied to the horn of the saddle. I went right up to the morral, for it was still on the saddle, and untied it. I was a little gant myself. Then I felt of the sacking around the tamales, and I couldn’t feel no heat. Says I to myself, ‘I bet that Meskin girl didn’t wrop ’em right and the danged things have got so cold they won’t be no count to eat.’ But I went on and unwropped the paper, and when I got to the shucks, danged if they didn’t burn my fingers. Them tamales shore tasted good after all that bull running and then hoofing it after the horse. It is remarkable the way tamales hold the heat when they are well wropped.”
Even the schools for ranch boys in Texas included “windjamming” among their activities. But many a frontiersman who had not had the advantage of an education must have been forced by circumstances to “make it strong” in telling about the Wild West to gentle Easterners. Every new land has marvels; hence “traveler’s tales.” When facts are taken for fabrications, then the narrator is tempted to “cutloose” sure enough. One of the most honest-hearted and reliable frontiersmen that ever boiled coffee over mesquite coals was Bigfoot Wallace. He came to Texas from Virginia long before barbed wire “played hell” with the longhorns. After he had himself become a regular Longhorn he went back to his old home for a visit. As John C. Duval in the delightfulAdventures of Bigfoot Wallace(1870) has the old frontiersman describe his reception, he was egged on in the following manner to take the bridle off and let out the last kink.
A few weeks after my arrival I went to a fandango that was given for my special benefit. There was a great crowd there, and everybody was anxious to see the “Wild Texan,” as they called me. I was the lion of the evening, particularly for the young ladies, who never tired of asking me questions about Mexico, Texas, the Indians, prairies, etc. I at first answered truthfully all the questions they asked me; but when I found they evidently doubted some of the stories I told them which were facts, then I branched out and gave them some whoppers. These they swallowed down without gagging. For instance, one young woman wanted to know how many wild horses I had ever seen in a drove. I told her perhaps thirty or forty thousand.“Oh, now! Mr. Wallace,” said she, “don’t try to make game of me in that way. Forty thousand horses in one drove! Well, I declare you are a second Munchausen!”[1]“Well, then,” said I, “maybe you won’t believe mewhen I tell you there is a sort of spider in Texas as big as a peck measure, the bite of which can only be cured by music.”“Oh, yes,” she answered, “I believe that’s all so, for I have read about them in a book.”“Among other whoppers, I told her there was a varmint in Texas called the Santa Fé, that was still worse than the tarantula, for the best brass band in the country couldn’t cure their sting; that the creature had a hundred legs and a sting on every one of them, besides two large stings in its forked tail, and fangs as big as a rattlesnake’s. When they sting you with their legs alone, you might possibly live an hour; when with all their stings, perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes; but when they sting and bite you at the same time, you first turn blue, then yellow, and then a beautiful bottle-green, when your hair all falls out, and your finger nails drop off, and in five minutes you are as dead as a door nail, in spite of all the doctors in America.”“Oh! My! Mr. Wallace!” said she. “How have you managed to live so long in that horrible country?”“Why, you see,” said I, “with my tarantula boots made of alligator skin, and my centipede hunting-shirt made of tanned rattlesnake hides, I have escaped pretty well; but these don’t protect you against the stinging scorpions, cow-killers, and scaly-back chinches, that crawl about at night when you are asleep! The only way to keep them at a distance is to chaw tobacco and drink whiskey, and that is the reason the Temperance Society never flourished much in Texas.”“Oh!” said she, “what a horrible country that must be, where the people have to be stung to death, or else chaw tobacco and drink whiskey! I don’t know which is the worst.”“Well,” said I, “the people out there don’t seem to mind it much; they get used to it after a while. In fact, they seem rather to like it, for they chaw tobaccoand drink whiskey even in the winter time, when the cow-killers and stinging lizards are all frozen up!”
A few weeks after my arrival I went to a fandango that was given for my special benefit. There was a great crowd there, and everybody was anxious to see the “Wild Texan,” as they called me. I was the lion of the evening, particularly for the young ladies, who never tired of asking me questions about Mexico, Texas, the Indians, prairies, etc. I at first answered truthfully all the questions they asked me; but when I found they evidently doubted some of the stories I told them which were facts, then I branched out and gave them some whoppers. These they swallowed down without gagging. For instance, one young woman wanted to know how many wild horses I had ever seen in a drove. I told her perhaps thirty or forty thousand.
“Oh, now! Mr. Wallace,” said she, “don’t try to make game of me in that way. Forty thousand horses in one drove! Well, I declare you are a second Munchausen!”[1]
“Well, then,” said I, “maybe you won’t believe mewhen I tell you there is a sort of spider in Texas as big as a peck measure, the bite of which can only be cured by music.”
“Oh, yes,” she answered, “I believe that’s all so, for I have read about them in a book.”
“Among other whoppers, I told her there was a varmint in Texas called the Santa Fé, that was still worse than the tarantula, for the best brass band in the country couldn’t cure their sting; that the creature had a hundred legs and a sting on every one of them, besides two large stings in its forked tail, and fangs as big as a rattlesnake’s. When they sting you with their legs alone, you might possibly live an hour; when with all their stings, perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes; but when they sting and bite you at the same time, you first turn blue, then yellow, and then a beautiful bottle-green, when your hair all falls out, and your finger nails drop off, and in five minutes you are as dead as a door nail, in spite of all the doctors in America.”
“Oh! My! Mr. Wallace!” said she. “How have you managed to live so long in that horrible country?”
“Why, you see,” said I, “with my tarantula boots made of alligator skin, and my centipede hunting-shirt made of tanned rattlesnake hides, I have escaped pretty well; but these don’t protect you against the stinging scorpions, cow-killers, and scaly-back chinches, that crawl about at night when you are asleep! The only way to keep them at a distance is to chaw tobacco and drink whiskey, and that is the reason the Temperance Society never flourished much in Texas.”
“Oh!” said she, “what a horrible country that must be, where the people have to be stung to death, or else chaw tobacco and drink whiskey! I don’t know which is the worst.”
“Well,” said I, “the people out there don’t seem to mind it much; they get used to it after a while. In fact, they seem rather to like it, for they chaw tobaccoand drink whiskey even in the winter time, when the cow-killers and stinging lizards are all frozen up!”
What gusto, what warmth of natural sympathy, what genial expansion! Here the authentic liar has been translated by circumstances and by his own genius into the pure aura of truth. There is no distortion, no “wrenching the true cause the wrong way,” no base intent to win by arousing false fears or to defraud through false hopes. The artist has but arranged the objects of his scene and then handed the spectator a magnifying glass that is flawlessly translucent. The magnified vision, like that of Tartarin of Tarascon, seems but the effect of a sunlight transilluminating all other sunlights—the sunlight of Tartarin’s Midi country, “the only liar in the Midi.” Only here it is the sunlight of the West, which brings mountain ranges a hundred miles away within apparent touching distance and through its mirages makes antelopes stalk as tall as giraffes, gives to buffalo bulls far out on the prairies the proportions of hay wagons, and reveals spired cities and tree-shadowed lakes reposing in deserts actually so devoid of life that not even a single blade of green grass can there be found.
Occasionally one of these authentic liars of the West falls a prey to his own lying. Frank Root (The Overland Stage to California) relates that one time after a Gargantuan story-teller named Ranger Jones had finished narrating a particularly blood-curdling “personal experience,” a stage driver who happened to be among the listeners looked him squarely in the eye and said, “I hope, Ranger Jones, that you don’t expect me to believe this story.”
“Well—er—no—really, I don’t,” the narrator answered. “The fact is, I have lied out here in this Western country so long and have been in the habit of tellingso many damned lies, the truth of it is now that I don’t know when I can believe myself.” InTrails Plowed UnderCharles M. Russell has a delicious chapter on “Some Liars of the Old West.”
“These men weren’t vicious liars,” he comments. “It was love of romance, lack of reading matter, and the wish to be entertainin’ that makes ’em stretch facts and invent yarns.” Among the most famous of these liars was a man known as Lyin’ Jack, and his favorite tale was on an elk he once killed that had a spread of antlers fifteen feet wide. He always kept these, as he told the story, in the loft of his cabin.
One time after a long absence Lyin’ Jack showed up in Benton. “The boys” were all glad to see him and, after a round or two of drinks, asked him for a yarn.
“No, boys,” said Jack, “I’m through. For years I’ve been tellin’ these lies—told ’em so often I got to believin’ ’em myself. That story of mine about the elk with the fifteen-foot horns is what cured me. I told about that elk so often that I knowed the place I killed it. One night I lit a candle and crawled up in the loft to view the horns—an’ I’m damned if they weren’t there.”
In a book of not enough consequence to warrant the naming of its title, the author, writing through hearsay and attempting to be veracious, describes the Texas norther—which comes “sudden and soon in the dead of night or the blaze of noon”—as being so swift in descent, so terrible in force, and so bitterly cold that “no old Texan would trust himself out on the prairies in July or August with the thermometer at ninety-six degrees, without two blankets strapped at the saddlebow to keep him from freezing to death should a norther blow up.” Of course no man of the range carries his blankets on the horn of a saddle and noTexan ever experienced a genuine norther in July or August. The description is utterly false, utterly lacking in authenticity. On the other hand, when “Mr. Fishback of the Sulphurs” relates how one hot day in December when he was riding home he saw a blue norther coming behind him, put spurs to his horse, and, racing for miles with the nose of the wind at his very backbone, arrived at the stable to find the hind-quarters of his horse frozen stiff whereas the fore-quarters were in a lather of sweat—such a hair’s breadth doth divide the hot prelude to a norther from the iciness of the norther itself—we realize that we are in the company of a liar as authentic as he is accomplished. Surely such do not violate the ninth commandment; indeed they have become as little children.
—J. Frank Dobie,Austin, Texas,Cinco de Mayo, 1934.
[1]Forty thousand, even thirty thousand, mustangs are a lot of mustangs. InThe Young Explorers, a book privately printed in Austin, Texas, about 1892, Duval,pp.111-112, defends this extraordinary assertion. The wild horses were encountered between the Nueces River and the Río Grande. Corroborative of the enormous numbers to be found in that region is the testimony of William A. McClintock, “Journal of a Trip Through Texas and Northern Mexico,”Southwestern Historical Quarterly,Vol. XXXIV, pp.232-233. Bigfoot Wallace was not lying about the wild horses.