Legends and Tales of the American West

by Richard Erdoes

  Many years went by because, being the most stubborn folks on earth, it took the loggers that long to admit that their get-rich schemes had not panned out. None of them had hit paydirt. All of them were in rags and starving. They came to the conclusion that going back to chopping down trees for a living was not such a bad idea.

  One fine morning the whole bunch of them was rapping at Paul’s door, clamoring for work. They had aged a bit. Paul too was older now, with a good crop of white hairs in his beard, while Old Babe was showing a lot of gray between the horns, but they were all as strong as ever, eager to go back to doing what they did best.

  They started up again at their last campsite. They found things as they had left them, except that the ground around the bunkhouse was littered with bones—rabbit, woodchuck, and gopher bones, to judge by their size. They also found a lot of tracks of a kind nobody had ever seen before. Otherwise there was no sign of life anywhere. “Mighty queer,” said Sowbosom Sam, the belly robber. Then all had their pork and beans and went to sleep.

  In the middle of the night Paul was wakened by a helliferocious racket. The loggers were hollering and screaming. One yelled, “Kangaroos! I’m being hassled by kangaroos!” Another cried, “Wildcats, I’m being savaged by wildcats!” Still another was yelling, “Badgers, badgers, one of ’em got a bite-hold on my nose!” They were all hollering like the devil and, somewhere, Old Babe was bellowing so loudly that it shook the leaves from their branches. Then Paul felt something stirring in his beard. At first, he paid it no mind, being accustomed to a bunch of birds always nesting in there, but all of a sudden he noticed sharp teeth nibbling at his ear. He made a grab at whatever was the cause of it, and came up with a beaver-sized critter that was scratching, biting, and squealing something fierce. Paul had to whack it at least a dozen times with his mighty fists, and stomp it with his half-acre boots, before he got the better of it. The loggers, in their long johns, were in a hellish uproar, kicking and hitting out at some unseen varmints. A few of the fellows lit their lanterns and by the light of them were dumbfounded to see passels of the weirdest outlandish critters scurrying about, snapping at their heels, jumping at their throats, snarling and growling, their gimlet eyes glowing like coals. The loggers were defending themselves as best they could with axes and sledge hammers, having their hands more than full. “Kangaroos!” screamed one man, beset by three strange beasts that could jump fifty feet into the air. One man was crying that he had a wolverine by the ears and was afraid of letting go. All night long, amidst an incredible turmoil, the loggers fought off the monstrous creatures, but as soon as the sun came up, they were all gone as if by magic, except one which Old Babe had trampled with his enormous hooves until it was dead.

  The fellows crowded around to examine it. They shuddered at the sight. It was the queerest, awfullest thing that ever was seen. The devilish critter was about as big as a wolf, covered with brownish fuzz, and strangely flat, as if it had been squashed by a steam press. It had huge mandibles with rows of sharp, cone-shaped teeth, but the weirdest thing about it was that it had six stumpy, hairy legs. The fellows looked at it in stupefied wonderment. It had them puzzled.

  Paul sat down on a boulder and started thinking, all the time contemplating the evil being. Suddenly, he jumped high in the air, clicked his heels, and shouted, “By the Great Swamp Gaboon and the Fire-breathing Windigo! Boys, I’ve got it! I’ll break my pick if this here ain’t an oversized bedbug!”

  “How, in blazes, did it get so big?” the loggers wanted to know.

  Paul gave it to them: “Boys, it’s what they call nowadays the survival of the fittest. When we quit here, ten years ago, we left our little cuties with nothing to feed on. The fleas and mattress lizards plumb starved to death, except the biggest and most ferocious, who started feeding on grasshoppers, maybe, and those pests had litters, and the litters had litters, and always the smallest and weakest died off, leaving only the biggest sons of bitches to reproduce their kind. So our little pets became bigger and bigger, going on from eating rats and gophers to dining on cats and rabbits and sheep. Those rambunctious hoppers you called kangaroos are fleas. The rest are all graybacks and chinch bugs. They’re all gone now, because they sleep during the day and feed at night.”

  “What do we do, Paul?” asked Sourdough Dave. “Come dark, they’ll be back. I don’t mind tellin’ you, I’m skeered.”

  “Leave it to me, boys,” said Paul. He saddled up Babe and galloped over to the nearby fort, talking the colonel into lending him two of those newfangled Gatling guns, and a platoon of cannoneers with a battery of quick-firing Napoleons. To top it all, he hitched Old Babe to a big twelve-pounder Parrott cannon. Before nightfall Paul was back in camp with all his artillery. He made the loggers and soldiers hide in and around the bunkhouse and set up woodpiles generously sprinkled with lamp oil. Beside each woodpile he had a lumberjack standing by with a box of lucifers, ready to set it ablaze as soon as Paul gave the word.

  “Wait till you see the whites of their eyes, boys, and then let ’em have it!” Paul told his men.

  As soon as it got dark, the lumberjacks could hear, coming from afar, a scruffling and scurrying, caterwauling and snarling, teeth-clicking and mewling to make the hair of even the hardiest woodsman stand on end. Soon they could make out hundreds of wicked eyes glowing in the dark amid a great noise of slavering, salivating, and chop-licking that set their teeth chattering.

  Instantly, Paul gave the order: “Light your fires, boys, and give ’em a whiff of grapeshot!”

  As soon as the fires illuminated the scene, the men saw a great mass of fearful varmints hopping, slithering, crawling, and scurrying toward them. At once the soldiers and loggers opened up with their Gatlings and Napoleons as the boom of cannon mingled with the sound of shotgun blasts and the whistling of rifle bullets. It was a massacre. Monstrous as they were, the giant insects could not stand up to the weapons of intelligent human beings. The men made short work of the ungodly pests whose carcasses soon were littering the ground. Old Babe had the time of his life, bellowing and stomping to death every critter that was still moving. When it was all over, the fellows gave a mighty cheer that made the mountains tremble.

  Paul ordered a roll call and found that one man was missing—Sowbosom Sam, the cook. One of the loggers spoke up, saying that he had seen one of the kangaroo-fleas carrying off what seemed to be a human.

  “Holy mackerel! That’s Sowbosom Sam for sure!” cried the King of Lumberjacks as he jumped on Old Babe’s back, “After him! Paul Bunyan to the rescue!”

  Off like the wind they went. Luckily, a full moon was rising, giving Paul glimpses of the monstrous flea carrying off the poor cook in his claws. The critter was mighty fast, covering a hundred yards with each jump. Old Babe had to crank up his speed, slowly gaining on the misbegotten insect. When it came to the crunch, nobody and nothing could outrun the Little Blue Ox of the Woods. At dawn they caught up with the kangaroo-flea and his victim. The monster, sitting on a rock, had a stranglehold on Sowbosom Sam and was about to gobble him like corn on the cob. Paul had his trusted Hawken rifle ready and let fly at the flea. The heavy slug hit it right between the eyes, but it was so hardheaded that it merely shook the bullet off, looked annoyed, and turned back to nibble at Sam’s rump. Then Old Babe charged. He caught the kangaroo-flea on one horn, flipped it upward a mile in the air, caught it on his other horn, and then kept tossing the cussed critter from one horn to the other until nothing remained of it but a few tufts of fuzz. That left Sowbosom Sam up in the air. Old Babe had flung him so high that it took the cook quite a while to come down. Paul caught him with both arms and set him gently down. Sam felt himself all over to make sure that all of him was still there and found that, except for a tiny nibble, he was still intact.

  “That was mighty close,” was Sowbosom Sam’s comment.

  Thunder Bay

  A violent norther was blowing when Shot Gunderson, the iron man of the Saginaw, came across the ice to challenge Paul Bun
yan.

  The iron man had his back to the wind. Paul Bunyan’s battle plan called for an exactly opposite position, but he was forced to make the best of this one. At any rate, the shantyboys were safe. The logger still hoped to make the iron man face the wind. Just how to maneuver him into that position was the question.

  To spar for time Paul engaged in a preliminary to actual battle. Shot Gunderson sneeringly participated. The iron man did not care. He had no fear or doubt about the outcome. He was invulnerable. He was likewise irresistible. Water was his only weakness, and he stood on seventeen feet of ice. So he scornfully followed the logger’s lead.

  “Go ahead and sashay,” rasped the iron man. “But it ain’t goin’ to do yer a particle of good.”

  Paul Bunyan said nothing. Leaning hard into the wind, he grimly eyed Shot Gunderson, at the same time hefting a bay-shore boulder in his left hand.

  Suddenly he tossed it in the wind and instantly pulzerized the stone with a blow of his right fist. Clouds of grit blew down the necks of the wind-heaved shantyboys on the shore. Grinning harshly, Shot Gunderson hauled fistfuls of black stuff from a mackinaw pocket and shoved them into his mouth. Then he struck sparks from his flint. A violent explosion rocked down the wind. The iron man of the Saginaw had fired a charge of blasting powder between his jaws without loosening a tooth. Paul Bunyan did not change expression.

  His next move was to draw a sixteen-foot log from his hip-pocket and set it on his shoulder.

  “Dast you to knock the log off my shoulder here,” Paul Bunyan growled.

  Shot Gunderson responded by gouging a furrow five feet deep in the ice with the toe of his boot.

  “Dast you to cross that line there,” he rasped.

  “I’m going to make you look human,” growled Paul Bunyan then. “For that you got to be peeled. So here and now I start to peel off your iron hide.”

  “I’m making a patchwork cushion outer you there,” rasped the iron man. “To make that I got to take you to pieces first. So I’m startin’ in to make pieces of you now.”

  That ended the ceremonies, which were to serve as a model forevermore when men in the woods engaged in battle. They failed to swerve Paul Bunyan. The iron man had not budged from his position. He leaned back solidly into the norther, his anvil fists slowly but surely coming up for a fighting swing. The boss logger did not quail or retreat, though fully convinced by now that Shot Gunderson was actually invulnerable and irresistible. The rumors had not told the half of it about the iron man.…

  Now the norther began to prove that the biggest storms indeed have the longest lulls. After the lull before dawn the wind had steadily increased, first with its barrage of gusts, then with its first massed forces, and at last with a terrific wedge of wind aimed and hurled with solid violence at Thunder Bay. Now the weather unloosed its last and mightiest effort against the boss logger. The wind was backing up Shot Gunderson.

  That was the iron man’s main trouble when he tried to set himself for one straight finishing punch.…

  Just an instant too late Shot Gunderson unloosed his irresistible fist. Paul Bunyan was already lunging inside the blow. The iron man’s arm shot harmlessly by Paul Bunyan’s dodging head like a log plunging over a waterfall. Nobody was there.

  It was the boss logger’s great chance. The force of his missed blow and the drive of the wind hurled the iron man off balance. He whirled dizzily. Paul Bunyan felt his own feet fly off the ice, but he sturdily kept his grip on the iron man’s corrugated throat. Shot Gunderson drove his spikes into the ice and hauled up, still on his feet. Paul Bunyan made his cleanest landing since the time he tumbled from the high jump of bucking Big Auger River. His vaulting feet curved down in a royal arc and struck true. Now Paul Bunyan had his back to the wind. Shot Gunderson, white-hot with frustrated wrath, leaned into the wind to seize his adversary in a death grapple.

  The boss logger was at last set to carry out the battle plan his sagacity had formed. The iron man was hooking him close. At his rear the norther was battering with increasingly furious blasts. Paul Bunyan leaned back carefully into the wind. He dropped his left hand from Gunderson’s neck, leaving his own jaw exposed.

  Then he roared tauntingly into the iron man’s funneled ear: “Scared to try another punch? Scared to fight and bound to wrassle? Where’s your killer’s punch, iron man?”

  The taunt was shrewd. Certainly it was Paul Bunyan alone who had done all the wrestling so far, and it was Shot Gunderson who had tried to fire a punch. The iron man raged. He heard nothing but the taunt, and he saw nothing but the exposed left jaw of the boss logger.

  “Show yer who’s skeered,” he rasped. “Show yer who’s a-wrastlin’! Right now I shatter that jaw of your’n into shavin’s!”

  Even as he rasped out the boast, the iron man dropped his anvil of a fist down to his boot top, to start an inside uppercut which would smash into the logger’s unguarded jaw. At that, Paul Bunyan took a yet heavier lean back into the norther. He tensed every muscle. The iron man’s irresistible fist started up like a huge rock heaved by a power enormous. In the very same instant of an instant Paul Bunyan yanked the iron man toward him with his right hand and pivoted himself out to the right like sheet lightning. The battering norther hammered by him, driving with full force into Shot Gunderson.

  The iron man’s fist was shooting up like seventeen cannonballs in one. The norther hit the irresistible fist when it was only inches from its mark and deflected its course. Shot Gunderson himself took the blow. The inside uppercut ended under his own chin with a shattering impact, lifted him explosively, hurled him backward in an enormous arc—and then the bay earned its loud name as the iron man of the Saginaw drove head first through the ice with a crash that resounded in echoes for five hours.

  Huge foaming waves and ponderous floes broke upon the boots of horseshoe iron that turned their calks toward the sky. The boots quivered once and were still. That quick Shot Gunderson gave up the ghost.

  CHAPTER 7

  Gold! Gold! Gold!

  It all started on January 24, 1848, at Sutter’s Mill in California’s Sacramento Valley, when Jim Marshall picked up a nugget and cried, “Boys, I think I found a gold mine!”

  The gold rush was on. Prospectors came from the East Coast in sailing ships around the Horn, or traveled across the whole width of the continent, some with nothing more than a handcart. The Great Melting Pot was born here—California swarmed with Yankees, southerners, ex-farmers and city dwellers, Mexicans, Chileans, Australians, Kanakas, Chinamen, Indians, blacks, and Europeans in general. Among these comers were titled English men, a longtime mistress of the king of Bavaria, men who claimed descent from Napoleon, famous writers, actors, and actresses, adventurers, cardsharps, duelists, and whores. All of them arrived sick with gold fever, consumed by greed and hope, lured by the shiny yellow metal, which made a very few of them rich, and made a very many of the “Fools of Forty-nine” wish they had never heard the word “gold.”

  Yearning for gold peopled the West, drove the Indians onto reservations, gave an impetus to the building of the transcontinental railroad, and spelled the end of the buffalo.

  The California Gold Rush was followed by gold strikes in Colorado, Montana, South Dakota, Arizona, and Alaska. Denver, Tombstone, Sacramento, Helena, and Deadwood owed their birth to gold. When the gold gave out, men could still make a fortune in silver, copper, or lead. Every strike brought on a new avalanche of immigrants. Gold inspired adventure stories, songs, and poems. In particular, it inspired legends—legends of jubilation and despair, of love and lust, murder and self-sacrifice, of devils and ghosts, and, most often, of lost treasures and mines—the Lost Dutchman’s, the Lost Frenchman’s, the Lost Jim Bowie, the Lost Bonanza, the Lost Breyfogle, the Lost Crazy Woman’s, the Lost Phantom, the Lost … There just is no end of them and, occasionally, one can still encounter a wild-eyed Oldtimer, with a map, wielding pick and shovel in search of buried treasure. The mines and treasures may be lost forever, but their legen
ds endure to this day.

  Tommy-Knockers

  The mines of Park City, Utah, are haunted by “tommy-knockers,” dwarfish ghosts, both disembodied and corporeal, some of them good and some evil. The mine shafts and galleries are also the abodes of a beautiful, nude, pale-skinned female spirit, with flowing, gossamer tresses, sometimes, but not always, astride a white headless horse.

  Perkin Basset, a “Cousin Jack”—that is, one of thousands of Cornishmen who came to America to work in the gold and silver mines—had a special cross to bear when it came to tommy-knockers, who, for reasons beyond this ken, singled him out for their unwanted attentions. It might have been that Perkin imbibed too much “conversation fluid,” which induced him to tell strange stories of being kept awake at night by the “click and ping” of single-jacking coming from the nearby mine, the eerie sounds of jack against drill caused by invisible imps. It got so bad that poor Perkin was robbed of his sleep by this infernal, persisting hammering, reverberating in his ears right inside his humble shack until it seemed to him that the ghost was driving the steel right into his throbbing head. The desperate miner had recourse to a bottle of the good creature that he kept right by the straw sack which served him as a bed, but the more of the stuff he knocked down, the worse it got. Finally, it dawned on him who it was that kept him awake.

  It was a tommy-knocker who, in his earthly existence, had been one Joe Trelawney, an old Cousin Jack and hard-rock man who had gone up the flume during a gas explosion in the Chinaman’s Pit. From this fellow Perkin had borrowed five dollars and the man had gone over the range before Perkin had a chance to pay him back. “That’s why he’s makin’ a noosance o’ himself,” Perkin told his friends while bending his elbow at the Free Soil saloon. “He’s worried about his goddam five bucks.”