American Tall Tales

by Mary Pope Osborne

  He saw a man named Lincoln giving speeches in a field. “Keep it up!” John shouted. “Maybe you’ll be president someday!”

  For forty years John Chapman traveled the frontier lands between the Ohio River and the northern lakes, carrying his seeds like a bird. He was known in every Indian village and log cabin from the Ohio to Lake Michigan. The Shawnee called him the Appleseed Man and shared their tepees with him. Most of the settlers never knew his last name—they just called him Johnny Appleseed.

  One spring night in 1845, as John walked up the road to an Indiana farmhouse, a little girl rushed outside to greet him, crying, “Johnny Appleseed, you’ve come back!”

  “Hi, Rosie. It’s good to see you again.” And in the cool twilight he hugged her and gave her a bright-blue ribbon and a willow whistle.

  “Come inside, Johnny, and join us for dinner,” Rosie’s mother said.

  “Thank you, ma’am, but I think I prefer to eat in the fresh spring air tonight.”

  As he sat in the twilight, eating his bread and watching the setting sun, he seemed much quieter than usual.

  “Johnny, would you like to come in and sleep in front of the fire?” Rosie’s father asked when it grew dark.

  “No, thank you, William. I’ll be just fine in the barn. I like hearing the animals in the dark.”

  When John laid his tired body down in the soft barn hay, the dogs and chickens and lambs gathered around him. As the moon traveled slowly across the Indiana sky, John listened to the language of the animals, and he answered them in a voice as gentle as the balmy air. “Yes, the wolf should be kind to the lamb,” he said, “and the leopard should lie down with the calf. . . . Now, quiet, my friends, time to sleep, a little folding of our hands to sleep . . .”

  The next morning Rosie’s father found Johnny Appleseed lying very still in the hay. The following week the Fort Wayne Sentinel had a simple notice:

  Died in the neighborhood of this city, on Tuesday last,

  Mr. John Chapman,

  better known as Johnny Appleseed.

  Johnny was gone.

  But years later, when Rosie was a very old lady, she told a mysterious story to her great-great-granddaughter. It seems that the night Johnny Appleseed died, the birds began to sing joyfully in the midnight dark. Then just before dawn Rosie saw a small, thin man with a tin pot on his head slip from the barn into the forest. The man was followed by an old horse and a lame wolf.

  Other folks in the Ohio Valley still say that in the very early morning, before sunrise, if you go to a certain apple orchard at a bend in the river, you’ll see smoke rising into the blue morning air. Johnny Appleseed is heating up his coffee over his fire. Soon his spirit will begin moving among the trees, waking the apple blossoms to a new day.

  NOTES ON THE STORY

  IN THE 1840S, great wooden ships known as clippers began sailing the high seas. These narrow, swift vessels were considered the fastest ships in the world. They sailed from New England ports to the West Indies, Java, China, and India, carrying furs and bringing back tea and silks. They also sailed around the tip of South America, transporting gold seekers from the east coast of America to California. When the Civil War ended, in 1865, steamships—and later, oil-burning ships—took over the work of the clippers. The days of the great wind-driven wooden ships soon came to an end.

  Stormalong was first immortalized in “Old Stormalong,” a popular sea chantey, or work song, sung by sailors when they weighed anchor or hoisted the sails. In 1930, in his book Here’s Audacity, Frank Shay collected and retold the old yarns about Stormalong told by sailors from the old wooden ships. And a few years later, a pamphlet published by C. E. Brown brought together more of the Stormalong tales.

  The story of Stormalong has since been retold a number of times. The popularity of the tale is due at least in part to the nostalgic, romantic appeal of the tall, graceful clippers and admiration for the skill and physical courage of the sailors who piloted them. Since the fossil fuels that have driven our ships for the last hundred years are in finite supply, perhaps it is just a matter of time before the great wind-driven ships return to the sea.

  One day in the early 1800s a tidal wave crashed down on the shores of Cape Cod in New England. After the wave had washed back out to sea, the villagers heard deep, bellowing sounds coming from the beach. When they rushed to find out what was going on, they couldn’t believe their eyes. A giant baby three fathoms tall—or eighteen feet!—was crawling across the sand, crying in a voice as loud as a foghorn.

  The villagers put the baby in a big wheelbarrow and carried him to town. They took him to the meetinghouse and fed him barrels and barrels of milk. As ten people patted the baby on the back, the minister said, “What will we name him?”

  “How about Alfred Bulltop Stormalong?” a little boy piped up. “And call him Stormy for short.”

  The baby smiled at the boy, then let out a giant burp that nearly blew the roof off the meetinghouse.

  “Stormy it is!” everyone cried.

  As he grew older, Stormy was the main attraction of Cape Cod. He didn’t care for all the attention, however. It reminded him that he was different from everyone else. After school he always tried to slip away to the sea. He liked to swim out into the deep water and ride the whales and porpoises. Stormy’s love for the ocean was so strong that folks used to say he had salt water in his veins.

  By the time Stormy was twelve, he was already six fathoms tall—or thirty-six feet! “I guess you’re going to have to go out into the world now,” his friends said sadly. “The truth is, you’ve grown too big for this town. You can’t fit in the schoolhouse, and you’re too tall to work in a store. Maybe you should go to Boston. It’s a lot bigger than Cape Cod.”

  Stormy felt like an outcast as he packed his trunk, hoisted it over his shoulder, and started away. And when he arrived in Boston, he discovered something that made him even sadder. Although the city had more buildings than Cape Cod, they were just as small. Worse than that, his huge size and foghorn voice scared the daylights out of everyone he met.

  “A sailor’s life is the only one for me,” he said, staring longingly at Boston Harbor. “The sea’s my best friend. It’s with her that I belong.” And with his back to Boston, Stormy strode toward the biggest Yankee clipper docked in the harbor, The Lady of the Sea.

  “Blow me down!” said the captain when Stormy stood before him. “I’ve never seen a man as big as you before.”

  “I’m not a man,” said Stormy. “I’m twelve years old.”

  “Blow me down again!” said the captain. “I guess you’ll have to be the biggest cabin boy in the world, then. Welcome aboard, son.”

  The sailors were a bit shocked when the captain introduced the thirty-six-foot giant as their new cabin boy. But the day soon came when all the sailors of The Lady of the Sea completely accepted Stormy’s awesome size. It happened one morning when the clipper was anchored off the coast of South America.

  “Hoist the anchor!” the captain shouted after a few hours of deep-sea fishing. But when the crew pulled on the great chain, nothing happened. The sailors heaved and hoed, and still could not move the anchor off the bottom of the ocean.

  “Let me take care of it!” Stormy boomed. Then the cabin boy stuck a knife between his teeth, climbed onto the bowsprit, and dived into the sea.

  After Stormy disappeared, terrible sounds came from the water. The ship began pitching and tossing on wild, foaming waves. It seemed that all aboard were about to be hurled to a wet grave, when suddenly the sea grew calm again—and Stormy bobbed to the surface!

  Hand over hand he climbed the anchor chain, nearly pulling the ship onto her side with his great weight. As soon as he was safely aboard, he yanked up the anchor, and once again The Lady of the Sea began to glide through the ocean.

  “What happened?” cried the crew.

  “Just a little fight with a two-ton octopus,” said Stormy.

  “Octopus!”

  “Aye. He didn
’t want to let go of our anchor.”

  “What’d you do to him?” the others cried.

  “Wrestled eight slimy tentacles into double knots. It’ll take a month o’ Sundays for him to untie himself.”

  From then on Stormy was the most popular sailor on board. Over the next few years his reputation spread too, until all the Yankee clipper crews wanted him to sail with them.

  But Stormy still wasn’t happy. Partly it was because no ship, not even The Lady of the Sea, was big enough for him. She would nearly tip over when he stood close to her rail. All her wood peeled off when he scrubbed her decks. And giant waves rolled over her sides when he sang a sea chantey.

  Worst of all, Stormy was still lonely. The clipper’s hammocks were so small that at night he had to sleep by himself in a rowboat. As he listened to the other sailors singing and having a good time, he felt as if his best friend, the sea, had betrayed him. Maybe it was time for the giant sailor to move on.

  One day, when The Lady of the Sea dropped anchor in Boston, Stormy announced to his friends that he’d decided to give up his seafaring life. “I’m going to put an oar over my shoulder and head west,” he said. “I hear there’s room enough for any kind of folks out there, even ones as big as me.”

  “Where will you settle down, Stormy?” a sailor asked.

  “I’m going to walk till the first person asks me, ‘Hey, mister, what’s that funny thing you got on your shoulder there?’ Then I’ll know I’m far enough away from the sea, and I won’t ever think about her again.”

  Stormy walked through the cities of Providence and New York. He walked through the pine barrens of New Jersey and the woods of Pennsylvania. He crossed the Allegheny Mountains and floated on flatboats down the Ohio River.

  Pioneers often invited Stormy to share their dinner, but these occasions only made him homesick, for folks always guessed he was a sailor and asked him questions about the sea.

  It wasn’t until Stormy came to the plains of Kansas that a farmer said, “Hey, mister, what’s that funny thing you got on your shoulder?”

  “You asked the right question, mate,” said Stormy. “I’m going to settle down on this spot and dig me some potatoes!”

  And that’s just what Stormy did. Soon he became the best farmer around. He planted over five million potatoes and watered his whole crop with the sweat of his brow.

  But all the time Stormy was watering, hoeing, picking, and planting, he knew he still had not found a home. He was too big to go square dancing in the dance hall. He was too big to visit other farmhouses, too big for the meetinghouse, too big for the general store.

  And he felt a great yearning for the sea. He missed the fishy-smelling breezes and salt spray. Never in the prairies did a giant wave knock him to his knees. Never did a hurricane whirl him across the earth. How could he ever test his true strength and courage?

  One day, several years after Stormy’s disappearance, the sailors of Boston Harbor saw a giant coming down the wharf, waving his oar above his head. As he approached, they began to whoop with joy. Stormy was back!

  But as happy as they were to see him, they were horrified when they discovered how bad he looked. He was all stooped over. His face was like a withered cornstalk, and there were pale bags under his eyes.

  After word spread about Stormy’s condition, thousands of sailors met to talk about the problem.

  “We’ve got to keep him with us this time,” one said.

  “There’s only one way to do it,” said another. “Build a ship that’s big enough.”

  “Aye!” the others agreed. “We can’t be having him trail behind us at night in his own rowboat!”

  So the New England sailors set about building the biggest clipper ship in the world. Her sails had to be cut and sewn in the Mojave Desert, and after she was built, there was a lumber shortage all over America. It took over forty seamen to manage her pilot’s wheel—unless, of course, the captain happened to be Alfred Bulltop Stormalong, who could whirl the ship’s wheel with his baby finger!

  Stormalong named the clipper The Courser. On her maiden voyage, he clutched The Courser’s wheel and steered her out of Boston Harbor. As he soared over the billowing waves, his cheeks glowed with sunburn, his hair sparkled with ocean spray, and the salt water began coursing through his veins again.

  Soon Stormy and The Courser were taking cargoes all over the world—to India, China, and Europe. It took four weeks to get all hands on deck. Teams of white horses carried sailors from stem to stern. The ship’s towering masts had to be hinged to let the sun and the moon go by. The tips of the masts were padded so they wouldn’t punch holes in the sky. The trip to the crow’s nest took so long, the sailors who climbed to the top returned with gray beards. The vessel was so big that once, when she hit an island in the Caribbean Sea, she knocked it clear into the Gulf of Mexico!

  But one of The Courser’s most memorable escapades took place in the English Channel. When she was trying to sail between Calais and the dark cliffs of Dover, her crew discovered the width of her beam was wider than the passageway.

  “It’s impossible to wedge her through!” the first mate cried. “We have to turn back!”

  “Hurry, before she crashes on the rocks!” said another.

  “No, don’t turn her back!” bellowed Stormy from the captain’s wheel. “Bring all the soap on deck!”

  The crew thought Stormy had lost his mind, but they went below and hauled up the three-ton shipment of soap just picked up in Holland.

  “Now swab her sides until she’s as slippery as an eel,” Stormy ordered.

  “Aye!” the sailors shouted, and they sang a chantey as they plastered The Courser’s sides with white soap.

  “Now we’ll take her through!” said Stormy. And as the ship’s sails caught the wind, Stormalong eased her between the Dover cliffs and Calais. Ever since then the white cliffs of Dover have been as milky white as a whale’s belly, and the sea below still foams with soapsuds.

  For years Stormalong was the most famous sea captain in the world. Sailors in every port told how he ate ostrich eggs for breakfast, a hundred gallons of whale soup for lunch, and a warehouseful of shark meat for dinner. They told how after every meal he’d pick his teeth with an eighteen-foot oar—some said it was the same oar he once carried to Kansas.

  But it was also said that sometimes when the crew sang chanteys late at night, their giant captain would stand alone on the deck, gazing out at the sea with a look of unfathomable sorrow in his eyes.

  After the Civil War, steamships began to transport cargo over the seas. The days of the great sailing ships came to an end, and the courageous men who steered the beautiful Yankee clippers across the oceans also began to disappear.

  No one remembers quite how old Stormalong died. All they recollect is his funeral. It seems that one foggy twilight thousands of sailors attended his burial. They covered him with a hundred yards of the finest Chinese silk, and then fifty sailors carried his huge coffin to a grave near the sea. As they dug into the sand with silver spades and lowered his coffin with a silver cord, they wept tears like rain.

  And for years afterward they sang about him:

  Old Stormy’s dead and gone to rest—

  To my way, hey, Stormalong!

  Of all the sailors he was the best—

  Aye, aye, aye, Mister Stormalong!

  Ever since then seamen first class put “A.B.S.” after their names. Most people think it means “Able-Bodied Seaman.” But the old New England seafaring men know different. They know it stands for the most amazing deep-water sailor who ever lived, Alfred Bulltop Stormalong.

  NOTES ON THE STORY

  IN 1848, AMERICA’S first urban folk hero was born on the Broadway stage. The play was A Glance at New York, by B. A. Baker, and its hero was Mose, the “Bowery B’hoy.” Baker based the character Mose on an actual person, Mose Humphreys, a resident of the Bowery and a well-known volunteer firefighter. At that time the old fire machines of New York were ha
rdly more than wagons with hoses. But these “pumpers” were proudly pulled through the streets by the four thousand volunteer “fireboys” of the city.

  A Glance at New York was one of the biggest hits of the nineteenth-century American theater. Other plays about Mose followed, and before long, stories about him were published in newspapers and booklets, and his picture began to appear on posters and lithographs. After the Civil War, however, the development of steam fire engines, requiring far less manpower, rendered the old pumpers obsolete. The volunteer firefighters were replaced by a professional force, and the Mose craze came to an end.

  Nevertheless, for years afterward tales about Mose continued to spring up, and in 1915 a historian named Herbert Asbury claimed that he collected Mose stories from the old men on the Bowery and included them in his books The Gangs of New York and Ye Olde Fire Laddies. This tale draws mainly from Asbury’s stories and from B. A. Baker’s A Glance at New York.

  “Afternoon, Mac!” Mose Humphreys tipped his stovepipe hat, revealing his flaming red hair. Puffing a huge cigar, he swaggered toward his special table at the Paradise Soup House on the Bowery. Mose was eight feet tall and had hands as large as Virginia hams. His arms were so long that he could scratch his kneecaps without bending his back.

  “Hi, Mose! What’ll it be?” shouted Mac, one of the soup house waiters.

  Mose sat down in the big chair made especially for him and said, “Bring me a plate of pork and beans, Mac.”

  But just then cries came from outside—“Fire! Fire! Turn out! Turn out!”—and the fire-alarm bell jangled from the City Hall tower.

  A newsboy burst into the soup house, shouting, “Front Street tenement on fire! Spreading fast!”

  Mose bounded out of the soup house. As an eerie glow lit up the evening sky of New York City, he hurried to his fire station. Other volunteer firemen rushed out of workshops, ballrooms, shipyards, and factories, until soon twenty-nine brawny men had joined Mose at the station house.