American Tall Tales

by Mary Pope Osborne

  After O’Reilly invented the character of Pecos Bill, many others revised and expanded upon the yarns in dozens of books, articles, poems, recordings, and plays. Pecos Bill seemed to capture the spirit of an earlier America—wild, untamed, and unsocialized. He even added an occasional note of his own brand of recklessness to stories about other tall-tale characters as well. In an original Febold Feboldson story, Febold and Pecos Bill have a shoot-out. And in a Paul Bunyan anthology, Pecos Bill teaches Paul how to ride a streak of lightning. This tale about Pecos Bill was derived from the O’Reilly saga as well as a number of other retellings.

  Ask any coyote near the Pecos River in western Texas who was the best cowboy who ever lived, and he’ll throw back his head and howl, “Ah-hooo!” If you didn’t know already, that’s coyote language for Pecos Bill.

  When Pecos Bill was a little baby, he was as tough as a pine knot. He teethed on horseshoes instead of teething rings and played with grizzly bears instead of teddy bears. He could have grown up just fine in the untamed land of eastern Texas. But one day his pappy ran in from the fields, hollering, “Pack up, Ma! Neighbors movin’ in fifty miles away! It’s gettin’ too crowded!”

  Before sundown Bill’s folks loaded their fifteen kids and all their belongings into their covered wagon and started west.

  As they clattered across the desolate land of western Texas, the crushing heat nearly drove them all crazy. Baby Bill got so hot and cross that he began to wallop his big brothers. Pretty soon all fifteen kids were going at one another tooth and nail. Before they turned each other into catfish bait, Bill fell out of the wagon and landed kerplop on the sun-scorched desert.

  The others were so busy fighting that they didn’t even notice the baby was missing until it was too late to do anything about it.

  Well, tough little Bill just sat there in the dirt, watching his family rattle off in a cloud of dust, until an old coyote walked over and sniffed him.

  “Goo-goo!” Bill said.

  Now it’s an amazing coincidence, but “Goo-goo” happens to mean something similar to “Glad to meet you” in coyote language. Naturally the old coyote figured he’d come across one of his own kind. He gave Bill a big lick and picked him up by the scruff of the neck and carried him home to his den.

  Bill soon discovered the coyote’s kinfolk were about the wildest, roughest bunch you could imagine. Before he knew it, he was roaming the prairies with the pack. He howled at the moon, sniffed the brush, and chased lizards across the sand. He was having such a good time, scuttling about naked and dirty on all fours, that he completely forgot what it was like to be a human.

  Pecos Bill’s coyote days came to an end about seventeen years later. One evening as he was sniffing the sagebrush, a cowpoke came loping by on a big horse. “Hey, you!” he shouted. “What in the world are you?”

  Bill sat on his haunches and stared at the feller.

  “What are you?” asked the cowpoke again.

  “Varmint,” said Bill hoarsely, for he hadn’t used his human voice in seventeen years.

  “No, you ain’t!”

  “Yeah, I am. I got fleas, don’t I?”

  “Well, that don’t mean nothing. A lot of Texans got fleas. The thing varmints got that you ain’t got is a tail.”

  “Oh, yes, I do have a tail,” said Pecos Bill.

  “Lemme see it, then,” said the cowpoke.

  Bill turned around to look at his rear end, and for the first time in his life he realized he didn’t have a tail.

  “Dang,” he said. “But if I’m not a varmint, what am I?”

  “You’re a cowboy! So start acting like one!”

  Bill just growled at the feller like any coyote worth his salt would. But deep down in his heart of hearts he knew the cowpoke was right. For the last seventeen years he’d had a sneaking suspicion that he was different from that pack of coyotes. For one thing, none of them seemed to smell quite as bad as he did.

  So with a heavy heart he said good-bye to his four-legged friends and took off with the cowpoke for the nearest ranch.

  Acting like a human wasn’t all that easy for Pecos Bill. Even though he soon started dressing right, he never bothered to shave or comb his hair. He’d just throw some water on his face in the morning and go around the rest of the day looking like a wet dog. Ignorant cowpokes claimed Bill wasn’t too smart. Some of the meaner ones liked to joke that he wore a ten-dollar hat on a five-cent head.

  The truth was Pecos Bill would soon prove to be one of the greatest cowboys who ever lived. He just needed to find the kind of folks who’d appreciate him. One night when he was licking his dinner plate, his ears perked up. A couple of ranch hands were going on about a gang of wild cowboys.

  “Yep. Those fellas are more animal than human,” one ranch hand was saying.

  “Yep. Them’s the toughest bunch I ever come across. Heck, they’re so tough, they can kick fire out of flint rock with their bare toes!”

  “Yep. ’N’ they like to bite nails in half for fun!”

  “Who are these fellers?” asked Bill.

  “The Hell’s Gate Gang,” said the ranch hand. “The mangiest, meanest, most low-down bunch of low-life varmints that ever grew hair.”

  “Sounds like my kind of folks,” said Bill, and before anyone could holler whoa, he jumped on his horse and took off for Hell’s Gate Canyon.

  Bill hadn’t gone far when disaster struck. His horse stepped in a hole and broke its ankle.

  “Dang!” said Bill as he stumbled up from the spill. He draped the lame critter around his neck and hurried on.

  After he’d walked about a hundred more miles, Bill heard some mean rattling. Then a fifty-foot rattlesnake reared up its ugly head and stuck out its long, forked tongue, ready to fight.

  “Knock it off, you scaly-hided fool. I’m in a hurry,” Bill said.

  The snake didn’t give a spit for Bill’s plans. He just rattled on.

  Before the cussed varmint could strike, Bill had no choice but to knock him cross-eyed. “Hey, feller,” he said, holding up the dazed snake. “I like your spunk. Come go with us.” Then he wrapped the rattler around his arm and continued on his way.

  After Bill had hiked another hundred miles with his horse around his neck and his snake around his arm, he heard a terrible growl. A huge mountain lion was crouching on a cliff, getting ready to leap on top of him.

  “Don’t jump, you mangy bobtailed fleabag!” Bill said.

  Well, call any mountain lion a mangy bobtailed fleabag, and he’ll jump on your back for sure. After this one leaped onto Bill, so much fur began to fly that it darkened the sky. Bill wrestled that mountain lion into a headlock, then squeezed him so tight that the big cat had to cry uncle.

  When the embarrassed old critter started to slink off, Bill felt sorry for him. “Aw, c’mon, you big silly,” he said. “You’re more like me than most humans I meet.”

  He saddled up the cat and jumped on his back, and the four of them headed for the canyon, with the mountain lion screeching, the horse neighing, the rattler rattling, and Pecos Bill hollering a wild war whoop.

  When the Hell’s Gate Gang heard those noises coming from the prairie, they nearly fainted. They dropped their dinner plates, and their faces turned as white as bleached desert bones. Their knees knocked and their six-guns shook.

  “Hey there!” Bill said as he sidled up to their campfire, grinning. “Who’s the boss around here?”

  A nine-foot feller with ten pistols at his sides stepped forward and in a shaky voice said, “Stranger, I was. But from now on, it’ll be you.”

  “Well, thanky, pardner,” said Bill. “Get on with your dinner, boys. Don’t let me interrupt.”

  Once Bill settled down with the Hell’s Gate Gang, his true genius revealed itself. With his gang’s help, he put together the biggest ranch in the Southwest. He used New Mexico as a corral and Arizona as a pasture. He invented tarantulas and scorpions as practical jokes. He also invented roping. Some say his rope was exactly
as long as the equator; others argue it was two feet shorter.

  Things were going fine for Bill until Texas began to suffer the worst drought in its history. It was so dry that all the rivers turned as powdery as biscuit flour. The parched grass was catching fire everywhere. For a while Bill and his gang managed to lasso water from the Rio Grande. When that river dried up, they lassoed water from the Gulf of Mexico.

  No matter what he did, though, Bill couldn’t get enough water to stay ahead of the drought. All his horses and cows were starting to dry up and blow away like balls of tumbleweed. It was horrible.

  Just when the end seemed near, the sky turned a deep shade of purple. From the distant mountains came a terrible roar. The cattle began to stampede, and a huge black funnel of a cyclone appeared, heading straight for Bill’s ranch.

  The rest of the Hell’s Gate Gang shouted, “Help!” and ran.

  But Pecos Bill wasn’t scared in the least. “Yahoo!” he hollered, and he swung his lariat and lassoed that cyclone around its neck.

  Bill held on tight as he got sucked up into the middle of the swirling cloud. He grabbed the cyclone by the ears and pulled himself onto her back. Then he let out a whoop and headed that twister across Texas.

  The mighty cyclone bucked, arched, and screamed like a wild bronco. But Pecos Bill just held on with his legs and used his strong hands to wring the rain out of her wind. He wrung out rain that flooded Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, until finally he slid off the shriveled-up funnel and fell into California. The earth sank about two hundred feet below sea level in the spot where Bill landed, creating the area known today as Death Valley.

  “There. That little waterin’ should hold things for a while,” he said, brushing himself off.

  After his cyclone ride, no horse was too wild for Pecos Bill. He soon found a young colt that was as tough as a tiger and as crazy as a streak of lightning. He named the colt Widow Maker and raised him on barbed wire and dynamite. Whenever the two rode together, they back-flipped and somersaulted all over Texas, loving every minute of it.

  One day when Bill and Widow Maker were bouncing around the Pecos River, they came across an awesome sight: a wild-looking, red-haired woman riding on the back of the biggest catfish Bill had ever seen. The woman looked like she was having a ball, screeching, “Ride ’em, cowgirl!” as the catfish whipped her around in the air.

  “What’s your name?” Bill shouted.

  “Slue-foot Sue! What’s it to you?” she said. Then she war-whooped away over the windy water.

  Thereafter all Pecos Bill could think of was Slue-foot Sue. He spent more and more time away from the Hell’s Gate Gang as he wandered the barren cattle-lands, looking for her. When he finally found her lonely little cabin, he was so love-struck he reverted to some of his old coyote ways. He sat on his haunches in the moonlight and began a-howling and ah-hooing.

  Well, the good news was that Sue had a bit of coyote in her too, so she completely understood Bill’s language. She stuck her head out her window and ah-hooed back to him that she loved him, too. Consequently Bill and Sue decided to get married.

  On the day of the wedding Sue wore a beautiful white dress with a steel-spring bustle, and Bill appeared in an elegant buckskin suit.

  But after a lovely ceremony, a terrible catastrophe occurred. Slue-foot Sue got it into her head that she just had to have a ride on Bill’s wild bronco, Widow Maker.

  “You can’t do that, honey,” Bill said. “He won’t let any human toss a leg over him but me.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Sue. “You know I can ride anything on four legs, not to mention what flies or swims.”

  Bill tried his best to talk Sue out of it, but she wouldn’t listen. She was dying to buck on the back of that bronco. Wearing her white wedding dress with the bustle, she jumped on Widow Maker and kicked him with her spurs.

  Well, that bronco didn’t need any thorns in his side to start bucking to beat the band. He bounded up in the air with such amazing force that suddenly Sue was flying high into the Texas sky. She flew over plains and mesas, over canyons, deserts, and prairies. She flew so high that she looped over the new moon and fell back to earth.

  But when Sue landed on her steel-spring bustle, she rebounded right back into the heavens! As she bounced back and forth between heaven and earth, Bill whirled his lariat above his head, then lassoed her. But instead of bringing Sue back down to earth, he got yanked into the night sky alongside her!

  Together Pecos Bill and Slue-foot Sue bounced off the earth and went flying to the moon. And at that point Bill must have gotten some sort of foothold in a moon crater—because neither he nor Sue returned to earth. Not ever.

  Folks figure those two must have dug their boot heels into some moon cheese and raised a pack of wild coyotes just like themselves. Texans’ll tell you that every time you hear thunder rolling over the desolate land near the Pecos River, it’s just Bill’s family having a good laugh upstairs. When you hear a strange ah-hooing in the dark night, don’t be fooled—that’s the sound of Bill howling on the moon instead of at it. And when lights flash across the midnight sky, you can bet it’s Bill and Sue riding the backs of some white-hot shooting stars.

  NOTES ON THE STORY

  AFTER THE CIVIL WAR, the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad Company laid hundreds of miles of railroad track through West Virginia. These new railroad routes opened up timber and coal lands and created new towns. When the tracks reached the Alleghenies, the railroad company hired more than a thousand laborers to build tunnels through the mountains. The tunnels were created by blasting through the mountain shale. This work was done by “steel drivers,” men who drilled steel spikes into the solid rock. Once the holes were drilled, they were packed with dynamite. Since the early West Virginia tunnels had no safety regulations, these tunnel workers were exposed to an early death from the dynamite explosions, falling rock, and lethal dust created by the blasts.

  Starting in the 1870s, a black steel driver named John Henry became the subject of many of the work songs sung by railroad-tunnel gangs. Like most work songs, the John Henry songs consisted of a few short lines repeated several times with pauses in between for the stroke of a pick or hammer. Historians disagree about whether John Henry was based on a real man or not. Some believe that he can be traced to John Hardy, a true-life subject of popular ballads who was also a superior steel driver; others believe that a man named John Henry actually worked on the Big Bend tunnel in the Alleghenies.

  Whether John Henry was real or mythical, he was a strong, enduring character to many southern black laborers. Later, when songs about him were recorded and played on the radio, he became known to the general public as well.

  The night John Henry was born the sky was as black as coal, thunder rolled through the heavens, and the earth trembled.

  “This boy is special,” the preacher said as folks gathered in the cabin by the river to see the new baby.

  In the dim lantern light, John Henry was the most powerful-looking baby folks had ever seen. His arms were as thick as stovepipes. He had great broad shoulders and strong muscles. And as folks stared at him, he opened his eyes and smiled a smile that lit up the southern night.

  When John Henry raised his arm, folks gasped and brought their hands to their faces, for they saw that the mighty baby had been born with a hammer in his hand. Then they all began to laugh and felt happier than they had in a long, long time.

  John Henry grew up fast in a world that didn’t let children stay children for long. Before he was six, he was carrying stones for the railroad gangs that were building tracks through the land of West Virginia.

  By the time he was ten, he was hammering steel from dawn till dark. No train whistle in America sang as loud as John Henry’s mighty hammer. It rang like silver and shone like gold. It flashed up through the air, making a wide arc more than nineteen feet, then crashed down, driving a steel spike six inches into solid rock.

  By the time he was a young man, John Henry was the best st
eel driver in the whole country. He could hammer for hours without missing a beat, so fast that his hammer moved like lightning. He had to keep a pail of water nearby to cool it down, and he wore out two handles a day. All the railroad bosses wanted John Henry to work for them. When the Chesapeake and Ohio started making a tunnel in the Allegheny Mountains, they asked him to lead their force of steel-driving men.

  Soon John Henry was whistling and singing in the early summer light as he walked to work in the mountain tunnel. Beside him was his wife, Lucy, with eyes as bright as stars and hair as wavy as the sea. Lucy was a steel driver herself. At noontime she drove the spikes while John Henry sat with their little boy, Johnny, in the sunny mountain grass and ate his lunch of ham hocks and biscuits with molasses.

  Lifting Johnny high into the air, John Henry shouted, “Someday you’re going to be a steel-driving man like your daddy!”

  July of that summer was the hottest month on record in West Virginia. Working in the terrible heat, many of the steel drivers collapsed by noon. But John Henry tried to protect their jobs by picking up their hammers and doing their work too. One week he did his own work and the work of four others as well. He hammered day and night, barely stopping for meals.

  When the men tried to thank John Henry, he just smiled and said, “A man ain’t nothing but a man. He’s just got to do his best.”

  August was hotter than July. One day as the men labored in the white light of the afternoon sun, a city salesman drove up to the work site. “Come see, everybody!” he shouted. “Lookee here at this incredible invention! A steam drill that can drill holes faster than a dozen men working together!”

  “Aw, I don’t know about that,” said the railroad boss, rubbing his grizzly jaw. “I got the best steel driver in the country. His name is John Henry, and he can beat two dozen men working together.”