Our neighbors are the rattlesnakes–
They crawl up from the Badlands' breaks;
We do not live, we only stay;
We are too poor to get away.
HARDLY THE WORDS of a Founding Father or a Pioneer Mother, hardly the phrasing of a history book or the rhetoric of a Historical Society pamphlet, but such are the expressions found routinely in the genres of folklore–those informal but traditional and recurrent ways in which the members of closely related groups pass along the shared values and attitudes which animate their everyday lives. Some culturally shared ideas are difficult to express in coldly technical or denotative language, precisely because their principal content is more emotional than intellectual. How does one express, for friends and relatives who already know the score, just how frustrating and disappointing the homesteading experience was– or how triumphant the second generation feels about the fact that their parents (some of them, at any rate) prevailed and actually obtained title to a snake-infested desert, supporting a family from its produce or its minerals? Clearly, the feelings involved are complex and deep, for they are a mixture of frustration and hard-won success, and they are best expressed, for insiders, at any rate, in the vernacular of everyday speech and the genres of everyday performance, that is, through jokes, songs, sayings, proverbs, customs, games-even food and buildings. The study of folklore analyzes these "unofficial" expressions of culturally shared ideas by looking at the articulations themselves, as they are found in the natural contexts in which people actually "perform" them to each other.
Doctors and professors, as well as cowboys, tell certain kinds of jokes, anecdotes,
and legends which testify to their ongoing shared concerns and anxieties about their
professional situation; these oral traditions will be quite different from the
traditions followed by the same people when at home celebrating Christmas or
Chanukah with their families, or the same people when they go to a Norwegian
family reunion or a festival in their home town in Buster, Oklahoma. All of us
are members of several folk
groups, and we tailor our speech and our other informal
behavior and expressions according to the group we find ourselves in at the particular
moment. The concept of geographical region, then, especially one so potentially
open to subjective definition as "The West," provides but one of many
dimensions of a very complex and fascinating subject.
Indeed, some folklorists are convinced that an entire region is too
broad for folkloristic analysis, especially when–as is certainly the case in the
American West–there is a constant influx of traditional expression from other areas.
Having said all that, what then remains to be discussed about the existence and nature
of folklore–distinctive and ongoing informal traditional expression used on an
everyday basis–in the American West? The folklore discussed in this essay may have
come into the West chiefly from other areas, but we know it has been adapted, used,
discarded, and developed according to both the newer "facts" of life in the West,
and the shared values of the people who settled the area. The process by which incoming
folklore and cultural attitude are modified to suit the new physical and cultural setting,
and the means by which this new environment then constitutes a living matrix in which local
expressions are generated, is treated at length in an excellent essay, "Regionalization:
A Rhetorical Strategy," by Suzi Jones.1
In it, she shows how folklore actually is used as a persuasive statement about regional
identity, and suggests that regional
folksongs, tall tales, names, and the like, although they may be presented in a laconic,
offhand manner (especially in front of outsiders), provide some of the most telling
"readings" on the depth of feeling in a locale. In the present essay, I will first
mention a few of the many folk groups which have characterized the cultural life of the
West, partly in order to show that the subject is far more complex than a brief essay
would indicate, and then describe some of the genres of folklore which are particularly
good examples of the "regionalized" tradition in the American West.' The reader is
requested to keep in mind, however, that these are a selection of the groups, forms,
topics, and character types that are clearly important to our understanding of western
culture: they are in no way a definitive listing, nor are they discussed very deeply.
The interested reader should, thus, go further and deeper with any one of them.
Most of the folk groups which have been prominent in the settlement of the West are
multidimensional; that is, occupations which have their own lore and language
have been developed or excelled in by members of certain ethnic or national
groups which have as well their own insider lore. For example, much of the
cowboy culture which has colored the life and attitudes (as well as fueled
the stereotypes and myths) of the West was in fact brought north from Mexico
and developed into a highly articulate culture by Spanish-speaking ranchers.
Much of the terminology still used in the cattle country comes directly
from Spanish buckaroos (vaqueros).
The preference, in fact, for the word "buckaroo" by the cattle ranchers over the
word "cowboy" is still a locally distinctive feature in some areas within the region
we call the West. In eastern Oregon, parts of Idaho, and much of Nevada, in fact, use of
the word "cowboy" marks someone as an outsider. With such
deep-seated usage of Hispanic terminology remaining so central
to local conception of insider culture, we would expect to find other kinds of cultural
expressions from the same background central to the on going value system, but they are
rare, a fact which testifies to the malleability and selectivity of the folklore process.
The buckaroos, working together with other knowledgeable buckaroos, developed a rich insider
lingo for dealing with horses and cattle. At home, among their families–where other
customs and ethnic values come into play–their folk expressions articulated those
other constellations. Obviously, ranchers of Hispanic background continue to live in a
richly colonial Hispanic culture, even though in the intervening years, not all Hispanic
people have remained ranchers. Significantly this strong central role in the development
of ranching in the West is not often depicted so fully in the popular media, where the
Mexican most often appears as a later interloper, a foreigner out of place in the Anglo
system. Although historians estimate that as many as thirty percent of the working
cowboys were Hispanic or black, and although their influence is easily seen in western
occupational speech and slang, the popular ../gifs which appear in films and dime novel
format grow more directly out of later racist stereotypes which have been politically
and sociologically more important to the public than acknowledgement of the deeper level
of earlier indebtedness suggested by folklore.
Among other things, this should indicate one important reason why
the study of folklore adds something to our fuller view of western
culture and history. But more germane to the point here is the suggestion
that nearly all folklore in the West is similarly complicated. Not only is there sheepherder
lore (both the lore of the sheepherders themselves and the ranchers who raised the sheep, and
the lore about sheepherders passed along by those–for example cattle ranchers–
who often saw the sheep ranchers as very odd people indeed, as outsiders to their own cultural
views), but there is Basque sheepherder lore, as well as Basque lore, and lore about
Basques by non-Basque people. Along the Northwest coast there is the lore of the fishing people
(the fishermen themselves, as well as their families at home); but there is also the lore of the
Yugoslav fishermen as contrasted to that of the Scandinavian fishermen.
Throughout the West there are various kinds of miners; thus we will find the folklore of
open pit and hardrock underground miners, coal vs. copper miners, and so on. Again,
complicating the picture even more, there are the Cornish miners with their Tommyknocker
stories, as well as the Finns, the Irish, and transplanted Kentucky and West Virginia miners of
Scotch-Irish background. In a place like Butte, Montana, this kaleidoscope creates a
cultural complexity that cannot be covered by the word "miner." So important were
these cultural differences in Butte's past that they resulted in the formation of distinctly
ethnic neighborhoods in that small city (Finntown, a part of Butte, has teetered on the brink
of the large open Berkeley pit for some years, waiting for total destruction), and these
differences have often led to fighting and rivalry among the people of the town. But the
brotherhood forged by the grinding underground and pit mining work also created a rich
set of values such as can be seen in the greeting card sent by a retired Irish miner to
his Finnish friends on St. Patrick's Day:
"Happy St. Urho's Day, you Finnish Bastard!" The combination of rivalry and
deep friendship, ethnic difference and occupational kinship, performed in the gruff humor
of a working culture, would be difficult to express in technical or simply denotative terms.
A similar kind of dichotomy is seen in the folklore of the lumber industry. Here, although
loggers come from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, the important split seems to be between
those who work in the woods and those who work in the mills. At least in the Pacific Northwest,
the people make a distinction between "logger" and "lumberjack," the latter being
someone who stacks lumber in a mill; used by a logger, the term suggests a negative
connotation. Since many of the eastern "lumberjacks" who left Michigan and Wisconsin to
become "loggers" in the Northwest were Scandinavian, we might expect that national
Identification to have exercised a strong influence on the lore of the occupation. And
indeed, it seems persistent today as a form of proud humor: Swedes (as most Scandinavians
were called) were reputed to be hard and faithful workers who felt no pain, and thus the
stories about them became something like internal stereotypes of the logger
image. A Swede, in one story, tries to show his foreman how he cut his hand off
in the buzzsaw by trying to work too fast: "Ooops, dammit, now dere goes da
udder vun!" It is said that when a logger died on the job, his
lower lip was pulled out to see if he had the distinguishing Swede characteristic:
a hole the size of a quarter burned into the lip by snoose (moist, ground
tobacco carried in the lip in preference to smoking). Young loggers trying to learn how to dip
snoose were said to be "passing as Swedes." For the forest workers, ethnic differences
showed up more distinctively at home or at weddings or church socials in which ethnic foods
were served and national dances allowed for a retention of older community expressions.
Chinese and Japanese immigrants, once imported mainly to work on the railroads and the mines,
slowly developed their community stability in America largely because they originally did not
bring their families with them. Much of their early folklore was men's lore, expressed, of
course, in their own languages. Later, as wives and families joined the men, family lore
(in the form of foods, customs, songs, and stories) grew apace, especially because there
was so much sense of cultural surroundment and social isolation. A well-known phenomenon
in folklore, often called marginal or peripheral distribution, accounts for the fact that people
far from their original homes tend not so much to lose their traditions as to
intensify them selectively by using them to adapt to the new situation while
maintaining their own sense of normality. Many of the Japanese and Chinese customs found
in the United States are actually older than the customs one can find in circulation today
in the parent country. A Japanese lullaby, "Naranda," sung to Japanese children born
in America at the turn of the century, is still sung here, but is virtually unknown in Japan.
Innovation along ethnically "normal" lines is also found in new contexts: thus, we
find several Chinese dishes which were "invented" in America, or Japanese foods (such as
sukiyaki) which have been altered by the addition of more meat (avoided once by Buddhists,
and rare anyway in Japan), or the exchange of one condiment or vegetable for another more
readily available in the new situation.
Much could be said about the deep differences in folklore between Japanese and Chinese:
how the one eventually settled mostly in rural areas and excelled in farming and developing
previously marginal land, while the
other, keeping large, extended family groups together, tended to settle in the urban areas
and operated family-owned service businesses; how the vastly different cultures were classified
together as the Yellow Peril, often coming under suspicion precisely because their folklore
was so different and because it was practiced in the privacy of their homes (a custom which
the Anglos saw as secretive and furtive). This outside stereotype came into political use
during World War II when government "experts" testified that the very fact that the
Japanese kept their culture alive secretly at home was a sure sign of their loyalty to the
Japanese emperor, and the fact that no sabotage had ever been committed by a Japanese-American
showed just how well-organized they were in their ultimate plan of waiting for the proper
moment to strike. Such beliefs led to the internment without due process of
110,000 American citizens of Japanese ancestry in 1942, but equally remarkable is that the
same stereotypes (many of them based on what we call exoteric folklore) are today used
to illustrate how successful the Asians have been in becoming American citizens:
they keep their families together, they mind their own business and keep their teenagers
off the street, and they keep their ethnic heritage alive, all qualities highly valued in modern
America. For the same reasons they were once a threat, the Asians are now thought of as our
model minority. Here is a striking example of the working of ethnic folklore and exoteric
response in the American West. Of course,
today, with the influx of Koreans since the 1950s and the Southeast Asians since the
early 1970s, the picture becomes increasingly complex, and one sees and hears the beliefs
once applied to the Japanese and Chinese being applied to the newer arrivals.
Folklore is alive and well in the American West, as elsewhere, and it
behooves us to pay attention to its political and sociological ramifications.
Nonetheless, the West envisioned by some academics who write about the region is not,
I think, the present-day West with its ongoing realities and
traditions, but the archetypical West in which certain recurrent ideas have functioned to
define and express values shared by substantial numbers of the people who have seen
themselves as central to the West. In this archetypical
world, the Japanese and Chinese remain as outsiders, the Indians as implacable
foes (or occasionally as spiritual guides–as long as they are not interested
in holding onto much land), the women as supporting players who sometimes rise to glory,
the men (and male values) as central issues of
reality. In many ways, thus, the West has given dramatic voice to attitudes characteristic
of the whole country, or has promoted "American" values revered by the whole culture.
Other groups which are valuable subjects in the study of western folklore are the
many religious groups which have made themselves at home
here, often in the expressed belief that somehow the West offered them a
possibility for community independence which they could not find elsewhere.
What was it they found, or thought they saw here? If we knew
more about their folk expressions, we could unlock still other cultural
aspects of the western puzzle. Consider their variety: the Mormons in Utah and
southern Idaho (archetypically, at least; of course the Mormons are not confined
there); the Hutterites in Montana; the communalistic Aurora Colony in
Oregon; the socialistic Puget Sound Utopian settlements; the extremely conservative
Russian Old Believers near Woodburn, Oregon; the Buddhists and Shinto people in
California and cities like Salt Lake; the Jews in every major city; the Catholics
in the Southwest; the Protestants in the Northwest;
the Amish in Oregon (once living near Amity, they suddenly picked up in the 1950s
and moved to Florida); the Rajneesh community in
Antelope, Oregon (temporarily renamed Rajneesh City). All of these groups have had an effect
on the culture of the West, and therefore an effect on what it is we call the West.
All of these have undoubtedly been regionalized to one extent or another. Each of these
groups would show in its folk expressions some dimension of the western experience,
and the study would be well worth the effort.
The first genre of western tradition to be discussed in this essay is material culture: those expressions which–by the use of cloth, wood, threads, plants and other physical materials–transmit in concrete form concepts and designs and values parallel to the oral forms that will be discussed. Cooking would of course be one of these expressions: local recipes (and names for them), local uses of wild vegetables and game, preferences for regional styles of food preparation and seasoning, favorite fuels or woods for smoking, customs about who does the cooking. Some western families restrict the raising and use of sourdough to men; in others, men cook meals prepared outdoors, while women take charge of those produced in the kitchen and control the language that is used there.
Largely but not exclusively a woman's form of expression is quilting. Most of the western quilters we know about are women, but men show up far more often than one would expect. Some take up quilting because there is no woman in the family passing on a mother's or a grandmother's tradition; in other cases a man takes it up after retirement or after a difficult operation. Still others are lured into it by helping their wives add the quilting (back and filling, together with whatever decorative stitches are used to bind them together) to a piecework top. The regular alteration of geometric patterns naturally provides a physical statement of the stability and predictability which are highly valued by the agrarian society in which quilting became so central. Certain patterns are most likely to be given as gifts because they embody the thought or intent offered by the giver: for example, "Double Wedding Ring," with its interwoven symbols of marriage, or "Log Cabin," with its regular "log" walls and central spot (reminiscent of a hearth), is considered a proper gift for newlyweds, while erratic or humorous patterns like "Drunkard's Path" or "Turkey Tracks," because of their characterizations of wandering away from the straight path, are considered dangerous for newly married couples. Do quilters "believe" that the quilt exercises a magical influence on those who sleep under it? No, but they obviously see the quilt as a statement, and they want the statement to be consistent with community value and practice. Folklore does not, however, need to be consciously planned in order to display intent and cultural resonance.
Other women's lore in the West (again, not limited to women but traditionally associated with female role and custom in the community) would include other arts or crafts such as embroidery (extremely important for the Russian Old Believers), rug hooking or braiding (mainly a practical way of reusing older materials, but subject to tremendous artistic variation), midwifery (almost exclusively a female tradition in the early West; older midwives will usually not even discuss it with a male researcher), and the performance of that great range of philosophical, medicinal, practical, and moral expression which falls under the deceptively simple rubric of house work. The housework itself is often done according to the traditions of routines long in the family: women report doing their washing and ironing on the same day their mothers did them, using certain procedures passed down in the family (like what order to wash clothes or dishes in), and even having the same attitudes toward color combinations that were thought normal by older female members of their families.
Another material dimension of western folklore is folk costume (not in the sense of a party costume, but the everyday traditional use of clothing to mark boundaries between groups of people). House painters tend to dress in white, cowboys and fishermen in blue, loggers in black and gray. Fishermen may prefer a certain kind of rubber boot, while loggers may use any work boot as long as it fits the terrain (which often means wearing caulked boots, pronounced "corks,"which have hobnails on the bottom). Ways of wearing the clothing may also be traditional: for example, loggers in some parts of the West cut the cuffs or seams off the pantlegs; others insist on wearing a certain striped workshirt with the tail cut off; others don't appear without their red "Logger's World" suspenders (belts are dangerous in the woods, and besides, many loggers work in the summer with their pants hanging open for ventilation). Cowboys wear different kinds of chaps for different purposes and in different kinds of weather. Many working cowboys of today do not wear the kind of Stetson that has become known as the cowboy hat; rather, they prefer a small working cap with a visor to protect the eyes from sun-the kind distributed by tractor companies and baseball clubs. Currently, one can see more cowboy hats per square head in downtown Denver among young working men and women at play than on a similar number of working cowboys.
Still another form of material expression in folk design is the folk boat: the distinctively local boat built by local people for local conditions and use. Usually these are modifications of some earlier kind of boat known to the first boatbuilder who tried regionalizing the idea. Practically every western river, from the Salmon to the Colorado to the Rogue, has its own distinctive boat. They are practical, usually built of local materials, and although the users would probably be the first to say that their construction is more practical than aesthetic, there is often a very strong note of grace, balance and symmetry that demonstrates an ongoing taste in good design as well as technical command of functional detail. The fact that local styles remain relatively stable over the years is a good sign that ends more complicated than technical necessity are being served. These are visible articulations of a shared sense of the good, proper, and beautiful.
The same can be said of traditional barns and outbuildings, fence styles and gates,
mailbox supports and ranch entryways. So ubiquitous in the West is the high, two-posted
entry with crossbeam that even weekenders from the city living in prefab or mobile homes
will erect one soon after obtaining a piece of property in ranch country. In earlier times,
the high entryway no doubt helped people to find the gate opening in a long fence stretching for
miles across the range. And of course it had to be built high enough that people could ride through
without dismounting. But its practical functions are nearly always augmented by personal
decoration of very specific sorts: a plank with the family or ranch name may hang in the
middle; a saddle may ride on the cross-piece; wagon wheels, single and doubletrees may dangle
from overhangs; bison or cattle skulls, horse and oxen shoes, large models of the family's
cattle brand, boots, hats and the like may be affixed over all. All of these are of course
emblems of the ranch life, and the better they detail the accepted notions of the "real"
ranch life of earlier times, the more they testify to the owner's tenure in the country.
Austin Fife showed some years ago how even the mailbox supports used throughout the West
demonstrated a decided element of cultural
choice: although government regulations stipulate what kind of supports may and may not be
used, and although practicality and economics would argue for something simple and unadorned,
one finds instead cream separators, welded logging chains, hand-held plows, milk cans,
augers, metal tractor seats–all of them physical remnants of the way the previous
generation did its work in the place. Technically, Fife pointed out, these items are
throwaways, "junk,`: but in emblematic terms they are signs that say, "We've
been here since this item was actually in use." The item, instead of having lost its
meaning, has been intensified and specialized in its meaning, and has become an easily
recognized icon. Anything can hold up a mailbox; not everything can proclaim local roots
and community value. For similar
reasons, the old "Jackson Fork" hay derrick (also known as the Mormon derrick),
though not in regular use to stack loose hay for some years now, remains standing
like a dinosaur in many a ranch yard, mute but eloquent testimony to the regional
identity of the owner. Woe to the new foreman from out of the area who saws the "useless"
rig up into firewood.
3
Fences, once the abomination of the cattlemen, have become in more recent years emblems of
domain and familiar self-produced signs of ownership. There are local preferences for
cedar posts, metal stakes, or diamond
willow ("gives the cattle a better shelter from wind in the open country,"
a Montana rancher soberly assured me), preferred ways of stretching or repairing wire fence,
locally developed methods of anchoring fencelines (such as "rock traps,"
bins of rock in eastern Oregon where land is too hard for
post holes, explained to tourists as a means of catching rocks before they are blown
out onto the road by high winds). Scraps of wire fencing are saved for use in repairing
gates, machinery, and tackle. Oregon old-timer Reub Long once said, "If heaven hasn't
any old rusty patched-up wire fences, I'll never feel at home there."
Many of the songs sung traditionally in the West have survived not only the transcontinental
journey, but the transoceanic voyage as well– often with surprising fidelity to earlier
versions. Of course, few folksongs have a single version which can reasonably be called
the "correct" one, because constant variation in text and tune is the hallmark of the
traditional process. Some older songs from England appear in western American versions
in what first appears to be eroded condition. An old British broadside street ballad of
some forty stanzas once became one of the most popular songs in the English language;
it described in what we would today consider extremely melodramatic language the slow
deaths of a wealthy husband and wife, and the later deaths of their two children. What
remains in western American tradition are a mere three verses, the ones that detail
the death of the lost children.
Before we lament that erosion has taken its toll, however, we should note several important
details: first, the part of the ballad which remains is poetically most pleasing, and
in diction the least didactic and strained of the whole earlier ballad. So a good
argument could be made here for the poetic tastes of American traditional singers.
Another thing we might notice is that the song now makes a somewhat different point:
instead of moralizing about the duties of adults to their minor charges,
the ballad now places full spotlight on the plight of the children, without rationale,
background, or moral lesson. Why would singers do this, and why would the song have
been so popularly sung in the West? It does not seem to be the result simply of poor
memory. One way to approach such a question is to ask about how and when a song was
actually sung, and by whom. Here we begin to get a revealing picture: most elderly people
in the West remember hearing this song as a lullaby sung to them by their mothers, who
probably shared with other mothers along the wagon trails, and later on the western
homesteads, the fear that their children might wander off and die in the
woods. For reasons like this, one of the most popular songs ever to exist in England
became also one of the most popular songs ever to be sung in the American West.
Oh do you remember a long time ago
And when it was night, so sad was their plight
And when they were dead, a robin so red
4
When two little babes, their names I don't know
They wandered away one bright summer's day
And were lost in the woods, I heard people say.
The moon had gone down and the stars gave no light
They sobbed and they sighed and bitterly cried
And those two little babes laid down and died.
Brought strawberry leaves and over them spread.
And all the day long they sang their sweet song,
Those two little babes who were lost in the wood.
Quite another kind of folk editing occurred when the equally popular British
broadside "The Unfortunate Rake" went into folk tradition. It depicts the
wayward son of a wealthy squire's family dying of drink, general dissolution and
venereal disease outside St. James Hospital in London. Already wrapped for burial,
placed outside the hospital to make room for
others, he is discovered by an old friend, to whom he tells his sad story. In some
versions he also asks that his younger brother be warned to avoid the same fate; in
most versions he requests a proper funeral with music, a procession and pallbearers.
The song became very popular and quickly entered the song traditions of the sailors,
who apparently felt some kinship of spirit for the poor victim. Naturally, however,
they would not have been interested in singing about some rich kid from the country,
so they inserted themselves in the role, and sang of a dying sailor lying wrapped in his
cerements-to-be outside St. James Hospital, who then tells a shipmate what has happened
and requests a proper sailor's funeral with fife and drums and pallbearers. The song came
to the American shore both in broadside (printed) form and in the oral traditions of
the sailors, and it was quickly taken up by virtually all male-oriented occupations
whose members often found themselves (or envisioned and hoped themselves) in the big
city and threatened by the ravages of good old male behavior. The song came West, of
course, and the interesting part of its history for our purposes is that it became "The Dying
Cowboy" or "The Streets of Laredo," now chastely bereft of its direct references to
venery (replaced by the euphemistic "it was first down to Rosie's"), but still
insisting on a military funeral with fife and
drum. Most Americans know the song only in its cowboy version, and most are unaware
of its origin, which tells us something about the way this song has made itself at
home in our preconceptions. Most people are also unaware that the song went in other
geographical directions as well, and has continued to have an interesting history:
it now exists in black tradition in the deep South as "The Saint James Infirmary Blues,"
a fact which should keep us in mind of the subtle and powerful ways of regionalization.
This rhetorical process can be nicely illustrated by following a song along its way west.
Although some songs change widely as they pass through oral tradition, others, with minimal
textual adjustment, achieve a considerable alteration in meaning or in application. The
following was originally a hymn, written by an Englishman, which became very popular among
Americans partly, one imagines, because of its capacity to suggest with its rich and
fertile imagery the promised land of the West, no doubt for many the Willamette
Valley, goal of most of the Oregon Trail trekkers. One verse and the chorus of
the hymn are sung as follows:
In Kansas, or so it is said, the farms and homesteads were so far apart that parents
despaired of ever getting their daughters married. Young women were advised to grab the
first person who came along. Naturally, in folklore (though of course not in real life)
the Kansas girls become famous as flirts:
Other songs, of course, are of very local origin; rather than reforming a song from some
other area to local specifications, these grow directly out of local pride or frustration
(usually the latter). Consider this verse and chorus from a song composed and later widely
sung among the Mormon settlers of the area called "Utah's Dixie," a hot, desert,
forbidding land into which they were sent by their church. The area emerges in
Mormon lore time and time again as a totally impossible place to live; yet the Mormon
pioneers with dedication (if not aplomb) did settle the place and cultivate the land.
They even raised grapes and made wine until the Church ruled against the use of alcohol.
One relatively high personage in the church, J. Golden
Kimball, is said to have declared in a sermon that if he had owned both St. George
and Hell, he would have sold St. George and moved to Hell. When directed by higher
Authority to go back and apologize for his remarks, he is supposed to have said:
"My brothers and sisters, the president of the Church has asked that I take
back my intemperate remarks about the heat you experience here, but it's so damn hot
today, I ain't gonna do it!" More of Kimball later; here it should suffice to say
that the settlers of the St. George area appear not to have been overjoyed by their
task in the early days.
Thus, it is difficult to accept Austin Fife's rhapsodic description of this song
as "epic,"for it has much more parody than prophecy. Nonetheless, there is
that subtle note of "Just look what our parents and we were able to put up
with" about it that cannot be denied. A reading of Juanita Brooks's works
One night in the winter a murder occurred,
Now he was the only good blacksmith we had
"I move we dismiss him–he's needed in town."
Probably the best known kind of folksong in the West is the cowboy song, although it is
difficult to call all of them regionalized, since many were written by former cowboys
after they had retired and moved back to Chicago. But the poetic context and dramatic
focus of the cowboy song make it an almost archetypical expression of
western values. The solitary and geographically mobile male figure who
cares more about his pard than about
his lady-love, who works himself to exhaustion and quits only if his boss is unfair,
who protects his horse and his equipment more than his own body, who is basically a
moral puritan (except when he is on a spree), who is easily embarrassed but will
shoot a liar without hesitation–this character is still so powerful in our
imaginations that even a photo of him can be used to sell
movies, cigarettes, and even politicians. His power as a rhetorical or iconic image
can hardly be questioned. The song "The Tenderfoot" appears to ridicule the
greenhorn, and ends with the advice to others that before taking up the cowboy
life, one should first slit his throat (an ironic self-parody, for the song would
have been sung by and for those who had already passed through the greenhorn stage); "The
Zebra Dun," conversely, tells of a man who only appears to be a tenderfoot ("he looked
so awful foolish and he talked so awful round, we thought he was a greenhorn just escaped from
town"), but who successfully stays on the wild bronco "the boys" give him and thereby
earns a job as ranch foreman. In "No Use for the Women," a young cowboy is attracted to
a lady of questionable repute; when a gambler insults her picture, the young man shoots him
and leaves town, followed by the inevitable posse made up of friends and acquaintances. His
friend, the persona of the song, says:
In the chorus, the cowboy asks that his friends bury him out on the prairie,
where the coyotes can howl over his grave. In another equally well-known song
the cowboy asks that his friends not bury him on the lone prairie, but
instead see that he is taken back home where his women folk can cry over his
grave (of course, in good cowboy style they bury him on the lone prairie anyhow).
In one, a cowboy rubs hair tonic on his bare chest so that he can look like a hero,
and dies in a gunfight, still hairless. In others, friends try to save each other
from being trampled in stampedes, or keep each other company on the long trail rides.
Some of the songs were apparently sung to quiet the cattle at night, but–as with
lullabys–we can easily suspect that the soothing was often self-directed. Once in a
while there is a glimpse of real local detail–such as in the "Mormon Cowboy," where
the persona decides to leave a party when he sees the others are drinking; the music was
provided by "a colored man with his guitar–I can hear him singing yet." This mixture
of sentimentality with toughness, naive respect for women and raw misogyny, piety and blasphemy
that we find in the whole range of cowboy song provides us with an extremely evocative character
portrait of a type still very much alive in American culture and American literature.
The stereotype of the cowboy as "macho" (a term, by the way, which Anglos use in a
much more limited way than do our Hispanic countrymen) appears often in humorous understatement.
This is the reverse of the hyperbole we find in the Tall Tales (below), but it serves a similar
purpose: it reveals that what is being said is only a part of the message. Left up to the listener
is the question of where reality really lies.
The lion he was ridin' at full speed was kickin' up plenty of dirt,
The wildcat he carried under his arm chewed the loose end of the reins,
A six-gun he carried in his right hand–I thought the durn fool would crack her, I asked him where he's goin'–what was his hurry all about;
I've reached the land of corn and wine
By the time some of the settlers got to the Plains or the deserts, however, some were giving out,
financially and physically. They settled down on ground quite unlike Beulah Land, and tried to
make a go of it anyway. In their own generation, it is said that they began to express their
frustration and disappointment in parody form; in any case, it is clear that their inheritors
used the parodies as a form of local chauvinism: look at what we've licked!
And all its riches now are mine;
Here shines undimmed one blissful day,
For all my night has passed away.
Oh Beulah Land, sweet Beulah Land,
As on thy highest mount I stand:
I look away across the sea
Where mansions are prepared for me,
And view the shining glory shore–
My heaven, my home, forevermore.We've reached the land of dying wheat
A New Mexico version stresses the wind, an incessant plague in that area, and ends with a
couple of lines which are humorous for what they do not use as a rhyme word:
Where nothing grows for man to eat,
Where the wind it blows the fiery heat
Across the plains so hard to beat.
Dakota Land, South Dakota Land,
As on thy burning soil I stand;
I look away across the plains
And wonder why it never rains,
Till Gabriel blows his trumpet sound
And says the rain's just gone around.This is a land of dusty roads,
Of rattlesnakes and horny toads;
It never rains, it never snows,
The doggone wind just blows and blows.
New Mexico so fertile and rich
We think you are a honey.
[The last two lines are to the tune of
the first line of "Oh Christmas Tree."]
Oh Kansas girls, dry Kansas girls,
By the time the pioneers (those who could make it) arrived in western Oregon,
they were beginning to see more rain and water than they had ever imagined possible.
While the dry Dakotas may have struck the imagination as a hellish contrast to
Beulah Land, mucky Oregon seemed like an overdose of God's plenty.
Moreover, we can tell that the Oregonians, while continuing the Beulah Land parody for
their own reasons, had already become acquainted with the Kansas version, for they
parodied as well its absurd suggestions that a girl could have sunny curls (even today,
the sun is referred to in western Oregon as a UFO). In addition, we note that the
courting situation is now a different one: Oregonians were beginning to settle in small
towns, or in clusters of relatively nearby farmsteads. Their problem was not finding
their daughter a husband, for the place was overrun with men. The bigger problem was
keeping the house from filling up with mud:
With laughing eyes and sunny curls;
They'll sing and dance and flirt and play
Til some sodbuster comes that way;
They'll grab him at the dugout door
And stick by him forevermore.
I've reached the land of rain and mud,
Where flowers and trees so early bud;
Where it rains and rains both night and day
For in Oregon [pronounced O-ree-gun] it rains always.
O Oregon, wet Oregon
As through thy rain and mud I run;
I stand and look out all around
And watch the rain soak in the ground,
Look up and see the waters pour
And wish it wouldn't rain no more.
Oh Oregon girls, wet Oregon girls,
With laughing eyes and soggy curls;
They'll sing and dance both night and day
Til some webfooter comes their way:
They'll meet him at the kitchen door
Saying, "Wipe your feet or come no more."
Chorus: Mesquite, soaproot, prickly pears and briars:
The sun it is so scorching hot it makes the water sizz, sir,
And the reason that it is so hot is just because it is, sir.
The wind with fury here doth blow, that when we plant or sow, sir,
We place one foot upon the seeds and hold them till they grow, sir.
St. George ere long will be a place that everyone admires.
6
Their witty way of dealing with their church's "call" to settle in the desert tells us
far more about the local Mormon spirit than we could ever expect to learn from official documents.
The use of humor as a means of expressing frustration or even fear and hatred is well reported
in the literature of psychology, but less often recognized in folklore, partly I think because
many have taken folklore to be a somewhat benign sort of expression for use in home entertainment.
7
Equally interesting is the extent to which an apparently humorous folksong can give
voice as well to factually accurate ../gifs of historical issues which grew out of deeply
shared emotions. Whether the events in the following song ever really happened as reported
is quite beside the point, for we know from the many examples of anti-Chinese activity from
Rock Springs, Wyoming, to the Mother Lode country of California that the sentiments here
dramatized are accurate. Chinese were considered superfluous, and on this basis
laws were enacted and outrages perpetrated against them. Moreover, it was precisely in the
courtroom where the technical crux of the matter was experienced, for the Chinese in most
western states were forbidden to testify against white persons. This song is thus–albeit
unwittingly–the cameo of a reality in the frontier experience, articulated in the humor
of those whose own citizenship was clouded by the guilt of their denial of it to others.
8
Old John Martin Duffy was a judge of the court
In a small mining town in the West;
Although he knew nothin' `bout rules of the law,
At judgin' he was one of the best.
And the blacksmith was accused of the crime;
We caught him red-handed and gave him three trials
But the verdict was "guilty" each time.
And we wanted to spare him his life,
So Duffy stood up in the court like a lord
And with these words he settled the strife:
Then he spoke out these words, which have gained him renown:
"We have two Chinese laundrymen, everyone knows–
Why not save the poor blacksmith and hang one of those?"
All through the long night we trailed him,
9
Through mesquite and thick chaparral,
And I couldn't help think of that woman
As I saw him pitch and fall:
If she'd been the pal that she should have,
He might have been raising a son,
Instead of out there on the prairie
To die by the ranger's gun.
As I was a-roundin' Scorpion Butte on a routine cattle inspection,
10
Who should I meet but Hairtrigger Pete, ridin' hell-bent for election.
He used a Bowie knife for a bit and a rattlesnake for a quirt.
A gila monster for a charm was drug by a barb-wire chain.
But all he did was spit in my face a pound of chaw tabacker.
He says "A tough guy just hit town and he's just run me out!"
By this time it should be clear that meaningful folk expressions about the West are not found in a single genre of folklore, for there are always overlaps and interchanges with other forms, such as Legend and local Tall Tale. In the latter, there is more than a humorously hyperbolic text in question, for most of the best texts we have available were narrated by people who themselves relished the role of the local "liar." Here is a genre in which the performer is a living part of the tradition, and usually tells the stories as having happened to himself (even when the scholar can show without question that the story is several generations old). Often the storyteller is a local marginal "character," a retired farmer or an early settler who has been bypassed by younger and more aggressive folks who do not appreciate what the good old days were all about. The local "liar," then, is often not at the center of his community's current life in practical terms, but is capable of projecting his community's values in a way that all insiders will recognize (because they know where reality leaves off and hyperbole begins, and they also know what it is that local taste considers worthy of hyperbolic treatment). In many ways, the western Tall Tale represents the inverse of myth (that is, the reverentially received and accepted story of the great, the powerful, the central): instead of describing the exploits of heroes and founders, or even of cowboys who may stereotypically characterize values which many people believe to be central to their culture, the Münchausens glorify mistakes, coincidences, and odd occurrences, which are at the center of local values. They brag about local geographical or meteorological conditions which no one likes, they extoll the use of outmoded equipment, they savor the details of patently impossible events, and most of all they love to do this in front of an audience made up in part of local folks who know the score and in part of innocent outsiders who do not.
In Wyoming lives an animal which looks very much like a jackrabbit except that it has horns like an antelope. The Jackalope, said to be a cross between an antelope and a jackrabbit, is very shy, and breeds only during lightning flashes in high desert rainstorms. Jackalopes are rarely seen except in taxidermic form, and their existence is thus attested to mainly by the eyewitness accounts of those who have dedicated their lives to the study of the beast (one of these, Roger Welsch, of Lincoln, Nebraska, was interviewed at length on national television by Charles Kuralt, and many viewers took the program as proof that such an animal actually existed). One imagines, however, that in the desert country of Wyoming and Montana, the question of veracity has less to do with the existence of the jackalope than it has to do with greening the visitors. The fact that the animal has been known for years in the alpine areas of Europe as the Hasenbock is no doubt of little interest or importance to the ranchers of Wyoming. Folk exaggeration runs from these examples of visual misinformation to lies that are acted out while the naive person watches (a mechanic pulls his hand back from a battery as if shocked: "Did it get you?" he is asked by a concerned observer. "Nope, I was too fast for it."), to lies that come up casually in conversation after some peculiar action has taken place. As well, there are artful lies told in the first person (Münchausens) and in the third person (Tall Tales), both of which will be discussed here in greater detail.
First, however, let us admit that our main aim is not to make sober distinctions between truth and falsehood in western culture; to begin with, truth is too hard to capture. How would anyone describe the redwoods or the canyons, or the colors, or the heat/cold extremes for someone who had never experienced them? Indeed, the truth is hard enough to deal with: in Oregon, if an angler catches a sturgeon under three feet long or over six, it must be returned to the water. Explain that one without smiling to your relatives in Connecticut. There are, moreover, cases where a lie may also be simultaneously the truth; the story is told in Utah that after the Army took over Zion and began to force Mormons to renounce polygamy, one Swedish immigrant left his three wives in the cemetery when he went to apply for U.S. citizenship so that he could say honestly of his wives, "Vell, sir, dey are resting in da churchyard," and thus avoid getting rid of them. In an interchange between two residents of southern Utah, I heard that the farmers in St. George feed their chickens cracked ice in the summertime to keep them from laying hard-boiled eggs. "Do you remember that time when the power went off? Why we had nothing but hard-boiled eggs to eat in this town for six weeks!" When such a conversation starts up, especially when there are young people or strangers present, it can easily turn into an orgy of exaggeration. One hears that the cows have to keep one foot on their hay to keep it from being blown away, that a heavy logging chain hung from a post tells how hard the wind is blowing (when links begin snapping off the end and the chain is straight out, it's a "fair breeze"), that one time the wind blew the streetlight and headlight beams off the roads (but of course that was back when the lights weren't as strong as they are now), or that the wind blew all the dirt from around a well or a prairie-dog hole, leaving the hole standing in the air. On the Olympic Peninsula in Washington a farmer will tell you how his rain barrel overflowed during one storm; the water running over the lip of the barrel washed out the dirt under one side and the barrel tipped over: "You know, it rained into the bunghole faster than the water could flow out the open end of that barrel, and before I knew it the water got all compacted in there, and it kept flowing out for a couple of months after the storm was over! Watered my stock on that one barrel the whole summer! I can show you the barrel itself if you don't believe me." Reub Long, a loquacious central Oregon rancher once said, "We measure humidity by the amount of sand in the air. When it rains, we keep our hired man in–we want all the water on the land." The same rancher once told anyone who would listen that he had never seen rain until he was eighteen years old, and then he had run outside to see what the strange sound was of something hitting the tin roof of the ranchhouse. "You know, one of those big desert raindrops hit me on the back of the head and knocked me cold. They had to throw six buckets of sand in my face to bring me around!" The rapidly changing weather and resultant difficulties of raising livestock were never subjects of complaint in Long's conversations, but, as we have seen with other expressions above, the source of considerable humor through exaggeration. "The reason I've been able to produce some fast horses is that, where I graze them, they have to feed at thirty miles an hour to get enough to eat." One of his favorite stories, especially in front of strangers, was his account of how he tried to get rid of rats on a ranch he once bought. He had heard that if you caught one of them and painted it white, the others would think it was a ghost and leave the place. Long and a group of buckaroo friends finally caught one of the rats at night, and to keep it from escaping, took it out into the middle of the road. Then, while they kneeled on it, they argued over which was the best way to apply the paint: with the grain of the hair or against it (did they want a shiny finish or a rough one?). While all this was in progress, someone came down the road in a car, and of course stopped at the sight of this strange crowd (one imagines that the stranger in the car in the story functions as the equivalent of the stranger listening to the story). "What in the world are you doing there, for God's sake?" "Why, we're whitewashing a rat," replied Long testily, whereupon the stranger turned around in haste and drove quickly out of sight. Once a stranger asked Long if he didn't feel isolated, if he didn't have the need to travel. "Travel?" he asked. "Why, I'm already here." 11 This mixture of local chauvinism with exaggeration is the hallmark of western Tall Tale lore, and it continues to this day ever fresh: after the dry summer of 1984, a rancher in central Nebraska told Roger Welsch that he had had to go out and buy two bales of hay just to prime his baler.
It is safe to say that every definable area in the West has at least one of these creative liars, 12 but the problem has been generally that their own families consider them an embarrassment and keep them hidden from sight. Occasionally a researcher inadvertently discovers such a person, and then we get a glimpse of an important character who would otherwise have remained unknown. Such was the case when a student, Susan Mullin, persisted over the objections of family members that "Arthur can't be relied on to tell the truth; he's getting on in years, you know, so don't believe anything he tells you." What Mullin eventually collected was a tremendous range of Tall Tales, as recalled by Arthur Belknap from the first-person performances of his grandfather, Benjamin Franklin Finn (who had claimed being the model for Mark Twain's Huck Finn). l3
Among Belknap's performances of his grandfather's daily narratives was the well-known "Liar
too busy to lie" (Motif # X905.4; AT 1920B).
14
Some Eugene newspapermen had come up the McKenzie River to interview him and collect
some of his lies, but he was too busy to lie to them that day.
"My best friend, Old Man Pepiot died just last night, and I've been up all night
working on his coffin. Now if you boys will just come back another
time, why I'd be happy to tell you some lies." The newspapermen of course apologized profusely
for their intrusion, and went on down the road, where the first person they met
was–naturally–Old Man Pepiot. Other yarns also found widely in the Münchausen
tradition feature Grandad being caught in a tree or in a split stump (had to go all the way
back to the house and get an ax to come chop himself loose), one which explained the
great hunter bringing back only one wolf hide (he had been treed by a whole
pack, and each time he shot one, the rest ate him up, so that finally,
although he had shot twenty, he had only one pelt to show for it, but of course used the
hide as proof of the whole story), a version of the Great Hunt (hunter, with very few shots,
kills an unbelievable amount of game, and often falls in water only to emerge with his pants
full of fish) which was narrated only when outsiders–hopefully game wardens–were
present so that when they said "Do you know who we are?–State game wardens!" he
could reply "You know who I am? Huck Finn, the biggest damn liar on the McKenzie!"
Probably his best known story locally, outside the immediate circle of family and friends,
concerns the naming of Finn Rock, a large monolith which stands beside the McKenzie River
Highway. Local story (of course originally narrated by B. F. Finn himself) tells how Finn
moved the rock to its present position by using a new buckskin harness which stretched as
he drove his skittish team out across the roaring McKenzie. "That didn't bother Grandad
none, though; he just hung the harness on a tree, and when the sun came out, why over come the
rock!" said Arthur Belknap in one conversation. Later, when asked to repeat the story, he claimed
that the stretching harness episode occurred when Grandad Finn brought a
wagon-load of groceries home through the Oregon rain. The wagon got mired in the muck along
the way, while the wet buckskin harness continued to stretch. "That didn't bother
Grandad none, though," said Belknap to Mullin, "he just hung the harness on the gatepost
and when the sun came out, why along come the wagon." With just two versions of the same
story from the same narrator, we begin to understand more clearly one of the standard
maxims of folklore study: no single version can be said to be the "original" or
the "correct" one, for the narrators themselves are accustomed to using them in
various ways depending on the circumstances. And the mere fact that there is a
particular "Finn Rock" whose placement is "explained" by the story solves
nothing: first of all, it is quite evident from its size and placement that this monolith
has never been moved by anybody, and that the river is entirely unfordable at this point
anyway; secondly, a bit of folklore research shows that the motif of the stretching buckskin
is a standard element in Münchausen lore, that it is extremely widespread, and that it
predates the existence of B. F. Finn. Belknap's formulaic phrasing, however,
places him in the long tradition of skilled oral performers from times previous to
Homer up through the present.
I hope it is clear that both the exaggerations and the understatement of proportions–especially
in terms not particularly flattering to the teller– provide us with a very special style
of hyperbole that is distinctly not found in the various sanitized productions of professional
writers trying to satisfy the wishes of schoolteachers and politicians without enraging parents
and voters. I refer here obviously to the well-meaning but phoney "tall tales"
promulgated by James Stevens and others and found chiefly in schoolrooms, not in the oral
traditions of loggers or farmers, or anyone else. That Stevens knew better is apparent from
his Big Jim Turner (1948), a novel flavored with the saltier songs and tales of the
actual folk tradition. Even from as early as the fur-trapping era, western writers such as
George Frederick Ruxton and Lewis H. Garrard had seasoned their writings with folklore, as
a glance at a collection like B. A. Botkin's A Treasury of Western Folklore (1951)
will show. Westerners such as J. Frank Dobie, Stewart H. Holbrook,
Mody C. Boatright and C. L. Sonnichsen have gained literary reputations from their accounts
of folk traditions, and most–practically all–western
authors have used folklore or fakelore or a bit of both in their works. The schoolroom has
been so dominated by phoney materials, however, that the genuine seldom receives attention,
and there are very few studies of the folk tradition (both the real article and the plastic)
as it has inspired and been incorporated in the literature of the West.
The West can be better understood by recognizing what it was that prompted writers like Stevens to manufacture a factitious folk tradition. Paul Bunyan was not born in the woods–at least not the Paul Bunyan we came to know, and perhaps for the wrong reasons love, in the fourth grade–but in the minds of authors who wanted to satisfy a demand of a much more political variety: the hero chock full of brag and fight and patriotism. The Paul Bunyan stories, along with Pecos Bill and other manufactured all-good and all-powerful western pseudo-heroes, were well laid to rest by folklorist Richard Dorson long ago, but they still keep showing up in the lesson plans of schoolteachers who probably would not mind dealing with the subtleties of style found in the real Münchausen stories, but who apparently cannot incorporate stories like the few Bunyan yarns that actually exist into their curricula–stories such as the one where Bunyan gets scared of heights while topping a tree in winter, and to get down quickly urinates and slides down the icicle. 15 Nor are they prepared to defend to the parents of their children a story which was told to me by the scion of an upstanding southern Utah Mormon family: "My uncle tried ranching in the Dixie country, but his wife came from the East, and she wanted a garden and a lawn. Almost impossible, you know, in that country. So he had to take time to train himself a team of lizards. Every day, he'd take them down to the Virgin (river) and fill `em up on water, then bring `em back up into the yard and beat the piss out of `em." If nothing else, the imagery of violence, along with the expression of marital and agricultural frustration, combined with what I would call an economy (if not a chasteness) of wording, constitute folk poetry at its best. But then, the people who actually perform these "yarns" are not interested in creating national heroes or acceptable lesson plans: they are engaged in expressing locally perceived truths using a very special kind of humorous hyperbole. It is hot and dry on the Utah and Nevada desert; it is unbelievably rainy on the Olympic Peninsula; the wind does blow furiously over much of the West. It is the shared attitudes and emotions on those bothersome subjects that reach expression through the Münchausen, the yarn-spinner, and the local folk raconteur.
One of the best living examples of this kind of expression was J. Golden Kimball, an important, but not highest-level, functionary in the Mormon Church. For his people, he became the epitome of faithful membership and individual pride. Not a Münchausen, Kimball was nonetheless a marginal figure in much the same way as were the other characters mentioned thus far: not in the sense of being distant from the values and concerns of society, but, living in an ambiguous situation, speakers of those values in relief. Local "characters" like J. Golden Kimball perform a tightrope act between acceptable and non-acceptable, between religious and secular, spiritual and worldly expressions of behavior. The local drunk who is the only one known to speak the truth, the local clown, the town idiot, the village wiseacre, the practical joker–all of these provide traditional ways of expressing things which "everyone" feels or knows, but no one wants to be caught saying in public. Kimball, a member of the Council of Seventies, had been an animal-driver, and his colorful language and direct way of speaking were not always comfortable to the Mormon Church. He disliked pomposity and hypocrisy, and was quite uncomfortable with the citified bureaucracy of his growing church. When church President Heber Grant was afraid Kimball would disgrace the Church during a national radio broadcast from Temple Square, he wrote out the text of the inspirational talk Kimball was to present. But when the tall, high-voiced ex-muleskinner rose and began haltingly to read the crabbed writing, he turned and on national radio said "Good Hell, Hebe, I can't read this damn thing!" Eyewitnesses, among them the most faithful of Mormons, not only tell the anecdote with glowing admiration, but recall that afterwards the streets were lined with well wishers who shouted encouragement to Kimball as, chastised, he walked to his home in the Avenues district. When a friend warned him that he might be "cut off the Church" (excommunicated) for his swearing, he is supposed to have said, "Hell, they can't cut me off the Church–I repent too damn fast!" Almost run over by hotrodders near Temple Square, he is said to have shouted "You sonsabitches! Have you no respect for the priesthood?" Sitting on a public works committee for the city, he fought against what he considered to be frivolous "improvements"; in one case, speaking against building a bridge across the Jordan River (west of Salt Lake) where an easy ford existed, he said, "We don't need a bridge over the Jordan; why, I can piss half-way across the Jordan." The chairman of the committee gavelled him into silence and said "Brother Golden, I believe you're out of order!" "I know I'm out of order," was his immediate comeback; "if I wasn't out of order, I could piss all the way across the Jordan River!" 16
It is the stories, and not Kimball himself, which give us a hint as to his cultural importance (although, as mentioned, the intentional performance of the local character indicates in itself a willingness to assume a traditional role of formulaic behavior); Kimball himself seems to have been both aware of his role and wary of others' enjoyment of it, for when asked if he wanted to hear the latest "J. Golden story," he told a neighbor, "Hell no! Seems like everytime something happens, they blame it either on me or on Mae West." He is still best remembered for his salty remarks in church, where strong language is officially discouraged, and for provocative remarks to his neighbors in a culture where neighborliness is a virtue: "Some son-of-a-bitch stole my lawnmower. Wonder if it's over here." Somehow, characters like Kimball play for white communities a role in real life similar to that of Coyote or the "trickster" in many Native American cultures, for they provide expression for that which simmers just under the surface, but for which the ordinary person has only a limited vocabulary.
There are, of course, stock characters who appear more in folk narratives than in the real
daily life of the West, although they certainly have their origins in shared ideals of
behavior or sterotypes of culturally valid
roles. In folk narratives these originals are intensified–as they also are in
popular literature: the Pioneer Wife or Mother (to say nothing of the archetypical
Pioneer himself, with leather pants, beard, rifle, jutting chin and purposeful
stride), the timid-but-triumphant man (often a nice greenhorn), the Doctor and the
Itinerant Preacher, the Whore with the Heart of
Gold, the Schoolmarm, the Town Tough, the Gambler, the Law Man, the
Outlaw, the Villain Businessman, the Drunk. We needed to have them all, for they represent
the variety of values we have developed in the West. Alongside the Chaste Schoolmarm and
the Moral Minister, the Helpful Doctor, and the Brave Upholder of the Law–roles we
have liked to see ourselves in and have thus cast many of our heroes and relatives in-we
have also gambled on moving west, have sold ourselves (not always to the highest bidder),
have prided ourselves at being tough, independent, and outside the Law (one of the reasons
why Outlaws are more positively viewed than are criminals in our folklore: we fear
Dillingers, but we kind of think that Jesse Jameses are all right; in any case we take no
chances and hang a good high-powered rifle in our pickup truck). And although we may disapprove
of drunkenness, somehow the drunk performs something of great sensitivity for us, perhaps
because he becomes almost an icon of human weakness, indulgence, and pathetic frustration
(preferable, in our society, to the suicide that would be considered the honorable response
in other cultures). And especially when the drunk can be contrasted with others more "normal"
who nonetheless fall below our expectations, the folk narratives have a way of articulating a
mixture of irony, social criticism, and optimism for reform that quite stuns the imagination.
In more recent years, Red Skelton and Jackie Gleason have capitalized on these traditional
responses in the American audience; oral tradition has used the motif without pause. Still
current in Reub Long's repertoire was the story of a frontier judge who was such a drunkard
that one of the local businessmen, a prissy newcomer from the East, was moved to run against
him in an election. On election day, as the citizens gathered to begin voting, the judge
staggered out onto the porch in front of his office and said, "I really feel sorry for
you people today. You haven't got much of a choice, because you've got to decide between a
drunkard and a fool.
There's only one thing that's worth remembering as you vote today, friends, and it's this:
with a drunkard, you know that at least sometimes he's sober." And of course
this is the same cluster of motifs cleverly brought together in Lee Marvin's portrayal of
the drunken gunfighter in the film Cat Ballou, an excellent example of the modern
relationship between a popular medium and folk tradition.
Unlike Münchausens, legends are stories, or idea clusters, passed along by people
who actually believe either that they are true or that at least they are very
likely to be true, usually because they have come from unimpeachable sources like one's
spouse or colleague. In some regards, legends are like
rumors, and they pass through the same channels of the culture, propelled by our
fascination with the almost unbelievable. Poodles are exploded in microwaves by old
ladies ignorant of modern appliances, spiders are found in uncombed hairdos, escaped
mental patients with hooks on arms accost people on lovers' lanes, countless innocent
women from the country are embarrassed by urban chefs into paying for recipes to
Red Velvet Cakes, and so on.
17
I speak in the plural here, for unlike rumors–which after all usually die out after a
while–legends live on and propagate themselves astronomically. It would be hard enough
to believe that some old lady blew up her poodle in her microwave unless I had heard the original
account of it from the wife of the doctor in Seattle who was summoned to treat her for the
resultant heart attack. Even if I had an unquestionable report on the incident (well, the
doctor, under close questioning by his wife, recanted and said that it was actually a
colleague on the other side of Seattle), the reader has undoubtedly also heard an
original account, also from someone who knows one of the principals. What are we to
conclude, then: that there is an epidemic of little old ladies stuffing their poodles into
ovens all over the country, or that the story–even if it is based on a real
occurrence–has somehow gotten away from the act and has begun to have a life of its own?
A folklorist would opt for the latter, carefully not calling the original a lie (or,
God forbid, a "myth," as it would be called by a journalist to indicate its "falsehood"),
but noting, and then analyzing, its currency and function in oral tradition. Clearly the story
has some function in our society, or it would not persist. Among other things, it portrays an
older woman as ignorant of a newer electronic way of life, both a sexist and an "agist"
stereotype which is found abundantly on other levels and in other kinds of expressions in our culture.
Without going further into the fascinating array of modern "urban"
legends–already well discussed by Jan H. Brunvand–let me focus this kind of attention
on an earlier, yet persistent legend of the West, that of
Bigfoot, or Sasquatch. In this constellation of motifs and narratives, one central idea continues
to emerge: alive in the mountains of the West is a kind of primate creature with shaggy
hair and primitive build, one who is reminiscent of gorillas or larger apes but who apparently
has some kind of social system like our own. The Bigfoots (the plural form is unclear, but I
use here a parallel to the plurals of "Webfoot" and "Tenderfoot") try to keep to
themselves, but they are troubled by our civilization, and are often described as
performing selected deeds of revenge (an empty oil barrel is found crushed by a logging crew,
a Bigfoot steps out of the bushes and scratches the top of a government pickup truck,
unsuspecting campers are scared off by a screaming Bigfoot, and so on). On occasion they
kidnap a human, taking the prisoner back to their "camp." Both male and female humans are
usually forced to accept Bigfoot sexual attentions, and are seldom released
afterwards. Police and others who have gone in search of missing persons are said
to have had mysterious accidents, or to have disappeared themselves. The stories seem to
cluster along certain mountain areas: the Siskiyous in northern California, the Cascades
in West Central Oregon and Washington, and the coastal ranges of British Columbia, including
Vancouver Island. One explanation for the persistence of these stories which cannot be ruled
out–especially since there are many eyewitness reports by very credible persons,
and since a number of anthropologists have busied themselves with the details of the
issue–is that there is such a creature.
Holding this possibility in one hand, however, let us still look into the
question of what function such a character would have in the folklore of the
West, for it may be that we have somehow needed this creature, whether it actually
exists or not, for the expression of something important in our culture. The reader
will probably already have remembered the existence of similar creatures in the Old
English Beowulf, and a few minutes' reflection will also scare up from memory
the Yahoos of Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan
Swift. What may not be readily known is that there is a wealth of "wild man of
the forest" stories across northern Europe dating from very early times;
one sees reference to them in medieval woodcuts, in tapestries, and even in statuary.
The wild men are depicted as covered with wavy, unruly hair, matted with twigs and bits
of grass and leaves; the wild women are a bit less hairy and very voluptuous. They are
shown as intruding on the affairs of civilized human beings by angrily rushing out of
the woods to kidnap people. It may be that they represent, at least in some cases, a
metaphorical statement about non-Christian or non-religious people, or even incarnations
of the Devil; in other cases, they may represent earlier gods of the field and wood
who were put into the shade (or out of business) by the advent of
Christianity. But in all cases, they actually pictorialize a clash between the civilized
and cultivated world and the uncivilized, uncultivated world. In other words, one of
their functions seems to be to epitomize a condition of human existence against which
civilization measures itself, and without which it has little meaning. Indeed, the image
is at least as old as the Gilga mesh epic.
In New England, especially in Maine, the legend of Yoho Cove (certainly not named by
Jonathan Swift) tells how a local geographical area received its name when one of
those Yohos came out of the woods and kidnapped a human girl who was out huckleberrying
with her family. She was forced to mate with the Yoho, and escaped some years later, the
Yoho running after her, ripping their child in half and throwing one half after her departing boat.
18
The same story is told in Kentucky, according to Leonard Roberts, where the creature is called Yeahoh.
19
All of the American stories stress the ape-like qualities of the animal,
in contrast to the distinctly human attributes of the European variety,
and they all have much in common
(viewed in retrospect) with the ../gifs which have made King Kong such a compelling
character in the popular media. What is there in the American West that would
nurture such stories as if they had local roots? Well, for one
thing, the West, with all its reducing of the land (and people) to cultivated
properties, also featured a number of distinctly uncivilized central episodes,
among them the treatment of the Indians during the change of ownership.
In addition, the frontier was a mixture of excitement and danger, a kind of tenuous boundary
between the known and the unknown. There were indeed Boggarts and Boogers which would come
and get you; at least the imagination seems to have created that scene, and the paranoid,
almost fanatic way in which wolves, rattlesnakes, and Indians were ruthlessly attacked,
when for the most part they kept trying to move out of the way, is a vivid indication that the
Order brought about on the frontier was paid for with a large dose of mental disquietude.
It is also worth saying that many of the common motifs of the Bigfoot stories are also
common in racial/racist
narratives, beliefs, and jokes: uncivilized and aggressive behavior, strong and
offensive smell, ape-like looks and movements, primitive culture, and
a taste for white women, to name only a few. Yes, whether there really are
Bigfoots or not, we would have reinvented and reused them in the
West, I believe, for our "ghosts" seem to require animation and narrative performance.
Legends allow the scholar a chance at least to speculate about what sorts of emotions
lie under the western surface nicely mythologized by historians but uncorked and set
loose every now and then in oral narratives and by good writers. Not coincidentally,
many of the local legends in the West have to do with monsters or mysterious animals who
live under lakes (again, European antecedents come easily to mind, and they must surely have
provided the cultural willingness to believe in the phenomenon), and what a strikingly
appropriate image for further reflection and deeper scrutiny: the unfathomed lake with
its hidden monster which comes into view every now and then and eats someone or
bashes a boat to smithereens (or, more recently, swallows up a flight of Air Force jets
without a belch). Jung would have been more than pleased to find this dream-stuff
so widespread in oral tradition presented as living truth, for in psychological terms,
that's precisely what it is. Bear Lake, Mono Lake, Crater Lake, Lake Chelan, even freshwater lakes along the Oregon coast: there is hardly a lake in the West that does not have
its monster, or at least a subterranean passage that links it to another lake that does.
Legends about founding fathers and the origins of place names are long-lived and similarly
widespread. Is it really true that Brigham Young, on seeing the Salt Lake Valley for the first
time, said "This is the place"? We may never know, but a vignette of Young's prophetic
spirit is certainly portrayed in the story (never mind that he had already heard about
the place and had a bet on with Jim Bridger), and it is that element of course which gives the
legend its force. It is also that which gives non-Mormon detractors, perhaps jealous of
Young's alleged sexual energies, the opportunity to say the line was actually spoken by
one of Young's wives, who really said, "Brigham! This is not the place!" We may
never know; fortunately for the folklorist, both utterances are important documents of
real feelings in the area.
Other place names have equally curious stories about them. Is it "true" that the French
voyageurs and trappers were so starved for feminine company that in their fantasies the Grand
Tetons had a symbolic force still carried by their name? What about other geographical
features in the West which were given their names before anyone ever thought a woman or a
preacher might read a map? Rooster Rock on the Columbia was clearly named for its phallic
form, but by coincidence that word does not carry the automatic sexual association it did
in earlier times. Not so lucky are the various Squaw-Teat Buttes about the West; most of them
have been changed by polite boards of geographers solicitous of formal standards of public
decency, and are now known by more antiseptic, if less objectionable names. Probably
because changing a name tends to change or qualify our deeper sense of feeling in local history,
local people almost always reject these refinements, and go on using the older "original"
terms along with the legends which provide their pedigree. A spot in Harney County,
Oregon, is known by the term "Whorehouse Meadows," because in earlier times an entrepreneur
brought temporary quarters and fancy ladies out to provide for the wants of cattle and
sheep men in the vicinity. In more recent years, the Bureau of Land Management quietly
substituted "Naughty Girl Meadows" on its maps, and the U.S. Geographical Names Board
tried to adopt the change officially, but an objection was lodged by the Oregon Names Board,
which won its case in federal arbitration. Besides the fact that the "girls" were no
naughtier than the "boys," everyone locally thought the name
change was idiotic because it took away the meaning of the place.
Names (and their attached legends) have played a large cultural role in states like
Utah, with its distinctive mixture of Indian and Book of Mormon
names. The principal cities of Washington are named after Indians or Indian tribes,
while the principal cities of Oregon are named after white settlers or the New England
towns they came from. Even the brief legend told of Francis W. Pettigrove from Maine and A. L.
Lovejoy from Massachusetts tossing a coin to decide if their city would be called Portland or
Boston gives us a feel for the times: who was making the decisions, and what was the
range of alternatives they allowed themselves? Here is the establishment of a solid New
England male protestant stamp on Oregon, portrayed in a tableau scene of incredible
economy of image. The various Murder Creeks, Bloody Washes, Bear-tooth Runs, and so on
throughout the West also have their legends to give flesh to the name, and in each
area the legends do not necessarily agree: Murder Creek, Oregon, was named because of
a murder which occurred there, but there are at least six different accounts of who was
murdered, and who was guilty (each one, of course, its narrator aware of the others,
presents itself as the "real" one, passed on by a grandfather who knew the sheriff,
or who was a school friend of one of the culprits and heard a private confession). The
genre has also been used to make fun of places one especially does not like, or to praise
places of special
value. Walla Walla is supposedly the place they loved so well they named it
twice; but one also hears that the name came about during a ritual bathing after
the local tribe's annual bean festival: the chief, waist-deep in water, broke wind, and
the resulting sound, taken to be the chief's command, was ever after applied to the
spot (needless to say this is neither a real Indian legend nor a favorite anecdote
of the Walla Walla Chamber of Commerce). Another story from Arizona tells how
two grizzled prospectors argued for years about what they would name their desert home.
They finally decided to shoot the first person who came their way, then name the place
after his last word. The unlucky visitor turned out to be a black cowboy who was
duly shot and approached; he raised his head and with his last breath said, "You muh. . . ."
20
Some of the prominent beliefs found in western folklore include the assumptions
behind the legends already cited (that monsters can, and thus probably do, live in
deep lakes; that ape-like creatures can exist out of sight of human searchers for
one hundred and fifty years; that there are ghosts, haunted houses, lost treasures and
mines), as well as constellations of belief and custom like dowsing (finding water,
oil, or minerals, even lost objects, by using an object held in the hand).
Witching for water is still a widespread phenomenon in the West, sometimes being
done by professional well-drillers, whose income, after all, depends on their success.
Some western dowsers use two welding rods bent pistol-like, one in each hand, and watch to
see where they suddenly move together or cross. Some claim that by using a piece of
metal spring or a stick they can witch water from a map
(moving in their imaginations over the area depicted there), or while riding
along in a car, and some believe they can locate uranium and other metals,
and even tell how deep they are. Other belief systems in the West include those of
the fishermen along the coast, who still pass on and use a combination of the most
ancient and modern beliefs imaginable. Many will not leave post on a Friday, one of
the oldest of seafarers' beliefs; someplace a golden or silver coin under the radar
housing (a modern variation of insuring or buying wind by placing a coin under the mast);
and almost all fishermen honor Lady Luck in one fashion or another, chiefly by not "pushing
their luck," too far. If it's raining, someone will note that since salmon love freshwater,
the fishing will be bound to get better; if the weather starts to clear, someone will
just as cheerfully point out that since salmon like warm weather and a rising barometer,
the fishing will start to pick up. Neither belief really indicates what the fishermen
think about fish behavior (besides, the two "beliefs" are contrary to each other), but
both are based on a shared set of beliefs that encourage fishermen to speak only in
positive terms about a change in the fishing; no matter what happens, the fishing will get better.
Attitudes toward such animals as the rattlesnake, the coyote, and the wolf must be seen as
principally cultural rather than based on cold rational observation, for the same animals
appear in Native American tradition with totally different values, and one cannot rationally
suggest that the Indians did not observe animals closely.
21
The despised coyote, so expendable that he is trapped and shot in great numbers just
to get rid of him, is nonetheless so symbolic of something ferocious in nature that his
pelt is hung ceremonially on fences in the West (is it simply a warning to other
coyotes, à la Reub Long's whitewashed rat? or is it, as Richard Poulsen surmises,
a deeper matter?).
22
The "good animals," that is, the ones which have cheerfully undergone domestication,
are treated differently: note the traditional appearance of horses, cats, dogs, and even
cows on the tombstones of westerners. Some ranching families in Montana place a cow or
steer on every tombstone, and while a large Hereford steer standing over the word "MOTHER"
may at first look a bit odd, it comes into better focus when we see the graves of neighboring
ranchers with their singletrees used as flowerpot holders, and branding irons as
grave decorations. Inscriptions including the names and pictures of animals indicate the
locally valid occupations, interests, hobbies and talents of those buried there. These
are not messages to outsiders, least of all to visiting professors, but to members of the
local community who can read the language.
Family folklore is found throughout the country, of course, but in the West, families are
often also the contexts for occupational lore: prominent in the West is the family-operated
ranch, where all family members participate in roundup, roping and tying, castration, and
branding. One sees a ranch wife on horseback roping an escaping calf, another wife with
cigarette dangling sitting on a calf while it is branded and castrated, while her ten-year-old
son comes dragging another calf by its neck and forelegs, taking time only to shift his
snoose to the other cheek and spit. These would be rare sights in a western movie, but
they are not rare in the daily reality of
ranchers, especially today, when ranch hands are hard to find and salaries hard to pay.
But such a matter is not only a part of reality, it becomes also a part of custom, jargon,
gesture, anecdote, and legend. It may not fit the public image of "the cowboy," but
it accurately expresses local community values about both occupation and family. Women,
traditionally discouraged or prevented from coming aboard fishing vessels, are often found as
integral units on family-owned and operated fishing boats in the West Coast fishery. This in
turn has led to the employment of single women on board otherwise
male-operated boats. Skippers who will still assure the listener that one never allows a woman
on board are discovered nonetheless to have employed women on their very own boats. One can
conclude from such evidence that fishermen are lying, of course, but it is far more likely that
their oral traditions are simply carrying a set of values which still exist on one
level, even though they may have begun to disappear on another. Attitudes and customs
about family relationships can thus affect traditional attitudes
on other matters. Folk belief and custom seldom remain static in function, although the spirit
of a region may persist for generations.
Family legends found all over America testify to the seriousness with which people take their
own family myth, or sacred story (the term is not too forced here, I think): stories of how
ancestors crossed the ocean or crossed the Plains, why they settled in a certain place, why
they left their original homeland, and so on, are not simply homey attempts to capture a
few facts of history, but are usually delicately structured cameos of family,
regional, religious, and cultural values. Succeeding generations who try to keep
their hands clean delight in detailing how their grandparents had to learn
to cook with buffalo chips, for it puts a slight reek of sainthood into their own
plastic lives. Descendants of the Aurora Colony in Oregon recount how their founder,
Dr. Wilhelm Keil, transported the body of his dead son Willie westward in a casket lined
with lead and filled with alcohol; it is no wonder that his wagon train, preceded by a
German band, had no trouble with the Indians, but in any case their sense of having come
on a mission of religious peace and friendship–in contrast to many of their secular
contemporaries–is a strong feature of their own subsequent evaluation of themselves,
even though the Colony as such no longer exists.
A number of families in the West tell legends of close calls with the
Indians or with large animals. An innocent child is followed all the way to the cabin door
by a nice kitty whose footprints later identify it as a large and heavy cougar. A young boy
living in the mountain West with no playmates keeps referring to his best friend Amos,
who turns out to be not a fantasy friend but a giant rattler who threatens all who dare
to come near the boy. A legend found in more than a dozen Northwest families was
called "Goldilocks on the Oregon Trail" by Professor Francis Haines, who spent
a large part of his life tracing the story.
24
He found that most of the early families in
Oregon had a version of the story in their oral traditions, while none of them was able
to find any account of it in the otherwise detailed journals that had been kept on the
way West. The story, in its broadest outlines, goes something like this: On their way
across the Plains, our family's wagon train was visited several times by the braves of
Chief Joseph's (or Sitting Bull's or Geronimo's) band, who were always trading for provisions,
ammunition, or horses. The Chief kept coming back to the wagon train day after day, and it
turned out that his attention had been drawn to the cute little blond four-year-old girl who
was to become our grandmother. He kept offering the little girl's father more and more ponies
for her, but the answer was still no. The father kept acting as though an eventual trade might be
made, but finally, of course, he told the Chief that it had all been in fun, and that the
girl was not for sale at any price. The Chief departed in great
sorrow, and the family says to this day that "Grandma was almost sold to the Indians."
It does seem strange that in families where a journal record was kept of daily temperatures,
miles covered, trees sighted on the horizon, rivers
crossed, and so on, there would have been no mention of this rather striking event. Even so,
we are not entitled to make the snap decision that it must never have happened. On the other
hand, as with the exploding poodle story of more recent times, we would be foolish to overlook
the fact that the story is told by more families than coincidence would suggest could have been
approached by that busy Chieftain. Moreover, the story has other familiar elements to it: dark,
powerful, aggressive male is believed to be infatuated with a small, prepubescent, white girl.
Aside from its misunderstanding of Indian canons of beauty, its stereotypical presentation of the
cliché of interracial sexual threat, so common in race-based stories, plus the common
theme of a young female saved from doom by a male representative of the adult world (cf. policemen
rescuing the stranded girlfriend from the back seat of the murdered boyfriend's car in countless
lovers' lane legends) should suggest to us that at least the continued telling of the
narrative does something more culturally complex than merely recalling an interesting incident
in Grandma's early years, one which we now all chuckle
over. Why do we chuckle at it, indeed? And why do we assume that Grandma would not have liked
life among the Indians, especially in the company of so illustrious a leader as Chief
Joseph?–Why, the family could have been really famous then! With this
suggestion, we begin to hear the hum of pioneer ancestors spinning in their cerements,
for that's not what they had in mind, we may well imagine. The story seems to function, among other
things, as a hallmark of early arrival on the scene, for most of the later pioneers,
though they had no easy time of this journey into rain and mud, did not get confronted
by the Indians in such an intimate way. There is a heady quality to being first in line for
the spoils that no amount of fact-finding will ever eradicate.
The spirit of the West has been, inevitably, that of the imagined frontier, and its feeling
remains in the air today. The way people perceived the frontier gave rise to
recognizable types who could flourish and prevail there. These character
types, and the customs by which they related to each other, naturally became enshrined
in the oral traditions of a people who felt a need to create their own myths, their own
testimonies of conquest and ownership, their own icons of meaning, and who felt driven
to impress these human dimensions upon a land which already held a depth of symbolic meaning for
those who had inhabited it earlier, those who were now expected–along with
their religion, culture, and languages–to commence vanishing. Perhaps
it is this drive for establishment, and not simply the weight of superior
numbers, that eventually assured that Euro-American regionalization would
become the main thread of traditional culture in what we now recognize as
the Mythic West. The Asians, after all, did not need to replace older Native
American roots with their own, for they brought their own with
them, and used these to intensify their cultural sense of who they were.
The French trappers in the North and the Hispanic ranchers in the Southwest
married in with the Indians and formed mestizo cultures which combined disparate
models of cultural world view into new constellations. The blacks
came, of course, but were mostly employed in establishing white power over the land and
its inhabitants; not until the twentieth century was the land in any way to be
viewed as "theirs." For the Indians, the losers, cultural symbols still animated
a deep relation with the area, but steady and unrelenting erosion by teachers and
missionaries helped to destroy much of what was left after they had been separated from
their land. It was mainly the white settlers from families whose traces go back to
north-central Europe (the English, Irish, Scottish, the Germans, the Scandinavians,
the Swiss–indeed, one is tempted to say "the Protestants,"but that would be
too simple) who needed to sweep away what had been there before them, who needed to
believe that the frontier was a place of great hazard and disarray which they had
been heroic enough to have brought into order, and who needed to create a blood
bond with the land which would have the power to supersede everything prior to itself.
The themes, topics, and motifs discussed in this essay are among the many lively
stereotypes of the western life in America, and are to be found in virtually
all levels of expression, from the everyday to the elite. The psychological
costs of these traditions are suggested by the apparent schizophrenia
of the themes themselves, as well as in the subtlety and delicacy
of their expression in the folklore: kindness, independence, piety, naivete,
charity, and hospitality, all in the same context as racism, pillage, plunder,
conquest, and exploitation; an insistence on both roots and mobility; pride
in family and rugged individualism; hyperbole and understatement. The
westerner is an unabashed combination of outlaw and preacher, pioneer mother
and dance-hall girl, buckaroo and oil baron, iconoclast and chauvinist.
Perhaps it can be said of western folklore that, like all good poetry, it
mediates, foregrounds, and makes palpable the most bothersome of these
discrepancies in a way that not only entertains and edifies, but somehow
as well gives voice to the otherwise inarticulate features of the culture.
Everything done and said by and in a culture is unavoidably a part of its larger
language, has meaning in its larger picture. In this sense, each cowboy, each
settler, each pioneer mother–either in real life or in song and story–is
a metaphor for some important aspect of the western cultural view. Thus,
the aggregate of everyday expressions available to us in the living record
of folklore provides us the poetic grammar through which the emotional
realities of America in its penultimate phase are articulated and understood.
25
BARRE
TOELKEN,
Utah State University
Suzi Jones, "Regionalization: A Rhetorical Strategy," Journal of the Folklore
Institute 13 (1976): 105—120. Attitudes toward the land which later appear as
cultural expressions are discussed in Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, 1974).
For a basic discussion of primary folklore genres, see Jan H.
Brunvand, The Study of American Folklore: An Introduction, 2nd. ed. (New
York: Norton, 1978). A description of the processes of tradition is given in Barre
Toelken, The Dynamics of Folklore (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979).
Two helpful collections of essays on folklore, both edited by Richard M. Dorson,
are Folklore and Folklife: An Introduction (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1972), and Handbook of American Folklore (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1983).
See Austin E. Fife and James M. Fife, "Hay Derricks of the Great Basin and
Upper Snake River Valley," Western Folklore 7 (1948): 225—239; this
seminal article on a regionalized article of material folk culture is being reprinted
in Louie W. Attebery, ed., Idaho Folklife (Salt Lake City: University of Utah
Press, 1985), a volume of central importance for those interested in the traditions
of the American West.
Collected from Herbert Arntson, Pullman, Washington, in December 1958; text and tune
are found throughout the West with only minor variations. The original broadside may
have appeared as early as 1597, according to Hyder E. Rollins, in The Pepys Ballads
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1930), vol. 3, p. 57.
The ballad became so popular that it inspired parodies of itself, some of which may be
found in John Ashton, Modern Street Ballads (London: Chatto and Windus, 1888), pp.
124—127.
A good start would be her "Memories of a Mormon Girlhood," in Journal of
American Folklore 77 (1964):195—219.
A text and tune for this song are found in Austin and Alta Fife,
Saints of Sage and Saddle: Folklore Among the Mormons (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1956), pp. 330—331. This work is an obligatory text for studying the
traditions of Mormon settlers in the West.
There are, of course, exceptions to this generalization. Folklorist Alan Dundes,
for example, has continually tried to employ the perspectives of Freud in the
analysis of folklore; others, like Joseph Campbell, have preferred a Jungian
approach. But the main body of folklore discussion has been descriptive, functional, historical.
This text was collected by students Marion Cupp and F. C. Michel, from Henry Tams,
a retired logger living in Moscow, Idaho, during the summer of 1959. Other
song texts cited were collected by the author, unless otherwise noted.
Other folksongs related to life in the Northwest can be found in B. Toelken,
"Northwest Ballads: A Collector's Dilemma," Northwest Review 5 (1962):
9—18; and in B. Toelken, "Northwest Regional Folklore," in Edwin R.
Bingham and Glen A. Love, eds., Northwest Perspectives: Essays on the Culture of
the Pacific Northwest (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979), pp. 21—42.
For Utah, Lester A. Hubbard's Ballads and Songs from Utah (Salt Lake City:
University of Utah Press, 1961) is a standard. Folksongs from many other areas of
the West are to be found in standard cowboy song collections, some of which will be
referenced in the following note.
A full text and tune for "No Use for the Women" is given in Austin E.
and Alta S. Fife, Cowboy and Western Songs: A Comprehensive Anthology (New
York: Potter, 1969), pp. 177—178; this is a fine collection with more detailed
notes and deeper scholarship than John A. and Alan Lomax, Cowboy Songs and Other
Frontier Ballads (New York: Macmillan, 1938)) itself a standard. The Fifes have
also produced a critical edition of N. Howard ("Jack") Thorp's Songs of the
Cowboys (New York: Bramhall House, 1966), a collection of cowboy religious
songs, Heaven on Horseback (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1970),
and a gathering of western verse from newspapers, personal journals, and western
popular print entitled Ballads of the Great West (Palo Alto: American West, 1970).
The Fifes have been indefatigable scholars in the field of western folklore, and have been
ahead of most of their American colleagues in insisting that popular media (records,
cowboy journals, etc.) be included in the raw materials of folklore scholarship.
Text and tune collected by Barre Toelken from Lewis Gordon at Logan, Utah, December 1955.
Reub Long's hyperboles are found throughout The Oregon Desert (Caldwell,
Idaho: Caxton, 1969), which he edited and wrote with E. R. Jackman. Tall
tales and other exaggerations which were his personal trademarks are still
in healthy oral tradition in central Oregon.
Jan H. Brunvand, "Len Henry: North Idaho Münchausen," Northwest Folklore
Susan Mullin, "Oregon's Huckleberry Finn: A Münchausen Enters Tradition,"
Northwest Folklore 2 (1967): 19—27.
Recurrent single elements of folklore, called motifs, are catalogued for
convenience in comparison and analysis in Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk
Literature: A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths,
Fables, Mediaeval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest-books, and Local Legends
(Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1955—58). Within
category X, Humor, Thompson especially designated the numbers X900 to X1899 for
the classification of Lies and Exaggerations in traditional narratives. In another
work designed to categorize entire narrative clusters (groups of motifs in
recurrent use, recognizable plots), Thompson and Antti Aarne provide Tale Type numbers
for a similar range of materials: The Types of the Folktale, Folklore Fellows
Communications 184 (Helsinki, 1961). The section called "Tales of
Lying" uses Type numbers 1875 to 1965, and includes such well-known "lies" as
1882A, Man Caught in Tree Goes Home to Get Axe; 1889F, Frozen Words
Thaw; 1889L, The Split Dog; 1889M, Snakebite causes Object to Swell; 1913, The Side-Hill
Beast (short legs on one side); 1917, The Stretching and Shrinking Harness; 1920B, "I
Have Not Time to Lie"; 1960M, Large Mosquitos Fly off with Kettle. Motif and Type
numbers have not been given for most of the texts quoted in this article, for their
appearance here is relatively unsystematic; standard practice in folklore analysis,
however, would require a survey of all texts of a given item, and an account of their
traditional provenance through reference to these basic research tools.
Dorson's commentary may be most easily found in his American Folklore (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1959), in Chapter 6, "A Gallery of Folk Heroes," pp.
199—243.
The best printed collection of the J. Golden Kimball stories is Thomas E.
Cheney, The Golden Legacy: A Folk History of J. Golden Kimball (Salt Lake
City: Peregrine Smith, 1974). A version of the Jordan River story is given on
pp. 120—121. Because of Kimball's peculiar high-pitched voice, it is even
more illuminating to hear the stories told by a gifted raconteur who can approximate
the original (as many indeed can do, because they remember hearing Kimball himself); a
tour de force example is Hector Lee's performance of J. Golden stories before a live
audience on the record, J. Golden Kimball Stories, by Folk Legacy Records (#FTA-25),
Sharon, Connecticut.
See Jan H. Brunvand, The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and
Their Meanings (New York: Norton, 1981), and The Choking
Doberman and Other "New" Urban Legends (New York: Norton, 1984).
The Yoho Cove story can be found in Dorson's American Folklore, pp.
130—131.
Leonard Roberts, South from
Hell-fer-Sartin: Kentucky Mountain Folk Tales
(Berea, Kentucky: Council of Southern Mountains, 1964),p. 162,
with the title "Origin of Man."
Unfortunately, not every western state has a work like Lewis A. McArthur,
Oregon Geographic Names, 5th ed. (Portland: Oregon Historical Society, 1982);
its pages are a compendium of western folklore, history, and local legends.
This point is one of several issues taken up in Barry Lopez's Of Wolves and Men
(New York: Scribner, 1978).
See Richard C. Poulsen, The Pure Experience of Order: Essays on the Symbolic in
the Material Culture of Western America (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1982). His chapter, "Hawks and Coyotes on Western Fences:
The Symbolism of Slaughter," suggests that the ancient custom of protecting
oneself against lightning, hail, plague, and other misfortune by hanging the
carcasses of certain animals on an entry or fence may still be an undercurrent
emotional/cultural factor in the killing and display of predators in America.
A good place to start consideration of family folklore is with Steven J. Zeitlin,
Amy Kotkin, and Holly Cutting Baker, eds., A Celebration of American Family Folklore
(New York: Pantheon, 1982).
Francis Haines, "Goldilocks on the Oregon Trail," Idaho Yesterdays 9 (1966):
26—30.
I would like to express my deepest thanks to friends and colleagues whose
conversation provided perspective and content for this chapter: Edwin Bingham,
Jan H. Brunvand, Suzi Jones, Roger Welsch, and William "Bert" Wilson.
In addition to the works cited in the footnotes to this chapter, those interested in the
subject of western folklore should consult back issues of the Journal of American
Folklore, the regional folklore journals Western Folklore and Northwest Folklore, and
the historical society quarterlies of the various western states. Parts of
Dorson's American Folklore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959)
and Buying the Wind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964) are
given over to the West, and much of the material in Duncan Emrich's Folklore on
the American Land (Boston:
Little, Brown, 1972) is drawn from western sources. Less helpful than its title
would imply is John Greenway, Folklore of the Great West (Palo Alto: American
West, 1969), but it does bring together a variety of essays which originally
appeared in the Journal of American Folklore. The many works published
and edited by J. Frank Dobie and others connected with the Publications of
the Texas Folklore Society are basic works for that region; all of them, of course,
provide bibliographical resources for still further particular research.
Especially useful is Mody C. Boatright's Folk Laughter on the American
Frontier (New York: Macmillan, 1949). A sampling of Oregon traditions,
with fine photographic illustrations, is Suzi Jones, Oregon Folklore (Eugene:
University of Oregon Press, 1977); Jones also edited a catalog, Web foots and
Bunchgrassers: Folk Art of the Oregon Country (Salem: Oregon Arts Commission,
1980), which provides a rich selection of material traditions from the area. A similar
exposure to Idaho material culture is given in Steve Siporin, ed., Folk Art of Idaho:
"We Came to Where We Were Supposed to Be" (Boise: Idaho Commission
on the Arts, 1984). In Louie Attebery, ed., Idaho Folklife: Homesteads to Headstones
(Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1985) appear more than twenty essays
on various aspects of folklore in that area–much of it, of course, analogous
to considerations which can and should be made for all western states. Jan H.
Brunvand offers a collector's guide in his Folklore in Utah (Salt Lake
City: University of Utah
Press, 1971); beyond that, the book is as well a small compendium of some of the most
common folk traditions of the area. Works on particular genres of western folklore
are not numerous, and have appeared with no consistency of coverage. A fine study
of the Münchausen is Roger Welsch's Catfish at the Pump: Humor and the
Frontier (Lincoln, Nebr.: Plains Heritage, 1982). Another work on local place
names is Erwin G. Gudde, California Place Names (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1969). For an early compendium of essays on western folklife, see
Austin and Alta Fife and Henry H. Glassie, Forms upon the Frontier (Logan:
Utah State University Press, 1969). To appear in 1985 is Wayland D. Hand's large
edition of Utah Folk Beliefs (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press); it will
surely become the standard upon which similar collections of beliefs in the other western
states will be developed. Since nearly every western state now has, or is planning,
a state funded folklife or folk arts program, we can expect a number of works over
the coming years to bring forth the kinds of materials which Suzi Jones,
Steve Siporin, Louie Attebery, Hal Cannon, and Michael Korn have produced for Oregon, Idaho,
Utah, and Montana. Virtually every major university has a folklore program of
some sort, and several have fine archives; an updated directory may be obtained
from the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.,
20540). Also available from the same source are bibliographies, discographies, finding
lists, general information about folksongs and instruments, and the like; although
these lists are nationwide in scope, they contain much that is regional in orientation.
The American Folklife Center and the Folklife Program at the Smithsonian Institution,
moreover, have sponsored various collecting, study, and publishing projects in the West;
these two programs, plus the National Council for the Traditional Arts (1346
Connecticut Ave., N. W., Suite 1118, Washington, D.C. 20036) and the Folk Arts
Program of the National Endowment for the Arts (Washington, D.C., 20506), are
reliable ongoing resources for information concerning projects in western American
folklore.
I (1965): 11—19.
© Texas Christian University Press, 1998. All rights reserved.