List of Illustrations
| “I feels somethin’ tappin’ me on the leg” | [12] |
| “Jist as he pulls the trigger, he runs to beat hell” | [23] |
| “Purty soon the whiffle-pooffle gits interested and pricks up his ears” | [33] |
| “Jist as I teched the crown a feller yelled out” | [47] |
| “Well, sir, them birds jist naturally lifted me right out of that sink hole” | [63] |
| “A settin’ on that tornado and a-spurrin’ it in the withers” | [85] |
| “That gal come ridin’ down the Río Grande on a catfish” | [93] |
A PREFACE ON AUTHENTIC LIARS
An authentic liar knows what he is lying about, knows that his listeners—unless they are tenderfeet, greenhorns—know also, and hence makes no pretense of fooling either himself or them. At his best he is as grave as a historian of the Roman Empire; yet what he is after is neither credulity nor the establishment of truth. He does not take himself too seriously, but he does regard himself as an artist and yearns for recognition of his art. He may lie with satiric intent; he may lie merely to make the time pass pleasantly; he may lie in order to take the wind out of some egotistic fellow of his own tribe or to take in some greener; again, without any purpose at all and directed only by his ebullient and companion-loving nature, he may “stretch the blanket” merely because, like the redoubtable Tom Ochiltree, he had “rather lie on credit than tell truth for cash.” His generous nature revolts at the monotony of everyday facts and overflows with desire to make his company joyful.
Certainly the telling of “windies” flourished in the Old World long before America was discovered; nevertheless the tall tale both in subject matter and in manner of telling has been peculiar to the frontiers of America, whether in the backwoods of the Old South, in the mining camps of the Far West, amid the logging camps presided over by Paul Bunyan, or on the range lands stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian line. Very likely the Pilgrim Fathers did not indulge much in the art of yarning, and the stately Cavaliers pretty much left that sort of entertainment to the poor—“poor but honest”—settlers. As to whether the “decay in the art of lying” that Oscar Wilde observed in literary fiction has blighted that to be heard around camp fires and on the galleries of ranch houses, we need not here inquire. The “big uns” that Mody Boatright has gathered together in this book are not altogether out of the past.
They express a way that range folk talked and they express also a way in which these folk cartooned objects familiar to them like rattlesnakes, sand storms, jack rabbits, the expanding and contracting powers of rawhide, the suddenness of Texas northers, “killings” according to a code that clearly distinguished a killing from a murder, and other things. They are, in short, authentic both as to the characters represented and the subjects discoursed upon.
When in the old days two cow outfits met upon the range, and there was “ample time,” as Andy Adams would say, they sometimes arranged what was known as an “auguring match.” Each outfit would pit its prime yarn-spinner against the other and there followed a contest not only of invention but of endurance. John Palliser in The Solitary Hunter; or, Sporting Adventures of the Prairies (London, 1856) relates how after an all-night talking contest between a Missourian and a Kentuckian, the umpire “at a quarter past five” found the Kentucky man fast asleep, his opponent “sitting up close beside him and whispering in his ear.” What the contestants talked about, Palliser does not say, but there is ample testimony to prove that the “auguring matches” on the range had as precedent among the backwoodsmen of the South who were to push out upon the ranges a kind of round table talk in which each talker sought to cap the tall tales of his fellow with one a little taller.
For genuine artists a solitary opponent is sufficient; art is substantive. In Piney Woods Tavern; or, Sam Slick in Texas (Philadelphia, 1858), by Samuel A. Hammett, the narrator in traveling from the Brazos to the Trinity rivers found the San Jacinto “a roarin’ and a hummin’ it.... Free soil movements was a-goin’ on, and trees a-tumblin’ in all along the banks.”
I see thar war no help for it [the narrator goes on]. So I took my feet outen the stirrups, threw my saddle-bags over my shoulder, and in me and the mar went.