We war in a awful tight place for a time, but we soon landed safe. I’d jest got my critter tied out, and a fire started to dry myself with when I see a chap come ridin’ up the hill on a smart chunk of a pony....
“Hoopee! stranger”—sings out my beauty—“How d’ye? Kept your fireworks dry, eh? How in thunder did ye get over?”
“Oh!” says I, “mighty easy. Ye see, stranger, I’m powerful on a pirogue; so I waited till I see a big log a-driftin’ nigh the shore, when I fastened to it, set my critter a-straddle on it, got into the saddle, paddled over with my saddle-bags, and steered with the mare’s tail.”
“Ye didn’t, though, by Ned!” says he, “did ye?”
“Mighty apt to”—says I—“but arter ye’ve sucked all that in and got yer breath agin, let’s know how you crossed?”
“Oh!” says he, settin’ his pig’s eyes on me, “I’ve been a-riding all day with a consarned ager, and orful dry, and afeard to drink at the prairie water holes; so when I got to the river I jest went in fer a big drink, swallered half a mile of water, and come over dry shod.”
“Stranger,” says I, “ye’r just one huckleberry above my persimmon. Light and take some red-eye. I thought ye looked green, but I were barkin’ up the wrong tree.”
Story-telling in Texas was so popular that at times it interfered with religion. The pioneer Baptist preacher, Z. N. Morrell, relates in his autobiographic Flowers and Fruits in the Wilderness (Dallas, 1886) that on one occasion while he was preaching in a log cabin in East Texas his sermon was drowned by the voices of men outside “telling anecdotes.” After an ineffectual reprimand, the preacher finally told his interrupters that if they would give him a chance he would tell an anecdote and that then, if it was not better than any of theirs, he would “take down his sign and listen to them.” They agreed to the challenge. The anecdote he proceeded to relate about Sam Houston and the battle of San Jacinto won him the right to keep on talking without interruption. The triumph was but a repetition of David Crockett’s election to Congress through his b’ar stories.
An anecdote is not by any means necessarily a windy, but people who cultivate the art of oral narration will sooner or later indulge in exaggerative invention. Some candidate for the Ph.D. degree should write a thesis on the interrelationship of the anecdote, the tall tale, and the short story in America. What is probably the most widely known story that the nation has produced, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” is all three—and it is mostly just a yarn in which the frontier character, Jim Smiley, character being the essence of good anecdote, is more important than the frog.
Sixty years or so ago at Covey’s college for ranch boys, located at Concrete, Texas, near Cuero, the “scholars” organized a liar’s club. According to the rules of the club every boy present at a session must tell a story. The teller of what was adjudged the best yarn was habitually awarded as a prize a dozen hot tamales cooked by one of the Mexican women about the premises.