Occasionally one of these authentic liars of the West falls a prey to his own lying. Frank Root (The Overland Stage to California) relates that one time after a Gargantuan story-teller named Ranger Jones had finished narrating a particularly blood-curdling “personal experience,” a stage driver who happened to be among the listeners looked him squarely in the eye and said, “I hope, Ranger Jones, that you don’t expect me to believe this story.”
“Well—er—no—really, I don’t,” the narrator answered. “The fact is, I have lied out here in this Western country so long and have been in the habit of telling so many damned lies, the truth of it is now that I don’t know when I can believe myself.” In Trails Plowed Under Charles M. Russell has a delicious chapter on “Some Liars of the Old West.”
“These men weren’t vicious liars,” he comments. “It was love of romance, lack of reading matter, and the wish to be entertainin’ that makes ’em stretch facts and invent yarns.” Among the most famous of these liars was a man known as Lyin’ Jack, and his favorite tale was on an elk he once killed that had a spread of antlers fifteen feet wide. He always kept these, as he told the story, in the loft of his cabin.
One time after a long absence Lyin’ Jack showed up in Benton. “The boys” were all glad to see him and, after a round or two of drinks, asked him for a yarn.
“No, boys,” said Jack, “I’m through. For years I’ve been tellin’ these lies—told ’em so often I got to believin’ ’em myself. That story of mine about the elk with the fifteen-foot horns is what cured me. I told about that elk so often that I knowed the place I killed it. One night I lit a candle and crawled up in the loft to view the horns—an’ I’m damned if they weren’t there.”
In a book of not enough consequence to warrant the naming of its title, the author, writing through hearsay and attempting to be veracious, describes the Texas norther—which comes “sudden and soon in the dead of night or the blaze of noon”—as being so swift in descent, so terrible in force, and so bitterly cold that “no old Texan would trust himself out on the prairies in July or August with the thermometer at ninety-six degrees, without two blankets strapped at the saddlebow to keep him from freezing to death should a norther blow up.” Of course no man of the range carries his blankets on the horn of a saddle and no Texan ever experienced a genuine norther in July or August. The description is utterly false, utterly lacking in authenticity. On the other hand, when “Mr. Fishback of the Sulphurs” relates how one hot day in December when he was riding home he saw a blue norther coming behind him, put spurs to his horse, and, racing for miles with the nose of the wind at his very backbone, arrived at the stable to find the hind-quarters of his horse frozen stiff whereas the fore-quarters were in a lather of sweat—such a hair’s breadth doth divide the hot prelude to a norther from the iciness of the norther itself—we realize that we are in the company of a liar as authentic as he is accomplished. Surely such do not violate the ninth commandment; indeed they have become as little children.
—J. Frank Dobie,
Austin, Texas,
Cinco de Mayo, 1934.
[1] Forty thousand, even thirty thousand, mustangs are a lot of mustangs. In The Young Explorers, a book privately printed in Austin, Texas, about 1892, Duval, pp. 111-112, defends this extraordinary assertion. The wild horses were encountered between the Nueces River and the Río Grande. Corroborative of the enormous numbers to be found in that region is the testimony of William A. McClintock, “Journal of a Trip Through Texas and Northern Mexico,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Vol. XXXIV, pp. 232-233. Bigfoot Wallace was not lying about the wild horses.
INTRODUCTION
The pioneers who came to Texas to found a cattle industry that eventually extended from the Río Grande to the Big Bow brought with them from the older Southwestern frontier a large body of floating literature of the tall tale variety. The influence of this folk material is clearly discernible in the works of Longstreet, and Baldwin, and other Southern humorists who preceded Mark Twain.