Tall Tales from Texas
9781465680228
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
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.
