On two folk heroes, and the competing frontier histories
they reveal.
Even as a kid, encountering his stories in a compilation of
tall tales, I could tell that Pecos Bill was a
bit of a Paul
Bunyan knockoff—an outlandish origin story (Bill fell out of a wagon as a
baby and was raised by a pack of wolves as one of their own), similarly
larger-than-life animal companions (his otherwise un-rideable horse
Widow-Maker, the rattlesnake Shake that he used as a lasso), an equally mythic
love interest (Slue-Foot Sue, who rode a giant catfish down the Rio Grande). So
I wasn’t surprised to learn that Bill was a late addition to the “big man”
school of tall tales, likely created
in 1916 by Edward O’Reilly and shoehorned back into the mythos of Westward
expansion and the frontier.
That Bill didn’t come into existence until a half-century
after the
closing of the frontier doesn’t lessen his symbolic status, however—if
anything, it highlights just how much the
mythos of the American West was and is just that, a consciously created set of myths that
have served to delineate after the fact a messy, dynamic, often dark, always
complex region and history. Moreover, that mythos was as multi-cultural as the
West, as illustrated by Mexican American folk hero Joaquin Murrieta,
“the Robin Hood of El Dorado”: Murrieta, a California 49er from northern
Mexico, first came to national prominence in a popular dime novel, John Rollin Ridge’s
The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta
(1854); the tales of his banditry have been a part of the region’s folk history
ever since, including a cameo as Zorro’s older brother in the Antonio Banderas film The Mask of Zorro (1998).
Yet however much Murrieta’s story has been fictionalized and
mythologized, it did
originate with an actual historical figure—and that distinction can help us
see past the myths to some of the frontier’s messier, darker, and more defining
realities. For one thing, Murrieta apparently began his outlaw career after he
and his family were violently dispossessed of a land claim, events which
connect to the social and legal aftermath of the
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. For another, his gang’s victims included not
only Anglo settlers but also Chinese laborers, revealing California’s genuinely
and often painfully multicultural
community as of the mid-19th century. A fuller engagement with
these histories would in part force Americans to confront the centuries of conflict
and violence that have so frequently comprised
the world of the frontier—but it would also allow us to push beyond tall
tales of larger-than-life individuals and to recognize just how collective and
communal are both the myths and realities of the Southwest, and of America.
Next series starts Monday,
Ben
PS. Southwest stories or histories you’d add to the series?
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