[On September 26th, 1774, Johnny Appleseed was born. So for the 250th birthday of the man, the myth, the legend, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of folk figures, leading up to Friday’s post on the status of the concept in the 21st century!]
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 his family’s
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, the frontier, and the Wild West, one more addition to the roster of
lawless heroes who had by the early 20th century come to define that
American mythos so fully.
That Bill didn’t come into existence until a few decades
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 remains 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 itself, 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 charming 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 folk
figure tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Folk figures or histories you’d highlight?
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