The story of the drought buster is one of the tall tales of Febold Feboldson, a mythical Swedish American farmer from Nebraska. Emerging around the mid-1800s, but not becoming popular until around 1930, Feboldson is one of the great American folk heroes. While there are many versions of his tall tale, the focus of the story remains much the same. Its most well-known incarnation, Drought Buster, was written by Paul R. Beath, to whom the legend of Feboldson owes much of its popularity. Though Beath did not create the character, his Tales from the Great Plains featured Feboldson and garnered enough attention to warrant Feboldson’s inclusion in the pantheon of legendary American heroes.
“Drought Buster,” however, is not a legitimate folktale in the traditional sense. Part of a tradition known as “fakelore,” the story did not emerge out of the oral storytelling process but was crafted by a professional author. While patterned after other folk heroes, Febold Feboldson was created in likeness to them. Researcher Louise Pound states that “Febold now belongs to folklore. But it is the lore of the literary class, the lore of educated lovers of lore, rather than … the less educated strata usually thought of as the ‘folk’ in ‘folklore’” (Pound 1943, 137).
In her essay “Nebraska Rain Lore and Rain Making,” Louise Pound writes that “in the late 1880’s and 1890’s, [rainmaking was] a profession that flourished especially in the Great Plains region” (Pound 1946, 129). Prior to this time, incantation of rainmaking had been a Native American ritual; however, during the nineteenth century scientists set out to discover ways of controlling the weather in the drought-plagued regions of the Great Plains. Paul R. Beath writes in “Drought Buster” that the Great Plains were “so dry that the ink dried before it could set on the paper, and blew away, leaving the pages blank” (Beath 1962, 56). This interest led many farmers to practice what would today be considered pseudoscientific means of weather control. One section of the 1878 annual report of the Nebraska State Horticultural Society was even entitled “How Deserts May Be Controlled” (Wilber 1881). Pound notes that “attempts were made over a period of years … before it was conceded that theories of rain making belonged not to the field of science, but to that of lore, where they are now relegated” (Pound 1946, 130).
Inevitably, folktales emerged around individuals who were said to be able to control the rains—the so-called “drought busters.” In Nebraska, Febold Feboldson slowly became part of local folklore, known as “the first white settler west of the Mississippi; that is, not counting Frenchmen” (Beath 1932, 59). According to the story, Febold Feboldson was a settler from Scandinavia who worked on the Great Plains of Nebraska where the summer months were dry and dusty. His farm was one of the biggest and best in all of the state and business had never been as good. However, the gold rush saw even fewer people settle on the Plains than they had before, and Feboldson’s prosperous farm began to suffer.
He had to think of a way to try to entice some of the settlers to stay in Nebraska, so he ordered a thousand goldfish from China. When they arrived, he poured them all into a lake on his land. The next morning, as wagons full of people headed for the gold fields of California passed, Feboldson said to them all, “Stay here, there’s gold in the lake!” The settlers spent all day panning for gold in the lake but found nothing. The goldfish swam away from them and would not be caught. The heat of the plains was too much for the gold-panners, and they decided that they would travel on to California overnight. Feboldson promised that he could make it rain before the morning, so they wouldn’t have to leave. The wagon master agreed that they would stay overnight; but if he failed, they would leave the next morning before it got too hot.
Feboldson got to work. He built huge bonfires all around the lake to heat up the water so that it would evaporate. Soon there was a huge raincloud in the sky over the place where the lake had been. When it was saturated, the rain began to fall. The Great Plains were so hot, though, that the rain turned to fog before it could hit the ground. The fog was so thick that neither Febold Feboldson nor the settlers could see a thing. Feboldson promised that he would clear the fog, and the wagon master ordered his men to stay until it was clear enough for them to set off. Febold Feboldson ordered the finest fog cutters from England; and when they arrived, he cut the fog into thick, grey strips, which he laid down on the dusty ground to make roads.
The Dustbowl
Farmers, especially in early agrarian societies, are at the mercy of complex meteorological systems, and thus volatility in the weather was of prime concern to American farmers long before the specter of global warming loomed. Indeed, what folklorists refer to as Weather Folklore, sometimes shortened to Weatherlore, is its own subspecialty. No single weather event, however, has had as abiding an effect on American agriculture and permanent population shifts in the popular mind as the Dustbowl. In that case, severe drought combined with agricultural methods that abetted wind erosion caused much of the topsoil of large swathes of the Depression-era Great Plains simply to blow away. This “perfect dust-storm” was seared indelibly into the collective American imagination for generations to come. The Dustbowl phenomenon, the ensuing mass exodus of millions of displaced people, and the resulting human misery were captured unforgettably in John Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath, as well as in the 1940 Oscar-winning film of the same name.
C. Fee
In other versions of the tale, Feboldson is not only hoping to revive his business, but is also trying to get women to settle in the region so that he can find a wife. In this version, the prospector has a daughter whom Feboldson must convince that he would be a good father and provider.
The tall tale is a major element of American folklore, and though Feboldson is one of the more obscure of these characters tales, he nevertheless is a part of the same tradition as Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, and Captain Alfred Bulltop Stormalong. The tales of Febold Feboldson the drought buster offer a nostalgic experience to a contemporary audience and appeal to romanticized memories of the Western frontier and the California gold rush. As American national identity developed, regional legends became folklore, replacing stories from earlier cultures. Feboldson’s attempt to control the weather embodies the working-class values of ingenuity and determination ingrained in American culture. According to Randall S. Cerveny, stories like these “serve to re-enforce and strengthen the ‘can-do’ spirit of pioneers in the West” (Cerveny 2005, 381).
Terri-Jane Dow
See also Captain Alfred Bulltop Stormalong; Fakelore; Febold Feboldson; Paul Bunyan; Pecos Bill; Tall Tales
Further Reading
Beath, Paul R. 1932. “Paul Bunyan and Febold.” Prairie Schooner 6 (1): 59–61.
Beath. Paul R. 1962. Febold Feboldson: Tales from the Great Plains. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Cerveny, Randall S. 2005. “Folklore, Myths, and Climate.” In The Encylopedia of World Climatology, edited by John E. Oliver, 380–381. Berlin: Springer Science and Business Media.
Pound, Louise. 1943. “Nebraska Strong Men.” Southern Folklore Quarterly 7 (3): 133–143.
Pound, Louise. 1946. “Nebraska Rain Lore and Rain Making.” California Folklore Quarterly 5 (2): 129–142.