Along with Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill, the mythic character Jumbo Riley (or Reilly) appears in tall tales of the Wild West, but originated from Oregon folklore about giant strongmen. He is a tall tales figure in the literature of the old West with roots in predominantly oral folklore. This separates Jumbo Riley from his tall tales counterparts who are newer, often “fakelore” characters invented by twentieth-century novelists and writers. Because of this fact, Jumbo Riley’s date of origin is difficult to determine, much like many other Old West legends. These legends appeared after the U.S. Civil War and before the turn of the twentieth century when the frontier began to fade into the past. Jumbo Riley’s popularity has resulted in appearances in contemporary fiction, such as Loren D. Estleman’s western novel Black Powder, White Smoke (2002).
As a folk character, Jumbo Riley is part of the culture of the Old West. Though many folktales of the region feature ghost towns and gunslingers, another theme in western storytelling is the saloon bar and its patrons. Working as the bouncer for a saloon and weighing upwards of 300 pounds, Jumbo Riley’s job was to protect the saloon from fistfights between obnoxious, drunk customers. No one would dare take on Jumbo Riley more than once (or at least, not on purpose, as his story demonstrates). In a version of the tale retold by S. E. Schlosser, Jumbo Riley had “the build and strength of a grizzly bear, and a grumpy nature to boot” (Schlosser 2009).
Because of his tremendous reputation, Jumbo worked at a popular saloon, with the longest bar in town and enough doors to get all of its customers in and out comfortably. One night, a skinny little man, having just sailed back from Shanghai and surely weighing no more than 100 pounds, was propping up the bar, getting more and more drunk on the saloon-owner’s best whiskey, and starting to attract attention. Jumbo Riley took notice, and as soon as the sailor started bothering other customers, Jumbo threw him straight out of the saloon. Minutes later, Riley noticed the same little man back at the bar, having snuck in through a side door. Riley lifted him straight off his feet and threw him back outside. As he was walking back across the saloon floor, the tiny drunk man popped through the door at the other end of the bar, and ran straight into him. Riley knocked him off his feet and sent him sprawling back into the dirt road outside. Five minutes later, our drunken friend walked back into the bar through the main doors, and looked straight up at Riley with a confused expression. Riley was amazed; no one had ever dared to come back into the bar after being thrown out three times. The man stared at him for a second, before drunkenly asking, “Are you the bouncer for every single bar in town?!”
Inasmuch as stories become exaggerated and oversized as they are passed along, many characters in folk legend are described as being physically “larger than life.” Like Paul Bunyan, so big he was delivered to his parents by five storks, Jumbo Riley was a giant character. For the folk tale, physical strength constitutes a power very different from shooting ability, especially in stories set in the old West. Yet, both the skill of the quick draw and the brute force of the giant are equally valued in a frontier environment. The strength and bravado of Jumbo Riley relates to the experiences of an audience of laborers, who engaged in building farms and ranches and performed the endlessly exhausting tasks of training and caring for horses, herding cattle or sheep, repairing tools, fences, and buildings, and dealing with extremes of weather. It is this lesser-educated but hardworking audience who would more likely pass on the Jumbo Riley tales.
In general, tall tales exaggerate very real experiences in the lives of nineteenth-century western farmers, ranchers, and miners. It is conceivable that Riley may have existed as a real person who worked in a saloon, and as the story of his feats became inflated in the retelling, so too did the size of his body. In a sense, tall tales differ from myths in that they derive from specific geographies and specific histories, and require exaggerated retellings to maintain their place in folklore. Jumbo Riley’s tales are good-natured and humorous. Riley admired the boldness of the drunken man he threw out of the saloon three times. There’s no judgment or censure. The drunk’s persistence puts Riley’s reputation at risk, but the resolution rescues his reputation in the end. Jumbo Riley wins sympathy from the audience by being more baffled by the sailor’s persistence than angered by it.
Jumbo Riley tales are obscure in comparison to Paul Bunyan’s, but they reveal the manner in which folktales can be created from a set of tropes specific to time and place. Riley’s tales relate more easily to the experiences of workingmen in the region, whereas legends of gunfights and six-shooters appeal to eastern audiences in thrall to a more fanciful image of the West. Riley stories gained traction within the Old West tradition because of their nostalgic value at a time of great change in modern American history, a time when the frontier began to fade and more and more people came to reside in cities. These tales offer a sense of a forgotten past when sailors returned from Shanghai and waged fistfights with cowboys in jangling spurs.
Terri-Jane Dow
See also Fakelore; Febold Feboldson; Paul Bunyan; Pecos Bill; Tall Tales
Further Reading
Blalock, Barney. 2015. Oregon Prizefighters: Forgotten Bare-knuckle Champions of Portland & Astoria. Charleston, SC: History Press.
Bronner, Simon J. 2002. Folk Nation: Folklore in the Creation of American Tradition. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Estleman, Loren D. 2002. Black Powder, White Smoke. New York: Forge Books.
Schlosser, S. E. 2009. “Jumbo Reilly.” American Folklore website. Accessed July 12, 2015. http://americanfolklore.net.