Capturing the rowdy lawlessness of the Old West in the same way Paul Bunyan embodied the rugged strength of the Upper Great Lakes loggers, Pecos Bill is credited with teaching cowboys all that they knew, including inventing “the six-shooter and train robbin’ and most of the crimes popular in the old days of the West” (Brachfeld 2010, 8). This fits the general character of the region around the Pecos River, from which Bill gets his name. During the nineteenth century it was so wild that the Dictionary of the American West defines the term “Pecos” as “to shoot someone and throw their body into the Pecos River.” Pecos Bill, then, imbues the West with a clear identity as a tough, raucous place of inordinate freedom and robust individualism.
This 32-cent United States postage stamp, issued in 1996, features an illustration of Pecos Bill, hero of American folklore and tall tales. (Blank Archives/Getty Images)
According to legend, Pecos Bill staked out most of Arizona and New Mexico and is responsible for many of the famous landmarks of the southwest territories. Examples include the origins of the Grand Canyon, Death Valley, and the Rio Grande. Known for his riding abilities, Pecos Bill made a bet that he could ride a cyclone without a saddle. He rode an Oklahoma cyclone across three states while rolling a cigarette in one hand until the cyclone finally rained out from under him. Tales claim that the rain from the cyclone washed out what is now the Grand Canyon, and where Bill finally landed became Death Valley. Legend also holds that Bill is responsible for the Rio Grande. He got tired of packing water from the Gulf of Mexico to water his cattle, so he dug the river to save him the trip.
Although stories of Pecos Bill are deeply ingrained in the American imagination, questions have been raised about their authenticity as true folklore. Edward O’Reilly first published the tales of Pecos Bill in The Century Magazine in 1917 and later collected them in The Saga of Pecos Bill in 1923, long after the era of open-range cattle grazing. O’Reilly claims in his account that the stories of Pecos Bill “have been sung for generations by the men of the range” and that he heard them from cowboys sitting around the chuck wagon. At best, they were possibly drawn from Southwestern tall tales and compiled in the figure of Pecos Bill. However, there is no evidence in the oral tradition of the Southwest that confirms that the tales originated in cowboy folklore. They are generally considered to be “fakelore,” a term coined by Richard Dorson to protect the integrity of folklore studies.
“Fakelore” is not the product of the traditional folklore process, but instead writers invent the figures for commercial purposes—in particular, selling books. It is unlikely that Edward O’Reilly intended to try to pass off his stories as authentic folklore. Instead, his attribution of the tales to the range was probably intended to add the feel of authenticity in the same way that Washington Irving claims his story “Rip Van Winkle” was found among the papers of the fictional Diedrich Knickerbocker, who studied the Dutch history of the area in which the story takes place. The tone of O’Reilly’s work attests to this. At one point, O’Reilly writes: “Although Bill has been quoted in a number of Western stories, the real history of his wondrous deeds has never been printed,” suggesting a historical context that is clearly suspect (O’Reilly 2002, 61).
Many spin-offs of the Pecos Bill tales followed the adventures of the wily cowboy, but O’Reilly’s Saga of Pecos Bill remains the original. According to O’Reilly, Pecos Bill was born in Texas and was weaned on moonshine when he was three days old and cut his teeth on a Bowie knife, a clear attempt to align Pecos Bill with the tough character of Texas and particularly Jim Bowie of Alamo fame. Giving a nod to the pioneer mentality and the notion of western expansion, O’Reilly has Bill’s family decide to move further west because they felt crowded in when neighbors moved within fifty miles of their homestead. As they crossed the Pecos River when he was one year old, Bill was thrown off the wagon. Because there were sixteen or seventeen other children, no one missed Bill until it was too late to turn around, so he was raised by coyotes until he was ten.
Later accounts of Pecos Bill were often developed for children, such as his appearance in Disney’s 1948 animated film, Melody Time, which watered down the fact that he was for all intents and purposes an outlaw given to profanity and killing. O’Reilly, though, indicates that Bill did have a soft spot, refusing to kill women and children and noting that he never scalped his victims: “he was too civilized for that. He used to skin them gently and tan their hides” (O’Reilly 2002, 62).
Because he was an outlaw to beat all outlaws, Pecos Bill set out to look for the roughest gang in the West, and it was on his journey in search of this outfit that Pecos Bill encountered some of his most famous foes. For example, he came face to face with a ten-foot rattlesnake. Wanting to give the snake a fighting chance, Pecos Bill let it have the first three bites before he soundly defeated it and took the reptile as a lasso. Later, on the same adventure, Pecos Bill was attacked by a mountain lion which “weighed more than three steers and a yearlin’.” Once he beat the mountain lion, he saddled the wild cat and rode it into the camp of the outfit he was planning to hitch up with. Bill was whooping, the mountain lion screeching, and the snake rattling as he came to a halt among the notorious outlaws. When Pecos Bill demanded who the boss was, “A big fellow about eight feet tall, with seven pistols and nine bowie-knives in his belt, rose up and, takin’ off his hat, said: ‘Stranger, I was; but you be’” (O’Reilly 2002, 63). Not long after he took up with this band of outlaws, Pecos Bill found a colt in Arizona that he raised on nitroglycerin and dynamite. This colt became Bill’s noted horse, Widow-Maker, and Bill was the only man alive who could ride him.
Pecos Bill had a soft spot for women, and he married quite a few of them. But his heart always belonged to Slue-Foot Sue, who was known for her riding skills. Bill first saw her as she rode a catfish the size of a whale up the Rio Grande. Tragedy struck on their wedding day, however. Sue insisted on trying to ride Widow-Maker, and the horse threw her so high that she nearly hit her head on the moon. Unfortunately, she was wearing a big steel-spring bustle under her wedding dress, and when she hit the ground, she bounced; every time she landed, she bounced higher. After three days and four nights of bouncing, Bill worried that she would starve to death, so he shot her to put her out of her misery.
As O’Reilly tells the story, accounts are mixed as to how Pecos Bill finally died. Some, he says, believe he died of drinking. Once liquor lost its kick for him, he began drinking strychnine “and other forms of wolf pizen,” but even that lost its effect, so he began lacing it with fish-hooks and barbed wire. The rust on his innards eventually gave him indigestion, and he “wasted away to a mere skeleton, weighin’ no more than two tons.” Other accounts, though, suggest that he once saw a man from Boston wearing a mail-order cowboy outfit and asking about the West. Evidently, Pecos Bill laughed himself to death at the spectacle.
Despite being categorized as “fakelore,” the tales of Pecos Bill have captured the imaginations of many interested in tall tales, and especially those with a fondness for the Wild West. Some accounts extend his adventures to Australia and Argentina, and early advertisers saw the figure of Pecos Bill as an emblem of the West and the personification of rugged individualism on the range and the ruthless morality of Western justice. A more recent manifestation of the tale was presented in 1995 in Disney’s film, Tall Tale, in which Patrick Swayze plays the role of Pecos Bill. In this version, Pecos Bill, Paul Bunyan, and John Henry help a young boy, Daniel, reclaim his rights to his father’s farm, a farm coveted by a greedy developer who threatens the wholesome life of working the land. By the end of the story, Daniel rediscovers the value of living close to the land. Here, for the child audience, Pecos Bill is transformed from his traditional role as ornery outlaw into the quintessential “good guy.”
W. Todd Martin
See also Fakelore; Folklore and Folktales; Paul Bunyan; Tall Tales; Windwagon Smith
Further Reading
Battle, Kemp P., ed. 1986. Great American Folklore: Legends, Tales, Ballads, and Superstitions from All Across America. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Boatright, Mody Coggin. 1982. Tales from Texas Cow Camps. Dallas: SMU Press.
Bowman, James Cloyd. 1966. Pecos Bill, The Greatest Cowboy of All Time. Chicago: A. Whitman.
Brachfeld, Aaron. 2010. The Life of Paul Bunyan and the Life of Pecos Bill. n.p.: Coastalfields Press.
Brennan, Stephen Vincent. 2007. The Greatest Cowboy Stories Ever Told: Enduring Tales of the Western Frontier. New York: Lyons Press.
O’Reilly, Edward. 2002. “The Saga of Pecos Bill.” In The American Fantasy Tradition, edited by Brian M. Thomsen, 61–65, New York: Tom Doherty Associates.
Pecos Bill—Primary Document
Edward O’Reilly, “The Saga of Pecos Bill” (1923)
While some characters in American folklore have developed around the exaggerated deeds of historical figures, others have been entirely fabricated. Such was the case with Pecos Bill, who was almost entirely the creation of Edward O’Reilly. O’Reilly’s stories were published by The Century Magazine between 1917 and 1923. While not strictly a part of American folklore, Pecos Bill nevertheless represented everything and more an Easterner expected to see in a Western ruffian: he was fiercely self-reliant, being raised by wolves; he was tough as the earth itself, wrestling mountain lions for sport; and he was as brutal as can be, making “murder a fine art.”
Although Bill has been quoted in a number of Western stories, the real history of his wondrous deeds has never been printed. I have here collected a few of the tales about him which will doubtless be familiar to cow-men, but deserve to be passed on to a larger audience.
Bill invented most of the things connected with the cow business. He was a mighty man of valor, the king killer of the bad men, and it was Bill who taught the broncho how to buck. It is a matter of record that he dug the Rio Grande one dry year when he grew tired of packin’ water from the Gulf of Mexico.
According to the most veracious historians, Bill was born about the time Sam Houston discovered Texas. His mother was a sturdy pioneer woman who once killed forty-five Indians with a broom-handle, and weaned him on moonshine liquor when he was three days old. He cut his teeth on a bowie-knife, and his earliest playfellows were the bears and catamounts of east Texas.
When Bill was about a year old, another family moved into the country, and located about fifty miles down the river. His father decided the place was gettin’ too crowded, and packed his family in a wagon and headed west.
One day after they crossed the Pecos River, Bill fell out of the wagon. As there were sixteen or seventeen other children in the family, his parents didn’t miss him for four or five weeks, and then it was too late to try to find him.
That’s how Bill came to grow up with the coyotes along the Pecos. He soon learned the coyote languages, and used to hunt with them and sit on the hills and howl at night. Being so young when he got lost, he always thought he was a coyote. That’s where he learned to kill deer by runnin’ them to death.
***
It wasn’t long until he was famous as a bad man. He invented the six-shooter and train-robbin’ and most of the crimes popular in the old days of the West. He didn’t invent cow-stealin’. That was discovered by King David in the Bible, but Bill improved on it.
There is no way of tellin’ just how many men Bill did kill. Deep down he had a tender heart, however, and never killed women or children, or tourists out of season. He never scalped his victims; he was too civilized for that. He used to skin them gently and tan their hides.
It wasn’t long before Bill had killed all the bad men in west Texas, massacred all the Indians, and eat all the buffalo. So he decided to migrate to a new country where hard men still thrived and a man could pass the time away.
He saddled up his horse and hit for the West. One day he met an old trapper and told him what he was lookin’ for.
“I want the hardest cow outfit in the world,” he says. “Not one of these ordinary cow-stealin’, Mexican-shootin’ bunches of amateurs, but a real hard herd of hand-picked hellions that make murder a fine art and take some pride in their slaughter.”
“Stranger, you’re headed in the right direction,” answers the trapper. “Keep right on down this draw for a couple of hundred miles, and you’ll find that very outfit. They’re so hard they can kick fire out of a flint rock with their toes.”
Bill single-footed down that draw for about a hundred miles that afternoon; then he met with an accident. His horse stubbed his toe on a mountain and broke his leg, leavin’ Bill afoot.
He slung his saddle over his shoulder and set off hikin’ down that draw cussin’ and a-swearin’. Profanity was a gift with Bill.
All at once a big ten-foot rattlesnake quiled up in his path, set his tail to singin’, and allowed he’d like to match a fight. Bill laid down his saddle and started on, carryin’ the snake in his hand and spinnin’ it in short loops at the Gila monsters.
About fifty miles further on, a big old mountain-lion jumped off a cliff and lit all spraddled out on Bill’s neck. This was no ordinary lion. It weighed more than three steers and a yearlin’, and was the very same lion the State of Nuevo León was named after down in old Mexico.
Kind of chuckin’ to himself, Bill laid down his saddle and his snake and went into action. In a minute the fur was flyin’ down the cañon until it darkened the sun. The way Bill knocked the animosity out of that lion was a shame. In about three minutes the lion hollered:
“I’ll give up, Bill. Can’t you take a joke?”
Bill let him up, and then he cinched the saddle on him and went down that cañon whoopin’ and yellin’, ridin’ that lion a hundred feet at a jump, and quirtin’ him down the flank with the rattlesnake.
It wasn’t long before he saw a chuck-wagon with a bunch of cow-boys squattin’ around it. He rode up to that wagon, splittin’ the air with his war-whoops, with that old lion a-screechin’, and that snake singin’ his rattles.
When he came to the fire he grabbed the old cougar by the ear, jerked him back on his haunches, stepped off him, hung his snake around his neck, and looked the outfit over. Them cow-boys sat there sayin’ less than nothin’.
Bill was hungry, and seein’ a boilerful of beans cookin’ on the fire, he scooped up a few handfuls and swallowed them, washin’ them down with a few gallons of boilin’ coffee out of the pot. Wipin’ his mouth on a handful of prickly-pear cactus, Bill turned to the cow-boys and asked:
“Who the hell is boss around here?”
A big fellow about eight feet tall, with seven pistols and nine bowie-knives in his belt, rose up, and takin’ off his hat, said:
“Stranger, I was; but you be.”
Source: Edward O’Reilly. “The Saga of Pecos Bill.” In The Century Magazine 106 (Oct. 1923): 827–833.