Windwagon Smith is a legendary character of American folklore who appears in many tall tales. Smith can also be found in stories regarded as occupational folklore, which revolve around a larger-than-life character considered to embody all the skills and values necessary to succeed at a particular form of industry. Smith is included in occupational folklore because he is depicted as the epitome of inventiveness and creative thinking.
Some folklore experts believe Smith may be based on a real person, Wind-Wagon Thomas, who, in 1849, would ferry prospectors westward toward California during the Gold Rush. Thomas transported prospectors using a wind-powered wagon and as such may have been the inspiration for Windwagon Smith. Thomas was not the only real-life person to use wind power to fuel a wagon. However, several such vehicles, known as wind wagons or sailing wagons, were used in Kansas during the nineteenth century and received much press coverage. The wind wagons of the nineteenth century were similar to ordinary wagons for they weighed around 350 pounds and measured about three feet by eight feet long. However, unlike normal wagons, wind wagons were fitted with one or more sails raised over the wagon’s front axle. When the prairie wind blew in the right direction, the wind wagons could skim across the prairies at speeds of up to forty miles per hour. Indeed, one wind wagon was said to have sped from Kansas City to Denver in just twenty days. Other researchers, however, believe that Smith may be a manufactured folklore figure—a character from so-called fakelore—in the manner of Pecos Bill, an apocryphal cowboy character found in tall tales of the Old West, or Febold Feboldson, the quasi-legendary Swedish American rainmaker of Nebraska.
According to American tradition, Windwagon Smith was a nineteenth-century sea captain who came to live on the prairies of Kansas where he built a unique version of a Conestoga wagon, that is, a heavy, covered wagon used extensively throughout the United States and Canada during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Smith’s wagon was unusual because it was powered by the wind, unlike other Conestoga wagons that were pulled by horses, oxen, or mules. Smith’s wagon was able to harness the power of the wind because it was equipped with a sail and mast as a ship would be. The unusual nature of Smith’s wagon is said to have attracted the townsfolk’s attention, leading to the town officials deciding to ask Smith to invent a large-scale version of his wagon that they could use to transport cargo to Santa Fe in New Mexico. Unfortunately for the townsfolk, the large-scale hybrid vehicle designed by Smith could not withstand strong winds, and the new vessel was destroyed by a tornado. Another version of Smith’s tale tells that the large version of his wind wagon was not destroyed by the wind but rather was abandoned by the townsfolk when traveling in the vessel made them feel seasick.
The character of Windwagon Smith is the basis for a rarely seen short animated Disney film, The Saga of Windwagon Smith, which was made in 1961. In The Saga of Windwagon Smith, the former sea captain inspires local people with the idea of creating a fleet of wind-powered wagons to transport passengers and freight across the prairies to Westport, Kansas, in the manner of a fleet of ships sailing across an ocean. In the cartoon the townsfolk construct a large wind wagon, and Smith woos the local mayor’s daughter, Molly. However, when the large wind wagon is launched, a so-called prairie twister strikes, destroying the prototype large wind wagon.
The Saga of Windwagon Smith inspired a group of Kansas community leaders called the Wichita Wagonmasters to create a theme and icon for their community festival, Riverfest (formerly known as the Wichitennial River Festival) in 1973. The iconic image of Smith sailing across the prairies in a wagon led to the creation of Admiral Windwagon Smith, an honorific title given to the Riverfest event’s official ambassador. The character of Windwagon Smith also inspired Wilbur Lang Schramm’s short story “Windwagon Smith” that won the O. Henry Award for fiction and was subsequently included in Schramm’s book Windwagon Smith and Other Yarns, published in 1947.
Victoria Williams
See also Fakelore; Febold Feboldson; Joe Magarac; Pecos Bill; Tall Tales
Further Reading
Blair, Walter. 1987. Tall Tale America: A Legendary History of Our Humorous Heroes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Corbin, Jayne. 2015. “Wind Wagons.” Kansas Historical Society. https://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/wind-wagons/12239. Accessed July 11, 2015.
Markstein, Donald D. 2009–2010. “The Saga of Windwagon Smith.” Toonopedia. http://www.toonopedia.com/windwagn.htm. Accessed July 11, 2015.
Norman, Floyd. 2006. “Taking My Best Shot: Working on Disney’s ‘The Saga of Windwagon Smith.’” Jim Hill Media. August 14. http://jimhillmedia.com/columnists1/b/floyd_norman/archive/2006/08/15/5021.aspx. Accessed July 11, 2015.
Wichita Festivals, Inc. “Wichita River Festival.” Riverfest. http://wichitariverfest.com/riverfest_info.php?page=history. Accessed July 11, 2015.
Wichita Wagonmasters. 2015. “The History of the Wagonmasters.” Wichita Wagonmasters. https://www.wagonmasters.org/history/. Accessed July 11, 2015.