tall tale

tall tale extravagantly and humorously exaggerated story of the backwoods exploits of an American frontiersman. Originating in the 1820s, the genre remained popular well into the 20th cent. One of the earliest heroes of this type of folklore, Colonel Davy Crockett of Tennessee, boasted:

I'm that same David Crockett, fresh from the backwoods, half-horse, half-alligator, a little touched with the snapping turtle; can wade the Mississippi, leap the Ohio, ride a streak of lightning, slip without a scratch down a honey locust, can whip my weight in wildcats … .

These bold deeds were made famous throughout the West by Crockett's Autobiography (1834) and by his Almanacs (1835-56). Crockett also popularized the deeds of the gigantic Mike Fink, "King of the Mississippi Keelboatmen," who was said to have once slain with a single shot both a deer and a Native American who was pursuing it. From Canada came the tales of the hero of the lumberjacks, Paul Bunyan, whose Blue Ox "Babe" was "forty-two ax handles and a plug of chewing tobacco between the eyes." The cowboys' hero was Pecos Bill, who "taught the bronco how to buck," and Southern blacks told tales of John Henry, the railroader and steamboat roustabout who once won a contest against a steam drill.

Tall Tale, term applied to the type of frontier anecdote characterized by exaggeration or violent understatement, with realistic details of character or local customs that work toward a cumulative effect of the grotesque, romantic, or humorous. Tall tales depend for their humor partly upon the incongruity between the realism in which the scene and narrator are portrayed and the fantastically comic world of the enclosed narrative. Frontier storytellers created the oral tradition of the tall tale, and folk legends and myths were developed through this medium, especially about such heroes as Paul Bunyan, Mike Fink, and Davy Crockett. Later, the anecdotes began to be printed, and the tall tale became a distinct literary genre, which delightfully pictures the social life of the frontier. These mock oral tales were frequently published in almanacs and in such newspapers as the Spirit of the Times, and were of a length dictated by the necessities of such publication. They were not only the creation of the frontier journalist, but the occasional amusement of lawyers, merchants, doctors, soldiers, actors, travelers, and gamblers, who turned amateur writer. Among the most famous literary examples are Longstreet's Georgia Scenes, Hooper's Simon Suggs, Thompson's Major Jones, Harris's Sut Lovingood, Baldwin's Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi, Thorpe's Big Bear of Arkansas, and many passages in the works of Clemens.