TALL STORIES

TALL STORIES is a term used in the United States to denote a comic folktale characterized by grotesque exaggeration. Although not confined to the United States, the tall story has flourished there as nowhere else and thoroughly characterizes the popular psychology that resulted from the rapid expansion of the country in the nineteenth century.

The subjects of the tall stories, or tall tales, were those things with which the tellers were familiar: weather, fauna, topography, and adventure. Long before the nation became "dust-bowl conscious," plains residents told of seeing prairie dogs twenty feet in the air digging madly to get back to the ground. In the southern highlands, astounding tales arose, such as that of the two panthers who climbed each other into the sky and out of sight, or that of David Crockett, who used to save powder by killing raccoons with his hideous grin. Tony Beaver, a West Virginia lumberman, took a day out of the calendar by arresting the rotation of the earth. A northern lumberman, Paul Bunyan, with his blue ox, Babe, snaked whole sections of land to the sawmills. Mike Fink, king of the keelboatmen, used to ride down the Mississippi River dancing Yankee Doodle on the back of an alligator. Free-bold Freeboldsen, having left his team in his Nebraska field while he went for a drink, returned to find his horses eaten up by the grasshoppers, who were pitching the horses' shoes to determine which should get Freebold. Kemp Morgan, able to smell oil underground, once built an oil derrick so high that an ax failing from the crown wore out nineteen handles before it hit the ground. Pecos Bill, who according to legend dug the Rio Grande, once overpowered a Texas mountain lion, mounted him, and rode away quirting him with a rattlesnake.

Unless they were deliberately imposing on the gullibility of the tenderfoot, tall liars did not expect their audience to believe them. Sometimes they lied as a defense against assumptions of superiority. Sometimes they lied through modesty. Sometimes, finding that their listeners did not believe the truth, they lied to regain their reputations for veracity. Sometimes they lied with satiric intent. Mostly, however, they lied because they were storytellers of imagination and resource and knew how to make the time pass pleasantly. In lying, they gave the United States some of its most characteristic folklore.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brown, Carolyn S. The Tall Tale in American Folklore and Literature. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987.

Dorson, Richard Mercer. Man and Beast in American Comic Legend. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982.

Wonham, Henry B. Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Mody C.Boatright/a. e.

See alsoSlang .