Legendary raconteur and folk doctor. Born in Tennessee, Smith migrated first to the
Midwest (Illinois and Indiana) in 1821, then to Oregon in 1852; in 1859 he returned to
Indiana, and finally moved to Chrisman, Illinois, where he died at age 97, having
established a legendary reputation as a folk doctor (earning him one nickname “Sassafras
Smith”) and a storyteller. His fame lasted for more than a century, and may still exist in
oral tradition.
Smidi was the subject of one of the first exhaustive scholarly folklore studies of an
American hero; William Hugh Jansen in his 1949 doctoral dissertation researched
Smith’s life to analyze the process by which a folk hero generates legends and the extent
to which the legendary details correlate with historical fact. Smith’s acclaim derived
largely from his story-telling abilities, and his known repertoire of more than seventy
tales included legends, tall tales, jokes, and lengthy traditional folktales. His stories about
Oregon earned him his better-known nickname.
Jansen also analyzed Smith’s storytelling and repertoire; Jansen’s delineation of
Smith’s performer-audience relationships and how these were intertwined with
performance style, genre, and context marked a seminal analytic approach now
commonly employed in folkloristics.
Although “Oregon” Smith’s reputation was limited to a confined area in the Midwest,
that it lasted so long is testimony to the tenacity of folk-historical data, no matter how
distorted they may become. Smith’s legendary existence is an excellent example of the
Swedish folklorist Carl Wilhelm Von Sydow’s notion of the “oikotype,” a distinctive
geographically limited and persistent form of oral narrative.
R.Gerald Alvey
References
Jansen, William Hugh. 1977 Abraham “Oregon” Smith: Pioneer, Folk Hero, and Tale-Teller. New
York: Arno.