Fictitious cowboy character with superhuman abilities. Pecos Bill is often alleged to be a
genuine folk hero of American cowboys, but both the character and his “saga” were
actually created by a writer long after the heyday of open-range cattle raising. The
widespread publicity given Pecos Bill occurred in popular culture and advertising rather
than folk tradition. Thus, the character is clearly fakelore, not genuine folklore.
In 1923 Edward O’Reilly published the first known Pecos Bill stories, probably
inspired by the logger character Paul Bunyan—whom he mentions, spelled as “Bunyon.”
O’Reilly incorporated some actual Southwestern tall tales into his account, and he
claimed to have heard old-timers tell such tales about Pecos Bill, but folklore researchers
have never been able to validate this claim. Indeed, Nathan Howard “Jack” Thorp, author
of one of the best books of cowboy reminiscences, wrote in his Pardner of the Wind
(1945): “Cowboys never developed a mythical range rider on the order of Paul Bunyan of
the lumber camp, but some of their tales were as tall as the mountains in whose shadows
they worked cattle.”
O’Reilly wrote that Pecos Bill was born in Texas but fell out of the wagon when his
family moved across the Pecos River and into New Mexico, where he was raised by
coyotes. After a passing cowboy convinced the boy that he was human and not a
“varmint,” Bill saddled a mountain lion, used a ten-foot ratdesnake for a quirt, and rode
into a cow camp looking for work. Later he raised his horse, Widow-Maker, from a colt,
feeding it a diet of nitroglycerin and dynamite; another time he rode an Oklahoma
cyclone without a saddle until it rained out from under him.
Pecos Bill fell in love widi Slue-Foot Sue when he saw her riding a catfish the size of
a whale down the Rio Grande. But when Sue rode Widow-Maker on her wedding day,
she was thrown, and the steel spring in her bustle caused her to bounce higher with each
fall. After she bounced for three days and four nights, Bill was forced to draw his pistol
and shoot her so she would not starve to death. After reporting several other such
escapades and heroic feats, O’Reilly concluded that Pecos Bill died by laughing himself
to death when he met a man from Boston “wearing a mail-order cow-boy outfit, and
askin’ fool questions about the West.”
Scores of later writers repeated and elaborated upon O’Reilly’s stories, often in books
written for children, and usually softening the harsher details of killing, drinking,
smoking, and carousing in the original. Such details were added to the saga as that
Widow-Maker had twenty-seven gaits—twenty-three forward and four in reverse. Some
writers even extended Bill’s adventures to Australia and Argentina. Advertisers adopted
the image of Pecos Bill as emblematic of the old wild West. An illustrated version printed
on the back of a box of Kellogg’s Cocoa Krispies cereal stated, essentially truthfully, that
“few folklore figures can match Pecos Bill s fabulous feats.” His greatest fame came
when Pecos Bill was featured in the 1948 Walt Disney film Melody Time (1948).
The only folklorist to publish Pecos Bill stories was Texan Mody Boatright in a 1934
book, but he readily credited O’Reilly’s article as his source. In 1951 New Mexico folklorist Ernest W.Baughman surveyed older ranchers of the Estancia Valley (supposed
“Pecos Bill Country”) and found that none of them had heard oral stories about Pecos
Bill. Brent Ashabranner, in a 1952 article, stated what has never been disputed, that
“Pecos Bill is a synthetic product, a character invented by O’Reilly for the purpose of
unifying some miscellaneous tall tales around a central character.”
Jan Harold Brunvand
References
Ashabranner, Brent. 1952. Pecos Bill: An Appraisal. Western Folklore 11:20–24.
Boatright, Mody C. [1934] 1982. Tall Tales from Texas Cow Camps. Dallas: Southern Methodist
University Press.
Fishwick, Marshall W. 1959. Sons of Paul: Folklore or Fakelore? Western Folklore 18:277–286.
O’Reilly, Edward. 1923. The Saga of Pecos Bill. Century 106 (6):826–833.