American Tall Tales Read online

  “Me too,” said Mike. “Feelin’ much better myself.”

  In spite of all his boastin’ and braggin’ and all his screamin’ and fightin’, Davy Crockett did do some remarkable things for humankind. Take this story he always liked to tell about himself and the sun:

  One day it was so cold, the sunlight froze as fast as it rose. When Davy Crockett saw daybreak was so far behind time, he grew concerned. “I better strike a little fire with my fingers,” he said, “light my pipe, and travel a few miles to see what’s going on.”

  Davy brought his knuckles together like two thunderclouds. But the sparks froze before he could even begin to collect them. He had no choice but to start on his way and try to keep himself from freezing. So off he went, hop, skip, and jump, whistling the tune of his favorite song, “Fire in the Mountains.” Even then, his hat froze to his head and twenty icicles formed under his nose.

  After he’d hopped, skipped, and jumped ten miles up to the peak of Daybreak Hill, Davy Crockett discovered exactly what was going on: The earth had frozen on her axis and couldn’t turn around! The reason was, the sun had gotten jammed between two giant cakes of ice.

  “Cre-ation!” said Davy. “Something must be done—or human life is over!”

  So he took a can of bear grease and poured about a ton of it over the sun’s face. Then he kicked the cakes of ice until he wrenched the sun loose. “Move along, Charlie, keep goin’!” he shouted.

  In about fifteen seconds, the sun woke up with such a beautiful smile that it made Davy sneeze. Then he lit his pipe with a blaze of sunlight. And as the earth began to move on her axis, he headed on home with a piece of sunrise in his pocket.

  NOTES ON THE STORY

  THE BACKWOODS WOMEN of Tennessee and Kentucky endured the same hardships as the men as they tried to carve a life out of the wilderness. They helped build cabins and clear land for planting. They hauled water from springs, grew cotton for clothes, and hunted wild animals. Though no early tall tales celebrate an abiding heroine, the Davy Crockett Almanacks do present rugged frontier women in a number of vignettes, such as “Sal Fink, the Mississippi Screamer,” “Nance Bowers Taming a Bear,” “Katy Goodgrit and the Wolves,” and “Sappina Wing and the Crocodile.” In these stories the Davy Crockett character tells about comically outrageous women who display amazing boldness and ingenuity.

  In the following tale I have chosen to combine these various female characters into a single heroine—and have called her Sally Ann Thunder Ann Whirlwind, the name of Davy’s fictional wife, who is briefly mentioned in the Davy Crockett Almanacks.

  One early spring day, when the leaves of the white oaks were about as big as a mouse’s ear, Davy Crockett set out alone through the forest to do some bear hunting. Suddenly it started raining real hard, and he felt obliged to stop for shelter under a tree. As he shook the rain out of his coonskin cap, he got sleepy, so he laid back into the crotch of the tree, and pretty soon he was snoring.

  Davy slept so hard, he didn’t wake up until nearly sundown. And when he did, he discovered that somehow or another in all that sleeping, his head had gotten stuck in the crotch of the tree, and he couldn’t get it out.

  Well, Davy roared loud enough to make the tree lose all its little mouse-ear leaves. He twisted and turned and carried on for over an hour, but still that tree wouldn’t let go. Just as he was about to give himself up for a goner, he heard a girl say, “What’s the matter, stranger?”

  Even from his awkward position, he could see that she was extraordinary—tall as a hickory sapling, with arms as big as a keelboat tiller’s.

  “My head’s stuck, sweetie,” he said. “And if you help me get it free, I’ll give you a pretty little comb.”

  “Don’t call me sweetie,” she said. “And don’t worry about giving me no pretty little comb, neither. I’ll free your old coconut, but just because I want to.”

  Then this extraordinary girl did something that made Davy’s hair stand on end. She reached in a bag and took out a bunch of rattlesnakes. She tied all the wriggly critters together to make a long rope, and as she tied, she kept talking. “I’m not a shy little colt,” she said. “And I’m not a little singing nightingale, neither. I can tote a steamboat on my back, outscream a panther, and jump over my own shadow. I can double up crocodiles any day, and I like to wear a hornets’ nest for my Sunday bonnet.”

  As the girl looped the ends of her snake rope to the top of the branch that was trapping Davy, she kept bragging: “I’m a streak of lightning set up edgeways and buttered with quicksilver. I can outgrin, outsnort, outrun, outlift, outsneeze, outsleep, outlie any varmint from Maine to Louisiana. Furthermore, sweetie, I can blow out the moonlight and sing a wolf to sleep.” Then she pulled on the other end of the snake rope so hard, it seemed as if she might tear the world apart.

  The right-hand fork of that big tree bent just about double. Then Davy slid his head out as easy as you please. For a minute he was so dizzy, he couldn’t tell up from down. But when he got everything going straight again, he took a good look at that girl. “What’s your name, ma’am?”

  “Sally Ann Thunder Ann Whirlwind,” she said. “But if you mind your manners, you can call me Sally.”

  From then on Davy Crockett was crazy in love with Sally Ann Thunder Ann Whirlwind. He asked everyone he knew about her, and everything he heard caused another one of Cupid’s arrows to jab him in the gizzard.

  “Oh, I know Sally!” the preacher said. “She can dance a rock to pieces and ride a panther bareback!”

  “Sally’s a good ole friend of mine,” the blacksmith said. “Once I seen her crack a walnut with her front teeth.”

  “Sally’s so very special,” said the schoolmarm. “She likes to whip across the Salt River, using her apron for a sail and her left leg for a rudder!”

  Sally Ann Thunder Ann Whirlwind had a reputation for being funny, too. Her best friend, Lucy, told Davy, “Sally can laugh the bark off a pine tree. She likes to whistle out one side of her mouth while she eats with the other side and grins with the middle!”

  According to her friends, Sally could tame about anything in the world, too. They all told Davy about the time she was churning butter and heard something scratching outside. Suddenly the door swung open, and in walked the Great King Bear of the Mud Forest. He’d come to steal one of her smoked hams. Well, before the King Bear could say boo, Sally grabbed a warm dumpling from the pot and stuffed it in his mouth.

  The dumpling tasted so good, the King Bear’s eyes winked with tears. But then he started to think that Sally might taste pretty good, too. So opening and closing his big old mouth, he backed her right into a corner.

  Sally was plenty scared, with her knees a-knocking and her heart a-hammering. But just as the King Bear blew his hot breath in her face, she gathered the courage to say, “Would you like to dance?”

  As everybody knows, no bear can resist an invitation to a square dance, so of course the old fellow forgot all about eating Sally and said, “Love to.”

  Then he bowed real pretty, and the two got to kicking and whooping and swinging each other through the air, as Sally sang:

  We are on our way to Baltimore,

  With two behind, and two before:

  Around, around, around we go,

  Where oats, peas, beans, and barley grow!

  And while she was singing, Sally tied a string from the bear’s ankle to her butter churn, so that all the time the old feller was kicking up his legs and dancing around the room, he was also churning her butter!

  And folks loved to tell the story about Sally’s encounter with another stinky varmint—only this one was a human varmint. It seems that Mike Fink, the riverboat man, decided to scare the toenails off Sally because he was sick and tired of hearing Davy Crockett talk about how great she was.

  One evening Mike crept into an old alligator skin and met Sally just as she was taking off to forage in the woods for berries. He spread open his gigantic mouth and made such a howl that he nea
rly scared himself to death. But Sally paid no more attention to that fool than she would have to a barking puppy dog.

  However, when Mike put out his claws to embrace her, her anger rose higher than a Mississippi flood. She threw a flash of eye lightning at him, turning the dark to daylight. Then she pulled out a little toothpick and with a single swing sent the alligator head flying fifty feet! And then, to finish him off good, she rolled up her sleeves and knocked Mike Fink clear across the woods and into a muddy swamp.

  When the fool came to, Davy Crockett was standing over him. “What in the world happened to you, Mikey?” he asked.

  “Well, I—I think I must-a been hit by some kind of wild alligator!” Mike stammered, rubbing his sore head.

  Davy smiled, knowing full well it was Sally Ann Thunder Ann Whirlwind just finished giving Mike Fink the only punishment he’d ever known.

  That incident caused Cupid’s final arrow to jab Davy’s gizzard. “Sally’s the whole steamboat,” he said, meaning she was something great. The next day he put on his best raccoon hat and sallied forth to see her.

  When he got within three miles of her cabin, he began to holler her name. His voice was so loud, it whirled through the woods like a hurricane.

  Sally looked out and saw the wind a-blowing and the trees a-bending. She heard her name a-thundering through the woods, and her heart began to thump. By now she’d begun to feel that Davy Crockett was the whole steamboat, too. So she put on her best hat—an eagle’s nest with a wildcat’s tail for a feather—and ran outside.

  Just as she stepped out the door, Davy Crockett burst from the woods and jumped onto her porch as fast as a frog. “Sally, darlin’!” he cried. “I think my heart is bustin’! Want to be my wife?”

  “Oh, my stars and possum dogs, why not?” she said.

  From that day on, Davy Crockett had a hard time acting tough around Sally Ann Thunder Ann Whirlwind. His fightin’ and hollerin’ had no more effect on her than dropping feathers on a barn floor. At least, that’s what she’d tell you. He might say something else.

  NOTES ON THE STORY

  IN 1871, W. D. HALEY, a writer for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, wrote a biographical essay about a pioneer named John Chapman. Born in Massachusetts in the late 1700s, Chapman moved to the Ohio River Valley as a young man and began planting apple orchards in the wildernesses of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. People throughout America heard tales of this barefoot, seed-sowing wanderer. When John Chapman died in 1845, General Sam Houston, standing before Congress, said, “Farewell, dear old eccentric heart. Your labor has been a labor of love, and generations yet unborn will rise up and call you blessed.”

  Over the years, as legendary details grew out of sketchy historical fact, “Johnny Appleseed,” as Chapman came to be called, became an American folk character. Poems, plays, and novels about him proliferated, and monuments were built to honor his memory.

  Perhaps Johnny Appleseed represents the immigrants who made amazing contributions to North America by introducing and growing new crops. Certainly it can be said that all of us, including those Johnny Appleseeds of early America, have been inheritors of an even older tradition—the Native Americans’ domestication and breeding of wild plants, which first caused our wilderness to flower like a garden.

  There’s a ghost in the Ohio Valley. He moves over the windswept hills and through the apple orchards planted long ago. The farmers in the valley who’ve heard the ghost singing above the sound of the rustling trees call him by name—Johnny Appleseed.

  One morning in the early 1800s, two brothers sat on a misty bank of the Ohio River, near Pittsburgh. John and Nathaniel Chapman had recently journeyed from their father’s farm in Massachusetts to the hills of western Pennsylvania. Now as they sat watching pioneer families load their chickens, pigs, and farming tools onto rafts and flatboats, John Chapman seemed lost in his thoughts.

  Finally John turned to his brother. “I have a new plan,” he said.

  “What now?” Nathaniel sighed, expecting to hear yet another of his brother’s odd ideas.

  “I’m going to be a missionary,” said John.

  Nathaniel laughed. “That’s not a new plan,” he said, for John was always telling Bible stories and reporting his long conversations with angels.

  “Not a regular missionary, Nathaniel,” said John, his dark eyes shining. “An apple missionary.”

  “A what?”

  “An apple missionary. I’m going to spread apples all over the frontier! Last night I prayed for a sign to tell me how I could help these brave souls traveling to a new life in a new land. I had a dream, and behold”—John stretched out his arm and spread his bony fingers—“I saw apple orchards shining all through the wilderness!”

  A rooster crowed in the early-morning air, and Nathaniel Chapman shook his head and smiled. He wished John would settle near him in the Pennsylvania woods. But he knew that nothing he could say would keep his brother from trying to make his apple dream come true.

  The next day John Chapman began gathering apple seeds from the sweet-smelling cider mills around Pittsburgh. He dried the seeds in the sun, then packed them into deerskin sacks. When John had enough, Nathaniel helped him load the sacks into two canoes, then lash the canoes together with a rope.

  “Good luck!” Nathaniel called, his heart heavy as he watched his strange and remarkable brother row down the Ohio. He hoped John wouldn’t be too lonely.

  But John Chapman wasn’t worried about loneliness. He had a mission. As he paddled his canoe up and down the dark streams that branched out from the Ohio, he called to the settlers fishing and bathing along the banks: “Apple seeds! Take them! Sow them and harvest God’s jewels!

  “Seeds! Seeds! Apple seeds!” he called, and the settlers rushed to him and took his seeds and asked him for advice on raising the trees.

  But John didn’t just give his seeds to others to plant. He soon abandoned his canoes. Then he put his tin coffeepot on his head for a hat, slung one of his deerskin sacks over his shoulder, and headed barefoot into the thick wild woods filled with hickories, willows, and alders. When he came upon a sunny clearing, John dug into the moist brown earth to plant the seeds himself. “There’s going to be an apple orchard here someday,” he said to the birds and squirrels. “Folks will have all the apples they can eat. So don’t go takin’ these little seeds, brothers. Wait for the apples.”

  The woods were filled with bears, wolves, wild hogs, and rattlesnakes, but John never hurt a living thing. He ate nuts and gooseberries, plums and honey. He planted his apple seeds, talked to the animals, and sang in a voice as soft and sweet as the evening breeze.

  For days John didn’t see a soul in the wilderness. Then one morning he followed a trail that led to a trading post where trappers bartered fur skins and ginseng root for sugar, flour, and coffee.

  “Hello, brothers and sisters. I’ve come to light a candle of understanding!” John said, poking his nose in the doorway. “I’ve got news fresh from heaven!”

  The traders didn’t know what to make of this strange barefoot man wearing an old sugar sack for a shirt and a tin pot on his head. They snickered at first. But when John began to talk about apples, his eyes snapping in the lantern light, they stood still and listened. By the time he was ready to leave, they hated to see him go.

  “Take these seeds to your families,” he said, reaching into his sacks. “They’ll bring you fall wine! Winter preserves! Spring blossoms! Summer pies!”

  “I’ll trade you some cornmeal and coffee for them,” the owner of the trading post said to John.

  “I won’t be needing any food today, brother,” John said. “But how about trading for that horse tied up outside?”

  “Jim? Why, sure,” said the trader, laughing. Everyone could see that the worn-out horse was not long for this world. He could barely stand up in the noon sunshine. John said good-bye to the traders, then led his new friend to a cool stream and poured potfuls of water over his dusty hide. As the bony horse n
uzzled John’s hand, strange, whimpering cries came from the nearby woods.

  John began searching among the trees, following the sounds, until he nearly stumbled over a huge wolf. The wolf’s leg was caught in the strong jaws of a steel trap.

  “Oh, friend,” John gasped. He stooped and pried open the trap. As the animal lay on the ground, John made a splint and bound the wounded leg.

  John set up camp by the river and set about nursing the lame wolf and the tired horse back to health. Then the three of them took off together along the old fur traders’ trails, crossing the frontier.

  As they journeyed through forests and fields, over valleys and along rivers, John Chapman saw a new country growing fast.

  He saw the arrival of blacksmiths, potters, weavers, and carpenters.

  He saw Yankees from New England and Germans from Pennsylvania traveling in covered wagons and stagecoaches.

  He saw the riverboat king, Mike Fink, pushing a keelboat up the Ohio.

  He saw steamboats starting to take over the work of the keelboats.

  He saw men chopping forests and building canals.

  He saw gristmills run by giant waterwheels turning corn into meal.

  He saw freight wagons pulled by steam engines running on wooden tracks. Folks called them trains.

  He saw mills cutting trees into lumber.

  He saw teams of oxen clearing away stumps and roots so farmers could plow the land.

  He saw women in sunbonnets gathering pumpkins and corn.

  He saw flax drying in the fields and sheep being sheared in the meadows.

  He saw buffalo standing in deep grass as flocks of geese flew overhead.

  He saw a man named Audubon painting birds on canvas.