Bowleg Bill

Also Known As: also Bowleg Bill the Sea-Going Cowboy, Bowleg Bill the Seagoing Cowpuncher
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Urban Legends & Contemporary Folklore
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: A Wyoming ranch hand transplanted to the New England fishing fleet, who treats whales and giant tuna exactly as he treated horses and cattle.
Role in Mythos: He is the comic hinge between two American boasting traditions, the cowboy West and the Yankee waterfront, invented in 1938 to swap the vocabulary of one for the other.
Relation to Humans: He sails with ordinary crews out of Massachusetts and Maine ports and spends most of his time baffling them, since he is a first-rate horseman and a hopeless sailor. The men around him are the ones telling the story, and the joke is usually at his expense and theirs at once.

The benches outside the fish houses on the Massachusetts shore were worn smooth by seventy years of oilskin trousers, and the men on them had a local specialty. They would tell a stranger something flatly impossible with a level face and a mouth full of tobacco, then wait. Bowleg Bill was supposed to have come off those benches. The 1938 book that carries him says so in its own subtitle, presenting the adventures of a Wyoming ranch-hand as recounted by the best-accredited liars’ benches along the entire coast of Massachusetts. It is a lovely claim and it is not true. Bowleg Bill came out of a typewriter in Provincetown.

The man at the typewriter was Josef Berger, born in Denver in 1903, trained in journalism at Missouri, a New York reporter for ten years before he moved his wife and daughter out to the tip of Cape Cod in 1934 to freelance. He was very nearly broke for a year. What rescued him was the Federal Writers’ Project, and what came out of that was *Cape Cod Pilot* in 1937, published under the pen name Jeremiah Digges, a success large enough to win him a Guggenheim. He had spent that year listening to Cape Codders talk. The next book, *Bowleg Bill, the Sea-Going Cowboy; or, Ship Ahoy & Let ‘Er Buck!*, came from Viking Press in 1938 with illustrations by William Gropper, and it is a collection of tall tales about a man who had no business anywhere near salt water.

The premise is one good joke stretched to book length, which is the correct length for that particular joke. A Wyoming cowhand ends up at sea off New England. He never makes able-bodied seaman and never will. What he does instead is apply the only trade he has to the only animals available. He ropes tuna. He rides them. The motif that folklorists eventually catalogued from him is blunt in its phrasing: a man rides a two-ton tuna and herds the other fish. Picture the water going white along a fish’s back the way dust goes up off a corral, a rope burning through a fist, a very long way to fall and nothing underneath. He lures whales with his music. He captures a mermaid. At one point he mutinies, which in a book of this temper is less a political act than another chance to be difficult on somebody else’s vessel.

His body is mostly an absence, and the absence is funnier than a description would have been. The name is the whole anatomy: legs bent out by years astride a horse, which is the precise wrong shape for standing on a wet deck in a swell. Everything else is left to the reader and the illustrator. The eight-foot version, the giant who rides herd on she-whales and he-whales and makes the most of two professions given to tall tales, whaling and bronco-busting, belongs to Harold W. Felton’s 1957 retelling for children and not to Berger. Felton put him aboard a vessel out of Portland Harbor under a Cape Cod skipper who wanted to beat a Plymouth captain to San Francisco, and when the storm came and nothing else worked, Bill saved Cape Cod’s honour by riding herd on his cattle from the back of the ship’s horse figurehead. That image says more about the character than any physical inventory could.

Other tellers kept adding. *New England Bean-Pot*, a 1948 collection of American folk stories to read aloud, carried “The Strange Adventure of the Cowboy-Sailor,” in which Bill meets a giant sea serpent and sets off hunting a woman named Keziah. Wyatt Blassingame wrote him again in 1976. A comic strip began on 30 October 1939, barely a year after the book. Gropper, who had drawn him first, put him on a 1946 map of America’s folk heroes among Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill and the rest of that crowd, which is how a character stops being one author’s property. As late as 1992 he was still turning up in school readers as the cowboy of the ocean waves.

Meanwhile the scholars were sorting out what he was. Richard M. Dorson wrote about him in *The American Scholar* in 1941, and Dorson is the man who nine years later coined the word fakelore for exactly this sort of thing: material made up by a writer and presented as though it had risen out of the people. B. A. Botkin printed Bowleg Bill material across a dozen pages of *A Treasury of American Folklore* in 1944, which pushed him further into the record. Ernest Baughman’s motif index eventually gave him a number and filed him under New England. The record does not show anyone telling a Bowleg Bill story before 1938.

His powers are all borrowed from the range and misapplied at sea, which is the engine of every story he appears in: he can rope, ride and break anything with a spine, and the ocean obligingly supplies animals large enough to make that interesting. His music pulls whales the way a harmonica is supposed to settle a herd at night. His limits are just as consistent. He cannot sail. He is useless at the actual work of a ship, which is why the crews around him are forever both saving him and being saved by him. And the deeper limitation is the one he shares with every invented hero: he has no oral tradition underneath him to keep him alive when the reprints stop. Bunyan got an advertising department. Bowleg Bill got a good book, a comic strip, and a slow fade.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Bowleg Bill?

Bowleg Bill is an American tall-tale hero, a Wyoming cowboy who ends up working on New England fishing and whaling vessels and ropes sea creatures the way he once roped cattle. He was created by the journalist Josef Berger, writing as Jeremiah Digges, in the 1938 book *Bowleg Bill, the Sea-Going Cowboy*. The stories are built on the collision between cowboy talk and Yankee waterfront talk.

Is Bowleg Bill a real folk hero or was he made up?

He was made up. Josef Berger invented him in 1938 and framed the book as though the stories had been collected from liars’ benches along the Massachusetts coast, but no telling of a Bowleg Bill story is recorded before that book. Folklorists class him as fakelore, the term Richard M. Dorson coined in 1950 for invented material presented as genuine oral tradition. Berger had genuinely spent a year collecting Cape Cod material for the Federal Writers’ Project before writing him.

What does Bowleg Bill do in the stories?

He rides and herds sea animals. He ropes and rides a two-ton tuna, drives other fish like cattle, lures whales with his music, captures a mermaid, and at one point leads a mutiny. In Harold Felton’s 1957 retelling he rides herd on his cows from the back of a ship’s horse figurehead during a storm to win a race for a Cape Cod skipper.

What did Bowleg Bill look like?

The original book fixes only his legs, bowed from years in the saddle and badly suited to a rolling deck, which is where the name comes from. No early source describes his face or his clothing. The eight-foot giant version comes from Harold W. Felton’s 1957 children’s book, not from the 1938 original.

Why does Bowleg Bill matter?

He is one of the clearest test cases for the difference between folklore and fakelore in American writing. His career shows how quickly an invented hero can enter the record: a comic strip within a year, inclusion in B. A. Botkin’s *A Treasury of American Folklore* in 1944, a place on William Gropper’s 1946 folk-hero map, a motif number in Baughman’s index, and school readers still printing him half a century on.