Febold Feboldson

The fog lay over the Platte valley thick enough to lean against, and Febold Feboldson went at it with a pair of shears. He had meant to make rain. He had built his fire beside the lake and boiled the water up into the sky the way a man boils a kettle, and the ground was so hot that the clouds could not break, so what came back down was not weather at all but a grey wool that filled the draws and swallowed the fence posts. So he cut it. He cut it into long strips the way you would cut felt, and he buried the strips, and the family he had been trying to impress stayed in Nebraska after all.

That is Febold in one motion. Every repair he ever made bred a second problem, and the second problem is always the part worth telling.

The stories put him on the plains around 1858, the first settler in his part of the country, a Swede who arrived when the maps still called the region the Great American Desert and who set about proving the mapmakers wrong. He could not be a woodsman, because there was no wood. What he fought instead were tornadoes, blizzards, grasshoppers, drouths, floods, disease and politicians, which was a fair summary of what actually killed homesteaders, rearranged into a shape people could laugh at.

He was made up, and the man who made him up admitted it in writing. Wayne T. Carroll, a lumber dealer in Gothenburg, Nebraska, wrote an occasional half column of humour for the Gothenburg Independent under the pen name Watt Tell, and somewhere around 1923 or 1924 he decided the plains needed folklore of their own. Bunyan had come down from the northern lumber camps, Johnny Appleseed had come west with the settlers, Pecos Bill had drifted up from the south, and Nebraska sat in the middle of all of it with nothing. Carroll handled lumber for a living, so he knew the Bunyan tales, and he built his man on that pattern. Asked outright decades later whether he had invented the character, he replied that he would have to admit he created him.

Even the name was assembled. Gothenburg had been settled by Swedes and named for the Swedish port, so Carroll wanted a Swedish sound. He had once known a young Swede called Febold something or other, and he ran that through the pattern of John Johnson and Nels Nelson and came out with Febold Feboldson. Bergstrom Stromberg came later, a satellite invented for the pleasure of the noise. The trick of the thing is that the tales are never told by Febold. They are told about him by a crowd of nephews who contradict each other, which gives a manufactured legend the worn, argued-over texture of a real one.

There was a real man underneath some of it. Louise Pound and Paul Beath both pointed at Olof Bergstrom, the Swedish founder of Gothenburg, a tall and handsome recruiter of settlers who once shot a house guest dead, was acquitted, handed each juror a twenty dollar bill afterward, and was walked home by a parade behind the Gothenburg Silver Cornet Band. A man who could turn that into a procession was already halfway to a tall tale.

Febold’s methods are all oblique. He held the boat concession at Diamond Bar lake one season and allowed no lines and no hooks; you whistled, and the dogfish jumped into your boat. Whistle too often and they swamped it and swam off, so greed punished itself without anyone needing to police it. If Febold saw a man about to take more than his share he whistled under his breath and sent the fish back into the water. On summer nights, the tellers said, you could hear dogfish barking under the bed.

The droughts brought out his best and worst thinking. The first method was noise, on the reasoning that rain generally follows battles and political conventions. The settlers were too dry to shout and so he hypnotised two frogs into believing it was already raining. They began to croak with joy, the news spread, and within minutes there was enough racket on the plains to give the local rain god a headache. Down came the rain, and it came so hard that every frog in the country and a good deal of livestock washed down to the Gulf of Mexico and took a full year to walk back. That limited the method to once a season. The second attempt was better because it was automatic and it is still running. Febold noticed that a watched pot never boils and that rain behaves the same way, so he got everyone to stop discussing the weather by teaching them to abuse the government instead, from the county assessor up to the secretary of the treasury. The sport caught on. One day the weather went unmentioned for twenty four hours and it rained all night. In the morning everybody said what a fine rain it was, and it stopped at once, insulted.

Then there is the chain that ends in prairie dogs. Grasshoppers had become intolerable, so Febold imported flying fish to eat them. The fish became a worse nuisance, so he brought in timber wolves to eat the fish, and the wolves needed woods, so he planted cottonwoods across the prairie until it was not a prairie any more. Southern planters paid him to grow cotton on the cottonwoods, and when the pickers could not reach the high branches he bent the trees double and stuck their tops in the ground, and by spring the trees had grown back down into the earth and vanished. The wolves were left homeless, blocked east by the Mississippi, south by the Rio Grande, west by the Rockies and north by the Canadian Northwest Mounted Police. Febold, who was fond of animals, dug up a cottonwood to show them the trees were merely underground. They burrowed in after them, each generation shrinking for lack of sunlight, and they are down there still, smaller every century, answering to the name of prairie dogs.

The tales carry their period’s ugliness plainly. Their recurring villains are a tribe Beath called the Dirtylegs, who never existed and were not modelled on any actual people, and one episode leans on a slur against Black labourers that no amount of context redeems. Read now, that material is not incidental colour. It is the same settler confidence that produced the rest of the humour, showing what it looked like when it turned outward.

What Febold has instead of strength is inexhaustible ingenuity and, like the heroes of older stories, the ability to talk with animals. He once traded a snake a drink of whiskey for the frog in its mouth and found ten thousand rattlesnakes behind him ten minutes later, each with a frog and each wagging its tail like a contented pup. He ran until he reached Kansas, where he met Carrie Nation and converted her from drinking to putting bricks through saloon windows, and Kansas has been dry ever since.

His limits are structural rather than physical. He can move weather but not hold it, and every solution he applies is bigger than the problem it solves. The one thing he could never fix was the pull of California, and the gold rush drained people and money out of the plains no matter what he did. He stocked the rivers with moulting Peruvian goldfish so the beds glittered like a Californian’s account of his adopted state, and gave it up on the grounds that after forty or fifty years of panning the men would go west anyway. Eventually he went himself. The nephews still argue about it. Eldad says no man that clever would come back to a country that burns you or freezes you or eats you alive; Bergstrom says he only went to study irrigation and forestry and will return to put water and trees on the plains.

Paul Beath, who wrote most of the stories and collected the rest into a University of Nebraska Press book in 1948, always refused to call his subject a folk hero, insisting these were tales made by individuals to entertain individuals. Louise Pound put it more sharply, filing Febold under the lore of the literary class rather than of the folk. In 1950 the folklorist Richard Dorson coined the word fakelore for material of exactly this kind, and Febold was on his list. All of which leaves an odd and rather likeable object: a hero invented on purpose, by a named man, in a named town, who then had to be argued about by his own fictional nephews before anyone would believe in him.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Febold Feboldson?

Febold Feboldson is a Swedish American plainsman of Nebraska tall tales, known as a drought buster who bent weather and animals to his purposes. The stories place him on the Great Plains from about 1858, fighting droughts, blizzards, grasshoppers, tornadoes and politicians. He was created as a Great Plains counterpart to Paul Bunyan.

Was Febold Feboldson a real folk hero or was he invented?

Febold Feboldson was invented. Wayne T. Carroll, a lumber dealer in Gothenburg, Nebraska, created him around 1923 or 1924 for a humour column in the Gothenburg Independent and later confirmed in writing that he had made the character up. Paul R. Beath wrote most of the surviving stories and always denied that Febold was genuine folklore, and the folklorist Richard Dorson listed him as an example of fakelore in 1950.

How did Febold Feboldson break a drought?

Febold Feboldson broke droughts by indirect methods rather than by force. In one tale he hypnotised two frogs into thinking it was raining, and the noise every frog in the country then made brought down so much rain that livestock washed to the Gulf of Mexico. His better method was to get people to stop talking about the weather by teaching them to criticise the government instead, on the theory that a watched pot never boils.

Why did Febold Feboldson cut fog into strips?

Febold Feboldson cut fog into strips because his attempt to make rain had failed. He lit a fire beside a lake to evaporate the water into clouds, but the ground was too hot for the clouds to release rain, so a thick fog settled over the plains instead. He sheared the fog into lengths and buried it.

What happened to Febold Feboldson at the end of the stories?

Febold Feboldson went to California, which the stories treat as the fate of every sensible plainsman. His nephews Bergstrom Stromberg and Eldad Johnson disagree permanently about why: Eldad says he escaped a country that was never fit to live in, while Bergstrom insists he went to study irrigation and forestry and will come back to plant trees and bring water to the plains.

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