John Darling

Also Known As: also Johnny Darling; expanded by later writers to Johnny Caesar Cicero Darling; called the Sage of Sand Pond in his own lifetime
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Urban Legends & Contemporary Folklore
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: He is the hero of every story he tells, surviving impossible hunts, falls, weathers and livestock through luck and nerve that no other man in the Catskills is granted.
Role in Mythos: He is the Catskill Munchausen, a real storyteller who made himself the central character of a tall-tale cycle that outlived him by a century.
Relation to Humans: His audience was his neighbours, raftsmen and bark peelers and farmers who gathered in kitchens and barrooms to hear what he had been up to lately. They enjoyed him and mistrusted him in equal measure, because he insisted his stories were true and would not release them into the safety of a joke.

The powder was slow, he said. He had fired at a deer as it crossed the knoll, and the deer ran on into the trees untouched, so he went home, made up fresh shells with faster powder in them, and came back the next day. The dog put the same deer over the same knoll. He raised the gun, took his aim, and before he could fire the animal dropped dead where it stood. Yesterday’s ball had finally caught up with it. That was John Darling’s story, and the whole point of John Darling is that he would not be told otherwise.

He lived in the western Catskills of New York, in the country where the Beaverkill and the creeks of Delaware County run down into the East Branch of the Delaware River. It was logging land then. Big trees came off the mountainsides by ones and twos, floated down fast water to Hancock where the two branches meet, and were built into rafts that men steered as far as Trenton and even Philadelphia. Around that trade sat everything else: hemlock bark stripped for the tanneries, scoop-making, sawmills, and later the acid factories. Darling turned his hand to these things, and to farming, and by local report to preaching, working his way from one schoolhouse to the next and, as one old man remembered it, hollering and taking on. None of it made him any money.

What he was good at was talk.

Nobody who actually saw him left much of a description. Frank Edwards of Livingston Manor, sixty when a folklorist sat down with him in 1941, had been five or six years old when he last laid eyes on Darling, and what he could offer was that he was a short man, a man along in years. That is close to the whole of the physical record. The teller who filled other people’s memories with gooseberry trees four feet through and hailstones the size of nail kegs left almost no image of himself behind, only a small figure in a warm room with a circle of listeners closing in around him.

The room mattered. Darling told in kitchens and barrooms and on porches, on Sunday afternoons and after dark, and he told in the first person. He had been out in the Washington lumberwoods and worked three days on one tree before walking round it and finding four other men already at it from the far side. He had cut a gooseberry tree down and got a hundred cord of firewood out of it. He had been down in Jersey where the mosquitoes were eating him alive, and had crawled under a cast-iron cauldron big enough to hold twenty-three barrels, and when one bill came punching through the iron he clinched it over with his hammer, and the mosquito flew off with the cauldron and all. He had gone blackberrying in high summer, reached his own dooryard with a full pail, stepped on a patch of ice and spilled the lot.

There is a courtesy to lying of this kind, and Darling broke it. George Swartwout of East Branch, seventy or so when he was interviewed and old enough to have known the man, laid out the offence precisely. He did not mind sitting down with a liar, provided the liar knew it was a lie and the listener knew it was a lie. Darling would not have that. Swartwout’s grandfather would tell him flatly that he was lying, and Darling would answer that he was not, it was a fact, and then he would take whatever true story had just been offered and come back with one on the same order and ten times worse. Swartwout’s verdict, delivered more than once and with feeling, was that John Darling was the biggest liar ever walked. His brother James said the same thing in nearly the same words.

He worked small as well as large. He once told Swartwout’s mother to take a thimble away from her child, because he had seen seven children choke to death in a single day on that same thimble. It is a horrible little joke, and it was delivered straight, which was the method.

The best of the stories, and the one that shows up in every collection, concerns a sow. She jumped a fence and broke her back. Darling could not bring himself to knock her in the head, so he built a two-wheeled cart and strapped her hindquarters into it, and she got about the yard that way for some weeks, and then she disappeared. He assumed she had gone off somewhere to die. One cold morning in the fall he looked up the hill and saw her coming down, so fat she could hardly waller, with ten pigs behind her, and every pig had a cart.

The rest of the cycle runs on the same fuel. He shot at a deer across a pond and the ball took the deer, a ten pound pickerel that happened to be jumping at a fly, and a hemlock tree that then ran honey out of the bullet hole. He ran out of ammunition, loaded with cherry pits, hit a buck in the head, and met the same animal the next season with cherry trees growing out of its skull. He aimed a plough drawn by seven yoke of bolting oxen at an oak stump, split it clean, and was caught by the seat of his britches when the stump shut again, and the pants held while the seven yokes broke, so that the only way out was to climb out of them. He stepped off a ledge in the dark, caught his toes on the edge, hung there all night, and in the morning found his head six inches off the ground fourteen feet below. He jumped for a beam, saw in mid-air that he was not going to reach it, and jumped back.

The cycle began with Darling himself. He was his own hero, and his raw material was not local: Munchausen, and older tales carried over from Europe, refitted with Sullivan County place names. Other tellers then loaded more onto him, free-floating yarns that elsewhere attach to other men or to nobody at all. Two relatives, Jube and Ed Darling, pulled in some of the same stories, which is how a cycle travels when a surname does half the work. By the summer of 1941 the tales were being repeated by men in their forties, sixties and seventies who had them from fathers and grandfathers, and the versions no longer agreed on how many pigs there were, or which Darling it had happened to.

His gift was tonal rather than physical. He could take any true story a neighbour offered and answer it on the same subject and ten times worse, without hurry, without smiling and without ever once conceding the frame. His limits came from the same place. He never learned to release a story, and the insistence that had held a barroom at thirty read very differently at seventy. He lost a farm, fell into poverty, and in March 1884 was committed to the homeopathic hospital at Middletown, where a local paper filed him as an eccentric known far and wide for relating improbable stories that nobody believed but himself. Within a year he was in the county poorhouse. He walked out of it and the record stops.

His stories did better than he did. Carl Carmer printed six of them, Harold W. Thompson printed seven and argued that the man behind them had really lived in Sullivan County and had probably been its champion liar, and in August 1941 Lieutenant Herbert Halpert spent three weeks in the region and came away with nearly two hundred folktales, a large share of them Darling’s, taken down from named men who had heard him or shaken his hand. M. A. Jagendorf rewrote the cycle for a wider readership in 1949 and gave him the grand triple name, the dog and the never-missing gun that the field texts know nothing about. Richard Dorson later set him alongside Jim Bridger and Gib Morgan as one of eight American Munchausens worth studying. Even his dates are contested: Dorson prints 1809 to 1903, his family put his death about nine years after the poorhouse, and local researchers have gone looking for the grave and come back with unmarked stones. The man who would never admit that one of his stories was untrue has no verifiable ending of his own.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was John Darling?

John Darling was a real nineteenth-century storyteller from the western Catskills of New York who became the hero of a cycle of tall tales he started about himself. He lived and worked in Sullivan and Delaware counties during the Delaware River logging and tanning era, trying farming, woods work and preaching without ever making a living. He is classed with Jim Bridger and Gib Morgan as one of America’s Munchausens, tall-tale tellers who star in their own stories.

Was John Darling a real person?

Yes. Men who had personally known Darling were still alive and being interviewed in 1941, and they described him as a short man, old by the time they were children, who told his yarns in barrooms and kitchens. His dates are disputed, with one scholarly source giving 1809 to 1903, but his existence is not. The fantastic elements belong to the stories, not to the question of whether the teller lived.

What are John Darling’s most famous tall tales?

The best known are the sow who broke her back, was fitted with a two-wheeled cart, and came home fat with a litter of pigs each pushing a cart of its own, and the leap for a barn beam that he abandoned in mid-air and jumped back from. Others include the slow powder that killed a deer a day late, the single shot that took a deer, a pickerel and a honey tree, and the deer that grew cherry trees from its head after being shot with cherry pits.

Why did his neighbours call John Darling a liar instead of a storyteller?

Because he refused to admit the stories were inventions. Tall-tale telling in the Catskills worked as a shared game in which both sides knew the rules, and Darling broke that arrangement by swearing his yarns were fact and arguing the point when challenged. One neighbour said he did not mind a liar who knew he was lying, but Darling would insist it was true and then top the next man’s story ten times over.

How did John Darling die?

Nobody knows. He lost his farm, fell into poverty, was committed to the hospital at Middletown in March 1884 and moved on to the county poorhouse, then left and was never reliably traced again. One scholarly source gives his death as 1903, his family said he died roughly nine years after leaving the poorhouse, and searches for a grave or death record have turned up nothing certain.