Pecos Bill

Also Known As: named for the Pecos River of West Texas and eastern New Mexico; occasionally Pecos William
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Urban Legends & Contemporary Folklore
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: Absurd, unbeatable competence at every job the cattle country has, extended until it swallows the weather and the map.
Role in Mythos: He is the cowboy’s cartoon of himself, the supertype in whom every skill of the range is invented, perfected and then pushed past the point of sense.
Relation to Humans: He is one of us with the limits taken off, a working hand rather than a god, and nothing in his stories asks for worship or offers protection. The people who told about him were laughing at their own trade, and the joke only lands if the listener has done the work.

The Pecos runs cold and green between banks of caliche and mesquite, and somewhere along it, in the early 1830s, a wagon hit a rock hard enough to bounce a baby out the back. The family was Texas pioneer stock and had eighteen children in it. They had pulled up stakes and moved west because another family had settled fifty miles downriver and the country was getting crowded. Nobody counted heads until the crossing was long behind them, and by then it was too late to turn the team around.

A coyote bitch found the child and carried him back to her den, and for the next ten years he was one of hers. He ran on all fours. He howled. He ate what he could run down, which came to mean deer and jackrabbits, and when a bigger appetite took him he took bigger meat.

That is how a cowboy came across him one afternoon: a boy of about ten, squeezing two bears to death, one under each arm, because supper had to come from somewhere. The cowboy tried to tell him he was human. The boy disagreed, and had ten years of evidence on his side. The argument was settled by anatomy. The cowboy pointed out that the boy had no tail. Nothing else in the whole cycle is allowed to describe what Pecos Bill looked like, but that detail is fixed, and it is the only one.

After that he threw in with people, and the tall tales get to work. He invented calf roping. He invented branding, then invented the branding iron on top of it to stop rustlers changing a mark, and when the cattle grew restless at night he invented the cowboy song to settle them. He built the first six-shooter. He taught gophers to dig postholes, which saved a great deal of stooping. When rattlesnakes became a nuisance he fed them mothballs packed with red pepper and nitroglycerin, and the nuisance stopped. He roped whole herds at a throw, not one head at a time, because doing it one head at a time struck him as a waste of a morning.

He did not bother much with horses at first. He rode a panther that weighed as much as three steers and a yearling, and carried a live rattlesnake for a quirt, and the smell of hot cat and dust coming into a camp at dusk was enough to put a whole outfit off its beans. The panther is the version of Bill worth keeping in the mind’s eye: a boy raised by predators, riding a predator, hitting it with a predator.

One drought year the Pecos country went dry enough to crack, so he dug the Rio Grande, the whole length of it, to bring water up from the Gulf of Mexico. He staked out New Mexico as a ranch. Arizona was the calf pasture. When a cyclone came at him across the flats, black and howling and pulling the tops off the hills, he did not run and he did not particularly hurry. He got on it. The stories are careful to add that he rolled a cigarette with his free hand while he rode it, which is the sort of detail that gives the whole thing away as the work of men sitting around a fire trying to outdo one another.

Then Slue-Foot Sue. She was the one thing on the range he could not outdo, and the story of what happened to her is the only genuinely dark turn in the cycle. On the wedding day she wanted to ride the Widow-Maker, Bill’s horse, and Bill told her not to, and she got on anyway. The horse pitched her so high that she very nearly came down on the moon. She landed on her steel-spring bustle, which was the fashion of the day, and the bustle threw her straight back up. She bounced. She kept bouncing. Bill watched her go up and come down and go up again, and worked out that she was going to starve before the springs gave out, and so he shot her.

Nobody agrees on how Bill himself went. One account has him drinking his whiskey with fishhooks and nitroglycerin in it until the mixture caught up with him. Another says he simply met some dudes who called themselves cowboys, took a long look at their outfits, and laughed himself to death on the spot. Both endings are jokes told against the newcomer, which is the audience the whole cycle was really aimed at.

Here is the part the tales do not mention. Pecos Bill got into print in *The Century Magazine* for October 1923, in an article called “The Saga of Pecos Bill” by Edward Synnott O’Reilly, a Denton-born reporter and soldier of fortune who claimed ten wars on four continents and wrote for the Associated Press between them. O’Reilly said he had grown up hearing the stories from cowboys at the chuck wagon. J. Frank Dobie, who knew southwestern folklore as well as anyone alive and was not sentimental about it, said flatly that no such stories existed before O’Reilly printed them. Mody Boatright, the folklorist who did more than anybody to spread the cycle, agreed in his own book while spreading it: writing in 1934, he noted that he had never met a soul claiming to be Pecos Bill, that few of the old-time cowmen had heard of him at all, and that this hero was “apparently a late development,” a man who got into print in 1923 and was already driving his rivals from the field.

The clinching detail is better than the argument. When another writer lifted the material, O’Reilly sued him, and in the course of the suit O’Reilly admitted that he had made Pecos Bill up.

Richard Dorson later built a word around cases like this. In 1950 he called it fakelore: material dressed as oral tradition but manufactured for a mass readership. Paul Bunyan was his other exhibit. Neither charge stuck to the public, and neither should be taken as saying that nothing real is underneath. The tall-tale habit Bill sits on top of is genuinely of the cattle camps, the “auguring match” in which two outfits pitted their best liar against each other and talked all night to see who folded first, and Bill’s individual stunts are made of the same stuff as the windies Boatright collected from real West Texas hands. What was invented was the man they were all hung on, and the pace at which they were hung.

His powers follow from the joke. He can do anything a cowhand can do, and the point of each story is that the doing scales up without ever changing in kind, so that roping a steer becomes roping a herd becomes roping a cyclone, and the humour lives in the flatness with which the impossible is reported. His limits follow from the joke too. He cannot be killed by anything in nature, only by his own appetite for nitroglycerin or by the sight of a tourist in a new hat. He cannot save Slue-Foot Sue, because a bustle is a fashion and not a bronc, and there is nothing in his skill set that answers it. And he cannot do the one thing every figure around him on the range can do, which is come from somewhere. He has a birth in the story and a birth in the record, and they are ninety years apart.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Pecos Bill?

Pecos Bill is a tall-tale cowboy hero of the American Southwest, said to have been born in Texas in the early 1830s, lost from a wagon crossing the Pecos River as a baby, and raised by coyotes. In the stories he invents roping, branding, the branding iron, the cowboy song and the six-shooter, rides a panther with a rattlesnake for a quirt, and rides a cyclone. He is a comic exaggeration of the cowboy’s own trade rather than a god or a spirit.

Was Pecos Bill a real person?

No. Pecos Bill has no historical prototype and no attested oral tradition before print. He first appeared in “The Saga of Pecos Bill” by Edward Synnott O’Reilly in *The Century Magazine* for October 1923, and when another writer plagiarised the piece O’Reilly admitted in the resulting lawsuit that he had invented the character.

Why is Pecos Bill called fakelore?

The folklorist Richard Dorson coined “fakelore” in 1950 for material presented as oral tradition but actually written for a mass readership, and he named Pecos Bill alongside Paul Bunyan as an example. J. Frank Dobie said the stories did not exist before O’Reilly printed them in 1923, and Mody Boatright, writing in 1934, recorded that few old-time cowmen had heard of Bill at all.

What happened to Slue-Foot Sue?

Slue-Foot Sue was Pecos Bill’s bride, and on their wedding day she insisted on riding Bill’s horse, the Widow-Maker, against his advice. The horse threw her so high she nearly reached the moon, and she landed on her steel-spring bustle, which bounced her back up again and kept her bouncing. Bill shot her to keep her from starving to death in mid-air.

How did Pecos Bill die?

The tellings disagree. In one, he drank whiskey laced with fishhooks and nitroglycerin until it killed him. In another, he met a group of dudes who called themselves cowboys and laughed himself to death at the sight of them.