Read more
Zusatztext "You'll never find a better guide than Richard Erdoes to lead you through the mosaic of the American frontier. The whole pack of our legendary past is crammed into this treasure box. —Dee Brown! author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee Informationen zum Autor edited, told, and retold by Richard Erdoes Klappentext From Davy Crockett, Wild Bill Hickok, and Calamity Jane to Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, and Frank and Jesse James, here are more than 130 colorful stories of the pioneers, cowboys, outlaws, gamblers, prospectors, and lawmen who settled the wild west, creating a uniquely American hero and an enduringly fascinating folk mythology. In this wonderfully boisterous treasury of tall tales, everyone and everything is larger than life and bragging is elevated into an art form. Many of these stories are of real people and real events; more than a few, however, grew taller and funnier as they made their rounds from wagon train to campfire to rodeo to miners' quarters. But even if it is far from established that Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett were able to kill three men with one bullet or subdue ferocious grizzly bears with their fists, they come vividly to life here as beloved characters who have become part of the fabric of the American imagination. With black-and white illustrations throughout Part of the Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library THE CHEATER CHEATED Traders to the Indians are part of the early West’s folklore. On the whole they were a sorry lot. As an eighteenth-century writer put it: The English manner of carrying on the Indian trade is this: the regular traders undertake twice of oftener each year journeys to the Indian villages, their Packhorses laden with Strowds, match coats, hats, looking-glasses, beads and bracelets of glass, knives, and all manner of Gawdy Toys and Knacks for children, as well as guns, flint, Powder, and Lead, and cags of potent Rum to be watered when they arrive to the Indian country. When there these traders live with the Indians, selling them goods in prospect of the season’s fur catch and often keeping one or more squaws as wives and are trusted by their neighbours for they are content or two or three centum profit . . . Other traders there are who frequently creep into the Woods with spirituous liquor and cheating trifles, after the Indian hunting camps, in the Winter season, and putting down several Cags before them, make them drunk selling their liquor at ten times its value, as the Indians will sell even their wearing shirt for inebriating liquors . . . These Traders are the most vicious and abandoned Wretches of our Nation, a set of Mean Dishonest mercenary Fellows . . . they even debauch the Indians’ young women, and even their wives, when the husbands are from home or drunk. But here is a tale of the cheater cheated. There was a Nipissing chief called the Red Owl, a mighty hunter and trapper, who brought enough meat to his wigwam to support several wives. His adobe was always filled with the choicest pelts of otter, beaver, fox, mink, and weasel. There also was a trader, Smith, or Miller, or, possibly, Cooper. Well, whatever his name, he was a mean liar and cheat who would have sold his own mother’s soul to the devil for two pieces of eight. One day this thieving swindler came to the Red Owl’s wigwam, pointing to a stack of prime beaver plews, saying, “I’ll have those.” “What you gimme for them?” “How about this keg of whiskey, Chief? Strong as lightning.” “No whiskey,” said the Red Owl, who could not be bamboozled by an offer of rattlesnake piss. “Tell you what I’ll do for you, Chief,” said the trader, handing the Red Owl a small bag of coarse-grained powder. “I’m in a giving mood today. I’ll swap this for you beavers,” “This littl...
