rson, n and ornic
Man and Beast in American Comic Legena • PART~
American Legendary Creatures
All the peoples of the world take seriously certain legendary crea tures of a lower mythology with whom they associate on familiar terms. All, that is, save the people of the United States. Alexander H. Krappe once asserted that America possessed no folklore. What he should have said was that some of America's folklore differs from that of the rest of the world. As examples of creatures of legend intimately bound with the culture, the lives, the psyche of a people, consider the fairies of Ireland, the kappa of Japan, and the jinn of Egypt. In common they possess supernatural powers; their existence is credited by a sub stantial sector o.f the national population; and their attributes are known to all in their land. The popular and the literary as well as the folk culture pay them tribute. They occupy only their own pa tria. (I once asked Sean O'Sullivan why the Irish in the United States do not sight fairies, and he opined that it was probably be cause the circles of greensward known as fairy rings on the Ould Sod did not appear in America.) These figures, in their various forms, live among their chosen folk, enter their homes, marry them on occasion, lurk in their gardens, fields, and streams, and transport them to other places. Yet the three also differ considerably from each other in their legendary lineaments. The fairies take the shape of little green men and women, ani-
1 2 AMERICAN LEGENDARY CREATURES . American Legendary Creatures 3
mals, ordinary human beings, and ghosts. Myriad are the memo big fish to the samurai's garden and instructed him in setting bro rates that recount meetings with the fairies by Irish farmer folk. In 2 ken bones. the best of the collections about the fairy faith, Visions and Beliefs The kappa permeates Japanese culture. He appears as a character of the West of Ireland, Lady Gregory set down cycles of testimonies in novels, short stories, comic cartoons; his likeness is depicted in telling of neighbors who had been taken ~~away" by ~~them," or of wood carvings, on place mats, checks, and on television. In the sum seeing harm come to those who traversed fairy routes, or of being mer of 1975 in a Tokyo hotel, I saw on my color TV a documentary cured by healers in converse with the fairy people. In Dublin in on the kappa, with scenes of farmers pointing out to the interviewer 1951, lunching in the faculty dining room of University College streams where the goblin resided. Although the camera did not with folklorists Sean O'Sullivan and Kevin Danahe~ I heard one of catch a live kappa, inserted stills of kappa drawings indicated their academic colleagues describe, with great inten~ity, how at the plainly enough the subject of the animated discussion. age of two he had seen the fairies dancing on the green by a fairy Even more than the fairies and the kappas, the jinn live close to fort, which was desecrated shortly after by a workman, .who died the homes of men. In Cairo they occupy old houses, ovens, latrines, within the year. Later in the week I visited the fieldworker in baths, and wells; they take the form of cats, dogs, men, and mon County Kerry for the Irish Folklore Comil_lission, Tadhg Murphy, sters, or become invisible. Created before Adam, they resemble the and heard him relate a lengthy experience that he had collected human species, but live for centuries and perpetrate magical mis from a narrator who had heard Sean Palmer tell how strangers had chief. Malicious jinn perched on rooftops hurl bricks and stones into taken him by boat in a few hours to America, where he called on the streets and courts of Cairo and other cities in Egypt. Some hu relatives. An elegant Yankee suit, a fine tobacco box and a five man magicians of unusual powers are believed to have obtained dollar bill displayed by Sean Palmer next day convi~ced his wife them from marrying a female jinni. During the first ten days of that he had indeed in one night visited America, thanks, of course, Moharram, a jinni in the form of a water-carrier knocks at the door to the fairies. 1 of a sleeping person, who calls out, ~~Who is there?" The jinni re Unlike the shape-shifting fairies, the kappa appears in one con sponds, ~ti, the water-carrier; where shall I empty the skin?" ~~Empty stant guise, that of a goblin-boy with a saucer-like cavity in its head. into the water-jar," ritually states the lucky one, aware that water If the fluid in the cavity is spilled, say by jostling the kappa, he loses carriers do not come at night, and later he finds the jar full of gold. his malignant power. Kappas inhabit rivers, ponds and lakes, and Sometimes the jinni arrives in the form of a mule bearing saddle-· seize children swimming in the waters, or pull down horses and bags full of gold and a dead man's head upon his back.3 Evil jinn cattle from the river banks, enter their anuses, draw out their intes known as ghouls haunt burial grounds and feed on dead bodies and tines, and suck their blood. Dictionaries and travel books describe the living who happen to come their way. Egyptians of the Islamic the kappa as an ugly naked child with greenish-yellow skin, a mon faith utter various charms against the jinn, such as ~~Iron, thou key face, a tortoise-like shell, webbed fingers and toes, and a fishy unlucky!" especially when they see approaching across the desert a smell. Kappas wrestle with men and rape women, but they have whirlwind of sand caused by the flight of ajinni. their kinder side, too, and will teach the art of bonesetting to fami Examples could readily be multiplied of these supernatural lies that have befriended or captured them. In one tale a kappa fell legendary-mythological beings who mingle intimately with the peo in love with the beautiful wife of a samurai and touched her but ples to whose culture they belong and enter their personal experi tocks as she sat on the toilet. Next night she took with her the short ence tales. This past year, Martha Blache of Argentina completed a sword of her husband and cut off the creature's hand as he stroked doctoral dissertation in folklore at Indiana University on memo her. The shaggy little man ran off shrieking, and night after night rates and anecdotes of such beings that she collected from the Gua appeared at the samurai's bed pleading for the return of his hand. rani Indians.4 She speaks of the pombero, a small fairy whose On receiving it he joined it to his arm, and the next day brought two friendship and protection may be cultivated with offerings left out- 4 AMERICAN LEGENDARY CREATURES American Legendary Creatures 5 side the house; of the yasy yatere, a pretty, fair haired creature that form of loose paraphrase or generalized accounts. Only in the case whistles and entices children into the woods at noon; and the luis6n, of the hoopsnake, who does perform an action-rolling like a hoop, the seventh son of an uninterrupted series of boys, a thin, ailing, chasing a man, and striking his stinger into a tree, which shortly unsociable man by day, and a dog that feeds on dead bodies on withers and dies-and the sidehill dodger, who can be caught by Friday nights. being turned around, are manifold texts available. The Windham The mainstream culture of the United States exhibits no directly frogs did participate in an event but long before the days of field comparable creatures. We were born too late to develop a higher or collecting, so for their escapade we rely on literary texts. Further lower mythology, and unlike our northern and southern neighbors, more, the total complex of the critter's tradition involves more than we excluded the Native American, erased the Afro-American, and a tale, since community response, tourist interest, hoax perpetra suppressed the ethnic American goblins from our folk-belief system. tion, protofestival activities, and media and literary recognition The winds of rationalism and secularism blew away these uprooted come into play and require ethnographic treatment and analysis. traditions, even the ubiquitous Devil once regularly sighted in the Excellent studies of these phenomena are John Gutowski's disser seventeenth century. tation on Oscar the Turtle and William Harris's article on the White Instead we have acquired a comic mythology of"fearsome critters" River Monster, which will be cited in due course. who perform services and reflect the United States ethos in a man The best single source, although not a collection of oral texts, is a ner comparable to the roles of the kappas, jinn, and fairy folk. We comic bestiary titled Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods, with yarn about, identify with, hunt for, depict, extol, and chuckle over a Few Desert and Mountain Beasts, which appeared in 1910, before these critters. Belief and dread are not wholly absent, but in con the emergence of the Paul Bunyan pseudo-legend. William T. Cox trast to the rest of the world, we engage in hoaxes, pranks, tall tales, wrote a one-page description of each of the twenty bizarre animals. and tomfoolery with our legendary creatures. I have nominated ten Coert DuBois illustrated each on a facing page with poker-faced zoological marvels for the American Hall of Fearsome Critters, se drawings, and the press of Judd and Detweiler in Washington, D.C., lecting them on the basis of longevity, in terms of our short history; issued the forty-seven page book. Cox, who died in 1961 at the age recognition by tale tellers, boosters, and bards; a modicum of cre of 82, graduated from the first class in forestry at the University of dence; and a large dash of extravaganza, American style. Minnesota, served as Minnesota's first State Forester (1911) and Various ingredients have contributed to this domesticated animal first Conservation Commissioner (1931) and conducted a widely kingdom-the medieval bestiary, the Munchausen vein of fanciful read column in The Farmer, as well as writing little books on Bird quadrupeds, explorers' and travelers' tales of New World monsters Stories and Wild Animals ofField and Forest. 5 In his introduction to but these American specimens have reached a special plateau. They Fearsome Creatures, Cox maintained that lumberjacks had devised are no longer creatures out there, in the forests, the rivers, and the these mythical .monsters as part of their imaginary oral lore. He mountains, but creatures within our culture, in our towns, our wrote: county fairs, our family circles. Thrilling taies of adventure are told in camp wherever the First, a word on sources. The folklorist investigating America's logger has entered the wilderness. The lumberjack is an imagi imaginary animals finds a paucity of field-collected texts-a general native being, and a story loses none of its interest as it is carried difficulty with all American folk narrative, as I once heard Ernest and repeated from one camp to another. Stories which I know to Baughman remark. Particularly with these fearsome critters is the have originated on the Penobscot and the Kennebec are told, problem oflocating oral texts accentuated, since they rarely do any somewhat strengthened and improved, in the redwood camps of Humboldt Bay. Yarns originating among the river drivers of the thing; the narrative action is lacking; what counts is the mere exis Ottawa, the St. Croix, and the upper Mississippi are re-spun to tence of these grotesque species, verified in terms of their groups of listening loggers on Vancouver Island. But every lum appearance and habits. So descriptions of the beasts easily take the ber district has its own peculiar tales. Some have their songs '""'~P•.--~= ~<'·---,------·---~~'~-,------~
American Legendary Creatures 7 6 AMERICAN LEGENDARY CREATURES gan, drooling skid grease from the corners of its mouth to accelerate its speed, until it gulps down its prey. A forest ranger once plotted the destruction of a slide-rock bolter, as follows:
A dummy tourist was rigged up with plaid Norfolkjacket, knee breeches, and a guide book to Colorado. It was then filled full of giant powder and fulminate caps and posted in a conspicuous place, where, sure enough, the next day it attracted the attention of a bolter which had been hanging for days on the slope of Liz zard Head. The resulting explosion flattened half the buildings in Rico, which were never rebuilt, and the surrounding hills fattened flocks ofbuzzards the rest of the summer.7
In 1939 Henry H. Tryon produced a volume closely imitating Cox's original comic bestiary, even to the title Fearsome Critters. The author claimed that he had collected logging tales in the camps and on the drives of !!legendary woods varmints" for the past thirty years, and dated his first hearing of one, the tree-squeak, in 1908, The Snoligoster even to remembering how two woods narrators gulled a greenhorn with details about the creature in a back-and-forth sober exchange. Tryon speculates that such tales may have existed for a century or also, and nearly all have mysterious stories or vague rumors of more, although woodsmen who began working in the 1870s and '80s dreadful beasts with which to regale newcomers and frighten told him they did not hear them until the turn of the century. He 6 people unfamiliar with the woods. declares that the Hodag, the tree-squeak, and the Side-Hill Gouger In his little book Cox put on record some of these frightening had been well known in the Northeast seventy years earlier and creatures dreamed up by the lumberjacks. Whether he, or they, or had migrated westward with the logging industry. Many correspon both did most of the imagining, some curious fauna resulted. Cox dents submitted critters to him, several of which he excluded from classified each of the Twenty with mock-Latin taxonomic labels and his book because of their limited range but mentioned in his preface. solemnly presented details of their physiology and predatory traits. Tryon ackno':Vledges his debt to William T. Cox, as indeed he The roperite, found in the Sierra foothills and said by the Digger should since he adapts eleven of Cox's twenty beasts into his own Indians to be the spirits of early Spanish ranchers, half flies, half bestiary of thirty-one alphabetically arranged critters. He also bounds across rugged terrain to pursue and snare its prey, mean thanks Charles E. Brown (whose name he misspells Browne) and while whirring the rattles on its tail. The snoligoster resembles a Lake Shore Kearney (whose book he misspells Hugah). Still heap crocodile but lacks legs or fins save for one long spike on its back on pears to have tapped some oral information and mentions a ! cross-feathered snee, snow snake, and snoligostus. This last presum ably is a variant of Cox's snoligoster but is not described. Likenesses of two of Cox's bestiary appear on a page of illustra tions in Hoaxes captioned ('Improbable quadrupeds: the Whirling Whimpus spinning like a top and the Tripodero on four elongated legs with a tiny tail." They vary considerably from Cox's drawings. Cox's tripodero has but two legs and a thick tail reaching the ground, to give a true tripod effect, while his whirling whimpus depicts a gorilla-like creature on dainty legs lurking behind a tree awaiting a wanderer coming along the path. In addition Mac Dougall's page presents a variant of the sidehill dodger: '(The Rack abore, an offspring of the javelina, is legged for sidehills. There are two types, right and left-handed." Completing the quartet of quad rupeds is the rubberado, a balloon-like animal shown in midair, which nbounces when shot. Anyone who eats it, bounces too." Possi bly the rubberado is a distant kin to Cox's bearlike gumberoo, off whose elastic hide any bullet or missile bounces back at the at tacker. 11 MacDougall lists his source simply as ((Outdoor Life" and provides the accompanying statement: ((Tenderfeet on camping trips The Tripodero are thrilled by the stories old-timers tell them of fabulous beasts. If 12 In a paragraph in his book on Hoaxes in 1940, Curtis MacDougall they existed, some of these creatures would look like this." mentions some mythical timberlands creatures. Those also de A third comic bestiary of 1976 following the format of Cox and scribed by Cox include the whirling whimpus, which according to Tryon, but adapted for a younger audience, carries the title Kickle MacDougall ((spins like a top so rapidly that its physical character Snifters and Other Fearsome Critters, Collected from American istics cannot be determined." According to Cox, who locates the Folklore, by Alvin Schwartz, author of several comparable works of beast in the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee, it resembles a juvenile folklore, all illustrated with comical line drawings by Glen gorilla save for tiny hind legs, on which it stands at a bend in the Rounds, who earlier illustrated his own Paul Bunyan book. This trail and whirls until it becomes invisible, whereupon any chance edition presents simplified texts in large type with the overcute passer-by, human or animal, who crosses its path will be ((deposited drawings frequently on the same pages as the text. Schwartz com in the form of syrup or varnish upon the huge paws of the whim mendably provides a statement on ('Notes and Sources" indicating pus."9 MacDougall also cites the tripodero and agrees with Cox that , the provenience of his twenty-seven creatures, and a useful ((Bibli 13 it has telescopic legs like a photographer's tripod, which it extends ography" of twenty entries. He candidly acknowledges: ('Except for to see above the chaparral in the California foothills and, sighting a passage from 'The Raggedy Man' [by James Whitcomb Riley] all 14 game with its large snout, fires clay quids from its left jaw demolish references have been adapted and many have been embellished." ing its victim. The tripodero then contracts its legs and bores From Cox to Tryon to Schwartz the ferocity of the fearsome crit through the brush to its prey. 10 Not mentioned by Cox are the rub ters is noticeably softened, and we may assume thereby the closer berado and the rackabore (see below), as well as a series of critters relation to oral tradition in Cox, who is not only the first but also that MacDougall merely enumerates: the wampus cat, tree-squeak, the toughest. Thus the alligator-like snoligoster in Cox reappears 10 AMERICAN LEGENDARY CREATURES American Legendary Creatures 11 neither in Tryon nor in Schwartz nor anywhere else in the printed sources, for reasons clear to a reader of the following paragraph: Mr. Inman F. Eldredge, of De Funiak Springs, Florida, while hunting for an outlaw negro in the swamps, had a most unusual experience. He caught sight of the negro, dead and impaled upon what at first appeared to be a slender cypress knee, but which presently began to move away. It was then seen to be the spike on a snoligoster's back. Eldredge's first impulse was to shoo.t the strange beast, but upon second thought he concluded that it was doing a good work and was entitled to live on. The very report of such a creature inhabiting the swamps would deter evil-doers from venturing into these wild places to avoid their pursuers and escape justice.15 The facing illustration shows the hapless runaway lying face up wards on the snoligoster's back with the spike protruding through his midriff. Hardly stuff for kids, or for many adults. While Schwartz does borrow the slide-rock bolter from Cox, the later writer substitutes spiders for the parties of tourists that Cox's bolter enjoys gulping down. To the three comparable bestiaries of Cox, Tryon, and Schwartz The Squonk we may join the unillustrated eight-page booklet of Charles E. hill. legs grow lo nger than h'Is uphill. ones; this rabbit-lik . Brown, Paul Bunyan Natural History (1935), recording seventeen IS so-called because < The Hodag scientists today devoutly believe in the reality of Bigfoot. The first The Hugag discoverer of Oscar the Turtle of Churubusco devoted all his ener gies to tracking down the great turtle and confounding his skeptics. The comic bestiaries and scattered articles about imaginary ani Those who fled from the guyuscutus acknowledged his existence by mals provide but one type of source for the fearsome critters I have their flight, and visitors to county fairs gawked at the hodag. nominated for American zoomythological stardom. All ten creatures 3. They have in most cases endured for a considerable period of selected meet the following criteria: American history. From the colonial era come the sea serpent 1. They enjoy a life in oral anecdote and tradition. Although the (known before the discovery of America), the Hoopsnake, the Wind field-recorded texts desired by the folklorist are all too frequently ham Frogs. Julius Caesar described the animal that couldn't lie wanting, strong evidence exists through paraphrase, reference, and down. Ante-bellum sketches inform us about the Guyuscutus and literary versions of collectable verbal forms. Veteran woo~~men the Sidehill Beast. Eugene Shepard launched the Hodag at the tum gulled tenderfeet with tales of imaginary animals; sober citizens of the present centu:ry. Bigfoot has been sighted since the 1920s. repeated accounts of monsters sighted; laughing narrators relat~d Only Oscar the Turtle and the J ackalope are youngsters. episodes of practical jokes and hoaxes involving the ((fearsome crit 4. They have become personalized and institutionalized. Our ten ters." For lack of sufficient oral vigor Paul Bunyan and Babe the critters possess charisma and folk--or pseudo-folk-appeal. Other Blue Ox, for example, fail to qualify. ~ontending beasts in Cox's bestiary have exerted no comparable 2. They inspire belief and conviction as well as hilarity and tom- Impact on the American imagination. Chambers of Commerce have foolery. Greenhorns accept the existence of the side.hill dod~er, the adopted Bigfoot, Oscar the Turtle, the J ackalope, the Hodag. The hodag, the hugag, and their kin. The residents of Windham In 1784 Free Public Library of Windham memorializes the Bullfrogs. Mark did mistake thirsty frogs for marauding Indians. Colonial settlers_ Twain adapted the Guyuscutus. Tale tellers all over the country credited the powers of the hoopsnake and the sea serpent. Some Yarn about the Sidehill Beast and the Hoopsnake. Newspaper sto- 14 AMERICAN LEGENDARY CREATURES ries feature sea serpents and lake monsters. By contrast the rattle snake, for instance, which shares with the Hoopsnake tall tales ONE about its sting causing wood or iron to swell, has not acquired folk popularity nor an individual personality, for the rattlesnake indu bitably exists. 5. They are all fanciful-mythical if you will. No one has yet captured an authentic specimen of any .of the fearsome critters. An exception may be made for the Windham Frogs, but their blowup into an invading army took on a fictional quality. Yet all possess their own reality, for all have been seen or heard and talked about and have become household familiars. ' 6. They all have their comical side, presented in spoof; gag, prank, and whopper, which endear them to American publics. No such hu morous endearment yet characterizes the UFOs, who remain out there in space, figures of not all that close encounters, treated still too reverently to tickle the American palate. Only two of my ten appear in Cox, and one of these deviates wholly from the tradition elsewhere recorded. The roperite, only N words of a local antiquarian, Lillian Marsh Higbee, an army critter to make all four bestiaries, does not make my ten. Four of th~ of thirsty frogs who terrorized the inhabitants of Windham, Con my ten do score triples in the bestiary match-ups. l necticut, one June night in 1754, ((rendered this old-fashioned town Collectively they support my theory for American (i.e., United famous for all time."19 The frogs put Windham on the map. At the States) folklore, that the special conditions of American history time of the episode a thousand souls resided in the frontier village, have shaped the character of American folklore. In place of a lower and all lived in apprehension of French and Indian attack. Colonel mythology we have recourse to a comic bestiary. Eliphalet Dyer had just raised a regiment to join the British expe dition against Crown Point in New York, and other citizens had taken the field with General Israel Putnam to battle the ((savages." In this atmosphere occurred the event customarily alluded to as the Frog Fight, or the Frog Fright, which was first recounted in extenso in 1781 by the Reverend Samuel Peters in his folklore-filled General History of Connecticut, as follows: Strangers are very much terrified at the hideous noise made on summer evenings by the vast number of frogs in the brooks . and ponds. There are about thirty different voices among them, some of which resemble the bellowing of a bull. The owls and whippoorwills complete the rough concert, which may be heard several miles. Persons accustomed to such serenades are not dis turbed by them at their proper stations; but one night in July, 1758 [sic], the frogs of an arti~~ial pond, three miles square, and about five from Windham, finding the water dried up, left the 15