Folklore

MANY OF THE MOST FAMOUS FIGURES in American folklore believed to be mythical were actually real, but hardly anybody seems prepared to believe it. It has been pointed out repeatedly that there was a real railroad engineer named Casey Jones who, at the turn of the century, did indeed courageously sacrifice his own life to save the lives of his passengers. But ever since the ballad about him became part of the national folklore shortly after his death, he has seemed, and seems destined to remain, a creature of fiction. John Henry has also been identified in numerous scholarly works as a real black railroad worker, and in 1940 he was even the subject of a play starring Paul Robeson specifically designed “to disinter him for the Broadway stage.” But all anyone recalls is the legend about a fictional man who died trying to beat a steam drill, a story that may or may not be true. The fact that the story was based on a real-life figure of formidable physical powers is forgotten.1

Mrs. O’Leary probably wished sometimes that she were just a fictional character and that the Chicago fire were a figment of someone’s imagination. But she actually lived, she actually had a cow, and the fire that burned down much of Chicago in 1871 actually started in her barn. All that is unknown is how the fire started. Some newspapers at the time blamed the cow, which was accused of kicking over a lantern because it supposedly hadn’t been milked. Others blamed Mrs. O’Leary, who was said to have started the fire in anger because her relief payments had been cut off. Unfortunately for this explanation, there is no evidence she was angry, her payments hadn’t been cut off—and she wasn’t on relief. All that is known for sure is that the fire started at the barn behind her house at 137 De Koven Street.2

John Chapman, aka Johnny Appleseed, not only lived, he really did tramp through the Ohio Valley planting trees. But he wasn’t poor, he wasn’t a hermit, and he didn’t, as alleged in one folktale, plant seeds on the grave of a sweetheart in such a way that when they matured, they spelled the phrase “Apple Blossoms.” According to historian Richard Dorson, Johnny was basically a well-liked nurseryman whose chief “contribution lay in moving his nurseries west to keep abreast of the receding frontier.” He may very well have liked to walk barefoot, but the fact is he probably didn’t need to; he was so successful that by the end of his life he had accumulated more than twelve hundred acres of land. As for his general appearance, nothing is known for sure. But by one account, given credence by Dorson, he dressed just about like everybody else on the frontier, down to Indian moccasins on his feet.3

Uncle Sam was a real person, too, by the name of Sam Wilson and, as fate would have it, one of Johnny Appleseed’s boyhood friends. Wilson didn’t wear striped pants and didn’t have a long white beard. But he did wear a top hat and in his own day became a symbol of the United States government. The identification with the government came during the War of 1812, when Wilson began supplying meat to troops stationed around Troy, New York. Meat sent to the soldiers was stamped “U.S.” for United States. But when a government inspector came along to check on the meat, he was told by an imaginative worker in Wilson’s store that the initials stood for “Uncle Sam,” Wilson’s nickname. Soon all federal supplies were said to belong to “Uncle Sam,”

For many years scholars discounted claims that Uncle Sam had been named in honor of Sam Wilson, but in 1961 a scholar discovered an 1830 newspaper which gave credence to the story. The newspaper quoted a soldier from the War of 1812 who claimed to have been at Wilson’s store the day the inspector was told about the initials. In the early 1960’s the U.S. Congress officially proclaimed Wilson the original Uncle Sam.4

Just as there are real people falsely believed to be mythical, so there are mythical figures falsely thought to be real. Among these is Mother Goose. In her case, belief was seemingly substantiated by a wealth of detail. It was said that Mother Goose was actually Elizabeth (Foster) Goose, that she was born in Boston in 1665, that she married Isaac Goose at age twenty-seven, and that she reared sixteen children, six her own and ten her husband’s. Adding to the realism was the claim that her songs were published by a characteristically spiteful son-in-law, Thomas Fleet, with an unflattering picture of an openmouthed, gooselike creature on the title page.

As it turns out, there really was an Elizabeth Goose, but she had nothing to do with the famous nursery rhymes; the Mother Goose rhymes were the work of Charles Perrault, the same Frenchman who invented the tales of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty.

Perrault didn’t coin the term “Mother Goose,” but it was his book, Tales of My Mother Goose, published in 1696—97, which apparently popularized the phrase, first in France, then, in 1777, in translation in Britain. The story linking Elizabeth Goose to Mother Goose, in contrast, didn’t come about until the mid-nineteenth century, when one of her descendants claimed in a magazine article that her songs had been published in a book printed in 1719. The book, alas, can’t be found; scholars say it never existed.5

Paul Bunyan wasn’t a real person, and no one thinks he was; but most people are under the mistaken impression he was a creation of folklore. In fact, he is one of the prime examples of what Dorson has called “fakelore”—an ersatz creation developed to meet the American need for instant homegrown folk heroes. While he is said to have “a trickle of oral tradition” behind him, the basic facts about Bunyan were made up out of the blue by writers and advertisers—not by plain folks and not a long time ago either. A hundred years ago no one had ever heard of Paul Bunyan.

The story which made Bunyan famous, in fact, was created by an advertising man, W. B. Laughead, in the 1920’s for the purpose of selling products for the Red River Lumber Company. As such, Paul is about as authentic a folk hero as Mr. Clean or the Jolly Green Giant—that is to say, not very authentic at all, unless it be held that folklore can emanate from an elite, a birth that doesn’t seem logical. Laughead himself confessed that when he created the Bunyan stories, all he had in mind was selling lumber. “We were not thinking of the Paul Bunyan material as literature,” he later acknowledged, “but merely as a vehicle for advertising.” A sample suggests he was telling the truth. In one story, published in 1922, Bunyan and friends come across like accountants at a budget hearing. “Babe, the big blue ox,” is said to constitute “Paul Bunyan’s assets and liabilities.” When cost sheets are figured on Babe, Johnny Inkslinger discovers that “upkeep and overhead” are “expensive but the charges for operation and depreciation” are “low and the efficiency” is very high.6

Of all our folk heroes, Santa Claus is probably the most familiar and the most misunderstood. To begin with, the name is strictly an Americanism; in Europe he was known for centuries as St. Nicholas. The change occurred when the Dutch, spelling his name “Sint Nikolass,” imported Nicholas to America. Somewhere along the way the name became “Sinterklass” and finally “Santa Claus.”

More surprising, Santa Claus didn’t always arrive at Christmas. In Europe he showed up on December 6, as he did in the early years in America. He became specifically associated with Christmas only when Americans of British ancestry adopted him from the Dutch.

Most interesting of all, Santa Claus didn’t always look the way he does now. The Dutch made him out to look like Fred Astaire, thin, tall, and dignified. Later, in the early 1800’s, Washington Irving imagined Santa as a bulky man who smoked a pipe and wore baggy pants. In a drawing in Harper’s Weekly in 1858 he doesn’t even have a beard. Not until the Civil War did he begin to look the way we think he should, thanks to a cartoon drawn by Thomas Nast.

Santa hasn’t changed much since then, but he got Rudolph, the red-nosed reindeer, only in 1939, when Montgomery Ward came up with the idea.7