James Baquet

America used to love “big man tales,” stories of larger-than-life figures: some entirely fictional, others based on legendary exploits of real men, and most associated with a particular profession. The lumberjacks had Paul Bunyan, the frontiersmen had Davy Crockett, and the cowboys had Pecos Bill.

The infant Bill, they used to tell around the campfire after the cows were bedded down, fell out of his family’s wagon near the Pecos River in Texas (hence his name), and was raised by coyotes. Maybe that’s why, as one song about him puts it, “He was the roughest, toughest critter, never known to be a quitter, ‘cause he never had no fear of man nor beast.”

Many of his exploits were “etiological”; that is, they explain how something came to be.

For example, a group of rustlers once stole a herd of cattle belonging to Bill. When he caught up to them, he hit them so hard that he knocked the gold fillings out of their teeth; “That’s the reason why there’s gold them thar hills” (a common expression in the prospecting days).

Another time, he and his horse Widow-Maker (so-called because anyone who tried to ride him besides Bill would be killed) got lost in the desert, and nearly died of thirst. So he got a stick and dug a watercourse that became the Rio Grande, the largest river in Texas (and the state’s border with Mexico).

Water — or the lack of it — figures largely in stories of the Old West, and Bill’s tales are no exception. Once a drought struck Texas, so Bill rode out to California and roped a raincloud, dragging it back to his home state. There was so much water in the cloud that the excess formed the Gulf of Mexico.

Likewise, he tamed a “raging cyclone,” riding it like a bucking bronco while hand-rolling and smoking a homemade cigarette. In the end, the “ornery wind” was nothing more than a breeze.

In another adventure, he chased some Indians so ferociously that their war paint came off, coloring Arizona’s “Painted Desert.” And in the end, he shot out all the stars except one, leaving in the sky the “emblem of the Lone Star Texas State” — which has a single star on its flag.

Vocabulary:

1. swirling wind, like a tornado;

2. searching for precious metals in the desert;

3. loggers;

4. horse that tries to throw a man off;

5. men who steal cows;

6. symbol;

7. disagreeable; stubborn;

8. time of little or no rain;

9. creature;

10. men who live on the edge of civilized regions

1. cyclone; 2. prospecting;

3. lumberjacks; 4. bucking bronco; 5. rustlers; 6. emblem;

7. ornery; 8. drought; 9. critter; 10. frontiersmen