Show 1 ball bad man all by eben given from alfret Il fret audacity american legendary berof by frank shay courteny the company by ELMO SCOTT WATSON 1 OR many many years americana had to look to european sources for a certain type of imaginative chave tales to the german grimm and the danish andersen for their fairy tales and to the greeks the romans and the scan for their legends and myths it has been only within recent years that they have als covered that their native land Is rich in folk lore some of which they may have learned as it was passed along by word of mouth but little of which has heretofore been collected and published in book form so the recent publication of frank shays heres audacity american legendary heroes by the macaulay company as an event of importance to those who want made in america myths and legends in the introduction mr shay tells how amer leans like other people create their giants own image and endow them with powers greater than their own tt e are an in du nation therefore our heroes are auda clous industrialists in the north and west the hero Is paul bunyan the lumberjack in west virginia he Is again a lumberjack but his name Is tony beaver in the southwest he becomes a cowboy and changes his name to pecos dili in virginia he Is a negro a steel driving man john henry by name in the oil fields of texas and oklahoma he Is a rotary well digger and calls himself kemp morgan on ahe railroads he becomes a mighty engineer and has won fame as jones on the old windjammers he Is still the same mighty super anan but his alias leold Stor malong old Storma longs full name was alfred bull top Stor malong and when he signed his initials on the ships log for his first skipper that worthy looked him over and A B S able bodied sailor by your size and strength they should measure the balenta of all other sea men As tor his size the bailers bailors disagree some eay that he was fourteen fathoms tall and others that he was jes four fathoms from the deck to the bridge of his nose and be was fearless too one day his fellow sailors pull up the anchor an octopus was wrapped around it and was holding it fast to the bottom of the ocean over the side went old Stor malong there was a terrific struggle under the water and then he emerged triumphant after the anchor was bately shipped somebody asked old Stor malong what he had done to the octopus jos tied his arms in knots double bends take him a month 0 sundays to untie cm but Stor malong was never satisfied he never could find a ship big enough tor him uell finally he signed on board the courser later when a new man was taken on the first thing te saw when he hit the deck was a stable ull of horses for the courser was so big that nil officers and men on watch were mounted on horses and rode about their duties on them man alive her rigging was so immense that no living man could take her in at a single glance her masts the clouds aad the top sections were on hinges so they could be bent over to let the sun and moon pass her sails were so big that the builders had to take all the able bodied sall makers out in the sahara desert to find room to sew em kemp morgan the kejs oil dialler dil ller was like old in that he too had to put hinges in three different places on big derrick eo that it could b folded up to let the sun and M hy JC hii so hagli that it took thirty mea going up our down a man on top and a ai faw as asawa awu I 1 r TONY bhaer bryna Vry na buckar JOHN HENRY man man on duty hen he brought in his well it spouted so high they had to put a root on it because st peter and all the angels were raisin all h 1 about the oil that was shoot ln through the floor of heaven it took ten dais for the oil to reach the top and then it rained down for three weeks but super man that he was not all ot morgan s wells brou glit in oil occasionally he got a duster a dry hole but did he abandon it as did kotlier dr illers not kamp morgan 1 aie knew that no kansas farmer could ever dag a post hole in bis hard bottom soil he would get his hands around his duster hole and pull it up four feel at a time saw it ff and ship aitto kansas ask any kansas farmer what he thinks of the kemp morgan portable post boles but kemp morgan unset the only lone star product of note there was pecos bill who was lost by his parents when he was a year old and grew up among the cat amounts and coyotes one day he wandered into the golden swan sa loon and there met a cowboy who told him ot the joys of cow punching so bill decided to quit being a coyote put on human clothes it took three coats and two pairs of trousers pieced out with three or tour blankets and pieces of cowhide to cover him and became a cowboy no horse was strong enough to carry him so he caught a huge grizzly bear and broke it to ride and 0 course he became the greatest cowboy of them all he could outshoot any other cowboy he could outride any other cowboy and he could out drink any other cowboy once bill rode a kansas cyclone lie rode it through three states until they got to california and when the cyclone saw it coulden couldn t throw him it rained out from under him and that was what washed out the grand canyon bill came down with a mighty thud in california and the spot where he landed Is now known as death valley a big hole in the ground SOO feet below sea leel another mighty texan was strap buckner who w ent to that state with the first party of settlers led by stephen F austin strap had the pleas ant custom of knocking men down with a blow between the eyes which he would do in the most friendly and courteous manner and with no in of harming them he knocked down his friends and his enemies he knocked down indians and grizzly bears and wildcats and buffalo but the greatest tight in which he ever engaged was his battle with the devil and in that fight for once in his life he was defected since strap buckner vas a heavy drinker the stories about him are something in the nature of moral allegories and the devil with whom he fought and by whom he was worsted was the demon rum of him mr shay says strap buckner joins the great army of av engers lie will be likened to the giant karaen Sa raen who had the strength of thirty men and whose cudgel was the solid trunk of an oak tree the tower of pisa lost its perpendicularity by tha weight of giant leaning against it whole books have been written about paul banyan the super lumberjack so of course he gets considerable space in heres audacity I 1 most of the facts about his youth and his logging operations on the big onion river in michigan are well known but some of the other facts about his life as given by mr shay seem to be new for instance after he used babe the blue or babe you remember measured forty axe handles and a plug of star tobacco between the eyes to straighten out a winding logging road paul discovered that he had fourteen miles of road left over so he rolled up alie fourteen miles and sold it to the city of chicago for a boulevard and it Is one of the shameful things about that wicked city that they call it michigan boulevard in honor of the state from which it came and not pau aunan boulevard in honor of the greatest lumberjack that ever lived I 1 then there was the time that jim hill the builder of the great northern railroad decided to build a barbed wire fence along the right of way to keep the tramps off his trains so he gave the job of building the asoo hiie fence to paul bunyan he soon found that it was going to take too long to get through with the work so he sent up to montana to a man who had trained gophers for two thousand post hole dig gang gophers then he sent an order to another roan who in beavers and ordered five hundred of these animals he set the beavers to work cutting six inch trees into six foot lengths and set the gophers to work digging holes the gophers were innocent and when one had finished digging big hole he prepared to make it his home then paul would come along with a post in one hand drag the gopher out ot his hole with one hand and shove the post in there was nothing tor the poor gopher to do but to begin work on a new home the gophers got pretty mad but who cares what a gopher thinks paul and be got his fence done in plenty of time As for tony beaver in west virginia they will tell you that tony who carries on his logging operations on eel river Is as great a lumberman as paul bunyan but logging his only interest he was also a grower of the biggest the world which were so big that by whittling out the insides Ins ldes cutting doors and windows and building fire places and allowing the rinds to dry out in the sun they made wonderful houses As for the other super americans one Is black and the other Is red there Is john henry the steel driving man who was so fast with his 12 pound hammer that he was known to wear out two handles in one shift and he always had to have a boy with a pall of cold water standing by so that he could keep his hammer cool but when steam driven drills came on the market john henry declared that such new tangled inventions vent ions were not necessary he said he could beat a steam drill and in a contest that was specially arranged he did beat it but he killed himself in doing it for after the contest was over john henry laid down ats himmah an he died then there Is the hercules of the american indians of longfellow wrote in hiawatha it was who filled his pipe wah tobacco kindled it with a bolt of lightning and then emptied the live coals into the sea for three days he did this and on the fourth day there rose up an island which Is now known as nantucket island ott the coast or massa chu this and many other marvels aid the very strong man be the strongest of all mortals by union |