The men around the corner store at home were forever telling stories
about the big yarns that Were told in the West. One of the favorites
was that ancient one of the Western town that was so healthy they had to
kill a man to start a graveyard.
Having been brought up on this tradition of Western yarns, I have been
surprised since living here never to have heard a single story that
didn’t sound perfectly reasonable. But it has dawned on me recently that
the “Yarns” are true. Therefore, they are no longer yarns, but facts.
Here is an oil boom story I heard first-hand the other day. I believe
it, but you couldn’t get those men around the corner store to believe
it--.
It was in a dusty town where everyone rushed in to make quick money and
never mind about the main street even if they did have to plough through
dust to their knees. Then one day a heavy rain came that made the street
one slough of soft oozy clay which no one could cross.
Then enters the hero. Even while they stood dismayed, gazing at each
other across the clay, he appeared with a mud sled and took them all
across for 50 cents a passenger and $1 if you had a bundle.
Now, I believe it. Didn’t I see the man who had been there and paid his
four-bits to cross? Imagine, if you can, though, trying to make those
Yankees around the corner store believe that there was a town where one
had to pay 50 cents to cross a narrow country road in a mud sled.
I believed a man who told me a story down in Kern County last summer. We
were riding over the desert and I asked the stage driver the name of
a low yellow bush that grows down there. He was an interesting fellow,
that stage driver, who had been a buccaroo all his life and apparently
knew all about the sage brush country. And when he didn’t know he was
not lacking in an answer. I like a man like that. Answer, I say, whether
you know or not.
He said with great assurance that the little, low, yellow bush was
“Mexican saddle blanket” or “Tinder bush,” this last because it burns
like tinder in the fall of the year.
“Why, that bush is so dry,” he said, “that once when I lighted it to
cook my bacon for breakfast it traveled so fast that by the time my
bacon was cooked I was five miles from camp.”
I laughed--I couldn’t help it when I imagined that six-footer traveling
across the desert with a frying pan over that low bush. I laughed
because it was so real to me, but he misunderstood, and said so sort of
hurt, “Don’t you believe me?”
And I told him I did. And I did. And I do. Five miles isn’t a great
distance to travel over the desert after one’s bacon.