(Image: Ben Harris with his white mare and his dog Jimmy Britt, ca.1916.)
The Man Who Could Dodge Lightning: Tall Tales of the Sierra as told by Ben Harris (1850-1933)
Collected by Joseph E. Doctor, edited by Mary Lou Lyon
From the Introduction:
I have been waiting for years for someone not as lazy as I to produce what I believe to be the classic folklore of the Sierra Nevada of California, the tales told by Ben Harris. Ben was a resident of the Three Rivers-Mineral King-Lemon Cove area of California for fifty years or more. By his own telling, he was a remarkable man. His eyesight was keener, his hearing the most acute, his dog the meanest, his horse the fastest, his gun the shootin’est…in short, in whatever category the competition was, he and his were the best.
His greatest boast was that he was “the biggest liar in the Sierra,” and by liar, he meant the best teller of tall tales. He resented any implication that he would lie for private gain or for devious reasons. He was, in his everyday life, an honest man. He would cheat no one.
Where did this strange relic of the Mountain Man come from? In their society, the teller of tall tales was a person of value who provided entertainment in the long nights at the rendezvous along the trail. Jim Bridger, probably the best known of the Mountain Men after he established his trading post on the Oregon-California Trail, was often mentioned in the correspondence of men who stopped by on their way west, as “the biggest liar I ever heard.” He delighted in feeding the tenderfeet who passed his way the most fantastic accounts of his exploits, including the famous story of the glass mountain, so clear that he took several shots at a grazing antelope before discovering that the animal was immune because it was on the opposite side of the perfectly clear glass mountain.
Another was his yarn about campling at the head of the “eight hour echo canyon,” where he shouted “time to get up boys” as he bedded down his brigade for the night only to have the waking message come back at the proper time in the morning.
Read more. (The entire book is available online).