The steep riverine valley I live within, on the west slope of the Cascades in Oregon, has a particular human and natural history. Though I’ve been here for thirty years, I am able to convey almost none of it. It is not out of inattentiveness. I’ve wandered widely within the drainages of its eponymous river, the McKenzie; and I could offer you a reasonably complete sketch of its immigrant history, going back to the 1840s. Before then, Tsanchifin Kalapuya, a Penutian-speaking people, camped in these mountains, but they came up the sixty-mile long valley apparently only in summer, to pick...

To a boy entering Theodore Roosevelt Grade School in 1949, there was no history, racism, justice, or culture in Burlington, Washington. For first graders, the town seemed to be magically defined by Burlington Hill, which rose above the flat Skagit Valley like a wooded turtle shell—just across the railroad tracks, just north of the school, just north of our home in the Presbyterian manse. No one lived on Burlington Hill. After school, my brother and I and our grade school friends would scrabble up the rocky trails and play for hours. Under the green and shadowy canopy of alder,...

I grew up with one foot in Salt Lake City and one foot in a western agricultural community, Bluffdale, Utah. As a boy I remember visiting our doctor’s office. I can picture the waiting room vividly. Cheap prints hung on the wall. One was a picture of a marsh, duck hunters waiting behind a blind as a V of ducks flew overhead. The other was of a Conestoga wagon, with pioneer family, rolling across a desert landscape. As an adult I came back to that same office. The old prints had come down. The wall color had changed, the furniture...

Since about 1991, I have been building an archival collection of commercially printed Catholic devotional ephemera—holy pictures, prayers, novenas, and other aids to prayer and meditation that are produced in vast quantities for the use of Catholics around the world. The main collection, obtained in the Southwestern United States and Mexico, now numbers over fifteen hundred items. (Smaller collections have been made in Bavaria, Spain, Portugal, Goa, and Sri Lanka.) All the material is housed in the Southwest Folklore Center (SWFC) of the University of Arizona Library. These devotional aids are used in several ways by traditional Roman Catholics....

In 1916, Hubert Eaton became the manager of a fifty-five acre rural cemetery in Tropico, California, called Forest Lawn. It was on New Year’s Day of the following year that Eaton received the vision that led him to transform this little, failing cemetery into one of America’s most famous cemeteries, second perhaps only to Arlington National Cemetery.

Today over 250,000 “loved ones” are entombed, interred, and inurned within the sacred grounds of Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale. Twenty-five thousand weddings have been performed in its three churches, and more than half a million tourists visit it annually. Prior to the...

In 1959, Ruth Handler of Mattel—inspired by paper dolls and a German sex doll—created an adult doll for little girls and named her Barbie. According to Mattel, the doll’s full name is Barbie Millicent Roberts, and she attended Willows High School in Willows, Wisconsin, and then went to “State College” (Robins 1989, 26). Barbie M. Roberts has come a long way since those early days. In 1996 Mattel’s net sales reached $3.8 billion, and Barbie dolls represented nearly one-half of these sales (Sarasohn-Kahn 1998, 1). If all the Barbies sold as of 1997 were lined up head to...

Is there anything significant left to say about tall tales? The apparent simplicity of the genre and the vast literature already written about it, some of which will be addressed below, might lead one to think that the answer must be no. Yet, as is the case with folklore generally, just when we think our “simple” subject has been exhausted, we discover new layers of meaning tucked away in a tale, in silence, or in newly emerging uses.

In this essay I will argue that in spite of the attention scholars have paid to tall tales, a fascinating function remains...

Jesse James, born to Robert James and Zerelda Cole James in September of 1847 and killed by Robert Ford in April of 1882, is perhaps the most famous western outlaw in the United States. After the Civil War—during which he served for a time with Quantrill’s men, as did his brother Frank—he and his brother became infamous as bank and train robbers, leading a gang which included, at times, such other well-known outlaws as the Younger brothers and the Miller brothers. There is substantial historical documentation for the major events of Jesse’s life,¹ but this factual carrer is...

For most of my adult life, I have been haunted by a story. Not so much a story, really, as the possibilities of one, lurking (or so I think) in a tangle of episodes, anecdotes, allusions, and conjectures that I’ve been carrying around in my head for years, until the urge to find a narrative order in the stuff, or impose one on it, has overcome my skepticism.

Lest I come off here at the outset sounding like a latter-day Ancient Mariner, or Conradian Marlow figure, forever doomed to seek the meaning of an experience by compulsively inflicting narrations of...

This story, which we are calling “Raven and the Tide,” was recorded by Nora Marks Dauenhauer from her mother, Emma Marks, in fall 1972 at the family home in Juneau. Other family members were present, including Nora’s father, Willie Marks, who enters into critical discussion at two points. Emma Marks, born in 1913, first heard this story growing up on the Italio River, a remote area between Dry Bay and Yakutat. For a full biography of Emma, see our Haa Kusteeeyí, Our Culture: Tlingit Life Stories (1994, 378–406).

Like the other texts and translations at the heart of our...

Imagine growing up wild and untamed in a wild and untamed world on the banks of a river in a rural settlement of the great uncut. Picture yourself sitting a moment and smelling the acrid sweetness of the woods, the distinctive odors marking the seasons—dank, damp moss, the spring skunk cabbage, the wildflowers springing up loyal and faithful season after season, rain dripping from fir needles. Stop and listen. You can almost hear the sound of silence broken only by drops of water falling on salal leaves, taking their little bows in turn, gathering courage and girth enough to...

As more and more examples of women’s non-traditional literature—letters, diaries, reminiscences—become available in both published and unpublished form, historians, folklorists, and literary scholars alike can begin to understand more fully the nature of the relationships between women on the western frontier, as they have been articulated in these various genres. These previously ignored pieces of writing provide us with an intimate, self-revelatory perspective on the western experience as it was lived by women. Through a comparison of female relationships on the ranching frontiers of Texas and in close-knit Mormon communities in Arizona and Utah, this essay will explore...

Although the story of Mormon folklore is considered by many scholars to be inextricably connected with the story of the American West, to read either of these stories as an inevitable part of the other is to read both of them wrong. But associating Mormons with the West is only one of the hindrances to the proper interpretation of Mormon folklore. Over the years such interpretation has been impaired by two separate emphases in folklore and historical studies—first, by a lingering adherence to Robert Redfield’s notions of the little (or folk) tradition versus the great (or urban) tradition and,...

From my childhood on, I have heard people remark, “Indians never forget. They’re always bringing up things from the past.” Growing up with one foot in Anglo culture and the other in Southern Oregon coastal Indian culture, I used to wonder about that and felt a little anxious because it seemed to be true. Yet at the same time I knew that the past should not be forgotten but should be carefully told over and over again. Sometimes—as in the telling of stories about Talapus (Old Man Coyote) and about his power (tamanawis) that could be used to make...

On 26 May 1996, two demolitions experts from Morrison-Knudsen set charges under the gigantic stacks of the former Bunker Hill smelter in Kellogg, Idaho. A contest was held to determine who would push the button and send the stacks plummeting to the ground. Lining the freeway, front porches, and rooftops of the denuded hillsides were thousands of people who came to watch the spectacle. Among them were two important factions in the community: One faction comprised those who were there to cheer the destruction of a corporate and industrial symbol that to many of the mining and union families of...

Gypsy Slim taught me why each town’s outcast eccentric is its patron saint. Until he disappeared, Slim camped by the downtown library in Portland. His plastic tarp stretched between two shopping carts and the stone bench carved with the name of that rebel from the Enlightenment, Laurence Sterne. When citizens would clip along past him, haughty with respectability, Gypsy Slim would jive them with an easy line of talk, until he had them stalled long enough for a real earful: “I don’t care if it’s family, friend, house, job, creed, ethnic group, country, institution, or sex—they all try to...