Great American Folklore: Legends, Tales, Ballads, and Superstitions from All Across America

We all grew up thinking this was great stuff ( Wyatt Earp and all), but Native American studies changed my perspective some! Some lies get retold so many times that they become history: such are many of the tall ( and some short) tales in this book from growing America. People were European when they hit the coasts. The land and killing Indians for it made them hard and set them to drinkin'. Language like "Dag nab it" and "darn" was invented to put off Auld Licht preachers. People who could make biscuits from scratch fixins had butter on their green beans too... Each place and small group of people marked important happenings with lies about it: the more important the happenings the bigger the lies, so that trains and steamboats rated right up there with cowboys and gunslingers. These stories are just one way of looking at what really happened.