When two companies of Texas drovers would meet on the trail, they’d put their best man forward in a competition. If you’re guessing the contest involved marksmanship, you don’t know the old Texans. The contest involved lying.
Maybe a better word would be “fiction.”
J. Frank Dobie, in his essay “A Preface on Authentic Liars,” makes the distinction between authentic and inauthentic liars.
A pulp Western writer who writes that a Texas cowhand had blankets on his saddle in August is just a liar. Don’t look for redeeming qualities.
On the other hand, Dobie loved to tell about the cowboy who saw a blue Norther coming and tried to outrun it. He ran his horse hard and beat the storm by a head. In the barn, the cowboy wiped sweat off his horse’s nose and mane and treated the hindquarters for frostbite.
A lie about cowboys and their horses, perhaps, but the gospel truth about Texas weather.
• Sources: The essay is in J. Frank Dobie, Prefaces; Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1975, pp. 1-25. If the story sounds familiar, I’m guilty of telling it more than once (“February in Texas,” Feb. 16, 2022). Guilty, also, because I’ve been thinking about fiction.
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