We hand these stories to children as if they’re fun. The giant lumberjack with the blue ox who dug the Grand Canyon by accident. The gentle wanderer scattering apple seeds across the frontier. The steel-driving man who raced a steam drill and won. Big, warm, national bedtime stories about how the continent got built.
Read them as an adult and they’re something else entirely. They’re the propaganda of a conquest, and in at least one case they’re a death that the country decided to celebrate rather than mourn. American tall tales are not innocent. They’re the folklore a nation invents to feel good about what it did to get where it is, and the horror in them is right there on the surface once you stop reading them to a five-year-old.
What the John Henry Ballad May Preserve
Start with the darkest one, because it’s the one we’ve sanded smoothest. The John Henry ballad is sung as a triumph — the mighty man who took his hammer against the steam drill and drove more steel than the machine, proving flesh could beat the coming industrial age.
He wins the race. And then he dies. “He laid down his hammer and he died.” That’s the ending. We sing it to kids as a victory and the victory is a corpse.
There’s serious historical work — most notably Scott Reynolds Nelson’s — arguing that John Henry was a real man: likely a Black laborer, quite possibly a convict leased out under the brutal post-Civil-War system that worked prisoners to death on railroad and tunnel projects. The Big Bend Tunnel on the Chesapeake and Ohio line, in the 1870s, is the leading candidate for where he swung his hammer. Convict laborers in those tunnels died in numbers, from rockfalls, from accidents, and from silicosis — the lungs filling with rock dust from exactly the kind of drilling the ballad describes.
The steam drill didn’t need to beat John Henry. The tunnel killed the men whether they beat the machine or not.
So the real story underneath the triumphant folk song is this: a Black man, possibly unfree, was worked against a machine in a lethal environment, and he may have won the contest and died of the winning, and America took that and turned it into a rousing anthem about the dignity of labor. The dignity of labor. He was leased convict labor in a tunnel that was eating men alive, and we made it a sing-along. That’s not folklore softening a hard truth. That’s folklore replacing a hard truth with its own opposite, which is a much more sinister thing for a story to do.
Johnny Appleseed Was a Land Speculator’s Dream
Now the gentle one. Johnny Appleseed — barefoot, saintly, wandering the wilderness scattering seeds so the frontier would bloom with fruit for the settlers to come. It’s the softest image in the whole American canon.
The real John Chapman existed, and he really did plant apple trees across Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. But he wasn’t scattering seeds for pies. Apples grown from seed are mostly inedible — sour, hard “spitters” good for one thing: hard cider and applejack. Chapman was, in effect, planting the alcohol supply of the frontier. And the deeper mechanism is the one the myth erases entirely: under frontier land law, planting an orchard was a way to establish an improvement claim on a piece of land. Chapman would move ahead of the settlement line, plant a nursery on land at the edge of what was being taken, and sell the trees — and sometimes the claim — to the settlers arriving behind him.
Which means the barefoot saint was an advance agent of the settlement frontier itself. He walked ahead of the wave of dispossession, and the trees he planted were markers of the land changing hands, land that was being taken from the people who already lived on it. The apple trees were a frontier being staked. The myth turned an instrument of expansion into a children’s saint, and in doing so it made the whole process of taking the continent look like a man kindly planting fruit.
Paul Bunyan Was Literally an Advertisement
At least John Henry and Johnny Appleseed started with real men. Paul Bunyan barely did. There were scraps of genuine lumber-camp tall tales, but the Paul Bunyan we know — the giant, Babe the Blue Ox, the whole merchandised mythology — was substantially built by an ad man. William Laughead wrote him up in promotional pamphlets for the Red River Lumber Company starting in 1916. The folk hero of American logging is, to a significant degree, a corporate mascot, invented to sell an industry to itself and to the public.
And what an industry to mythologize. The Bunyan stories are comedies of destruction: he clears whole forests in an afternoon, he flattens mountains, he creates lakes by dragging his tools. The joke is the scale of the devastation. We took the industrial-scale deforestation of the American continent — the erasure of the white pine forests of the upper Midwest, one of the largest ecological transformations in the country’s history — and we gave it a jolly giant and told it as a story about how big and strong and funny we were while we did it. Bunyan is the ecological catastrophe rewritten as a tall tale, with a corporation holding the pen.
Why a Nation Builds These
Here’s the argument, and it’s arguable, which is how you know it’s worth making. Every one of these tales performs the same operation: it takes a genuine horror of the expansion — worked-to-death labor, dispossession of native peoples, ecological annihilation — and reprocesses it into a folk story that makes the horror feel like a virtue. That’s not incidental. That’s the function. A conquering society needs a mythology that lets it not look directly at the conquest, and folklore is the softest, most durable, most transmissible form that mythology can take, because you install it in people before they’re old enough to ask questions.
Manifest Destiny — the belief that the expansion across the continent was divinely ordained and inherently good — needed a folk canon to feel true at the level of the gut, not just the sermon. So it got one. The steel-driving man made the deadly labor heroic. The seed-planting saint made the land-taking gentle. The giant lumberjack made the deforestation a joke. Together they form a national bedtime story that lets the country sleep, and the fact that we still tell them to children mostly untroubled is evidence of how well the machinery worked.
I’m not arguing we should stop telling them. I’m arguing we should tell them whole. John Henry is a far greater story when you know he might have been a convict dying of rock dust, because then his race against the machine becomes what it actually was — not a celebration of human strength but an indictment of a system that made a man prove his worth by killing himself faster than the drill could. That version is horror. It’s also true. And it respects him more than the sing-along ever did.
The Postcolonial Turn
The useful move — the one that makes this more than a debunking — is to ask who’s missing from each tale. In the John Henry story, it’s the other convicts, the ones who didn’t get a ballad, who just died. In Johnny Appleseed, it’s the native nations whose land the orchards were staking. In Paul Bunyan, it’s the forest itself and everything that lived in it. Every American tall tale is a photograph carefully cropped, and the horror is in what got cropped out of the frame to make the picture cheerful.
That’s the same instinct that runs through everything I write: the belief that the true story is usually the one standing just outside the edge of the version we were handed, and that the folklore isn’t lying to us so much as arranging us, so we look at the strong man and never at the tunnel that killed him.
Sing the ballad. But know that when John Henry laid down his hammer, the country picked it up and used it to build a story that let it stop grieving him. That’s the real American tall tale. It’s about how good we are at not looking.
I write horror that goes looking for what got cropped out of the frame. Get the free story here — the true version’s usually standing just off to the side.
The fiction this thinking feeds is There Be Monsters: Then and Now. For more strange stories that carry their history with them, The Collected Strange Stories is a good next shelf over.