Somewhere along the way, we grew up and traded in our traditional super heroes for a more modern batch. The new super heroes not only have the strength and speed to meet any villain, but possess an arsenal of hi-tech gadgets to assist them in smashing evil, whoever it is. We've all but forgotten the bigger than life heroes of America's Tall Tales. Heroes that solved monumental tasks with everyday tools (if you call a giant blue ox "everyday") and they got stronger, bigger and more creative as their feats were told around the campfire of a young America still growing up.

I can still get enthralled by Paul Bunyan's feats, love Johnny Appleseed, and John Henry is still my hero; who can forget Calamity Jane! The tall tale is a fundamental element of American folk literature. A Tall Tale is like today's super heroes in that they are bigger or stronger than real people and they solve problems in super-human ways. That is where the similarity ends. With Super Heroes, There is an attempt to let you imagine that sometime in the future technology could advance enough for this to happen. A Tall Tale is a competition between story tellers to see who can exaggerate the most, and pepper it with sarcastic humor. They solve everyday, unsolvable problems in a bigger than life, humorous way (Paul Bunyan hooking his ox to curvy logging roads and pulling them straight, or Pecos Bill lassoing a tornado to subdue it).

Tall tales are all American. The need for the supernatural is universal; Fairy tales in Europe, Genies in the middle east and Wee Folk in Irland. Meanwhile America sat around campfires and fireplaces and told our Tall Tales, each tale outdoing the last. Each one meant to bring a laugh and a taller tale from the person next to you.

Although the most popular of the tall tales originated in the west and seemed to flourish everywhere the tough men of the American Frontier would gather, many came from east of the Mississippi. The toughest boatman on the Mississippi River was Mike Fink, and a their own Man-of-steel was a Pittsburg steel worker - Joe Magarac. Paul Bunyon had a cousin in West Virginia, another lumberjack named Tony Beaver.

The best thing about a tall tale is that everyone could join in. Told in the vernacular of the day, they possessed a homey feel and anyone with a little imagination could spin one or ad to a tale already started. If you couldn't invent one, you could add to someone elses, or make a tall tale out of a real character such as Calamity Jane, making here adventures bigger than life. This was campfire fun at it's best, and made a hard life a little easier.

Unfortunately, since these were passed along from campfire to campfire, many got lost forever. Fortunately, as America settled into a civilized society, some of these wonderful tales were written down by our literary-minded keepers of the past. You can find compilations of Tale Tales in any library, or quicker yet, by typing "tall tales" in any search engine you can get a whole gaggle of them to read and laugh at.

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