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exaggerated beyond belief. Some-
times the hero is based on a real
person and they usually have a regu-
lar job like lumberjack, firefighter,
sailor, or railway worker.
How Were Tall Tales Spread?
Tall tales were spread by word of mouth, usually through bragging con-
tests. Often times the narrator him-
self knew he was telling a tall tale but
he was doing so to fool the city folk
who he referred to as “greenhorns”
for being so naïve.
WELCOME!
WATCH
We can’t fit the hundreds of years of information about American Tall Tales into this document so we created a supplemental playlist on our YouTube channel called SRP 2020: Story Lab Week #5—American Tall Tales, which you can
find here—
https://www.youtube.com/user/
WWPL46074/playlists
What is a Tall Tale?
Tall tales were first told at the begin-
ning of American history when peo-
ple were moving across the country
and taming the wilderness. In those
days, before people had the types of
entertainment we enjoy today—no
movies or television and many peo-
ple couldn’t read—they depended on
storytelling for entertainment. After
a long day of hard work on the ranch
or at a logging camp, people gath-
ered together and told each other
funny tales filled with exaggerations.
These tales helped people face the
difficult, dangerous, and sometimes
overwhelming task of living on the
frontier.
The heroes of these stories are usu-
ally larger-than-life and details are
Learn 2
Read 3
Make 4
Did You Know? 4
Solve 5
Explore 6
Write 6
INSIDE THIS ISSUE:
American
Tall Tales June 30, 2020
Story Lab—
Week #5
Westfield
Washington
Public Library
Don’t forget to sign up for the
Summer Reading Program!
wwpl.beanstack.org
Story Lab Schedule
06/02—Egyptian Mythology
06/09—Roman & Greek
Mythology
06/16—Medieval Legends
06/23—Age of Enlightenment
Fairy Tales
06/30—American Tall Tales
07/07—Stories from Africa
07/14—Stories from Asia
07/21—Stories from
South America
07/28—Stories from
the Middle East *Please note that this playlist is housed on regular YouTube and parents are encouraged to
monitor their child’s activity in the event that any questions arise while watching.
There are a lot of interesting
tall tales about characters
throughout American history.
Check out a few of them
below:
The fictional Pecos Bill was a
legendary cowboy who grew up in
Texas. His parents lost him out of
their covered wagon near the
Pecos River. He was raised by a
pack of wolves and didn’t know he
was human until he was a teenager.
He is said to have been strong
enough, brave enough, and smart
enough to rope a tornado and take
care of all the cattle in Texas.
Paul Bunyan is a fictional giant
who invented logging and all the
tools to go with it. According to
the tall tales that exist about him,
Paul created both the Puget Sound
in the northwest and the Grand
Canyon in the southwest. Legend
has it that, to provide drinking wa-
ter for his giant blue ox, Babe, Bun-
yan scooped out the Great Lakes!
There were claims that Paul’s camp
stove covers an acre, and his
hotcake griddle is so large that it
is greased by men using sides of
bacon for skates.
Alfred Bulltop Stormalong was
a seafaring giant invented by story-
tellers who told tales about his
nautical adventures. Stories agree
that Stormalong came from an
American town somewhere along
the Atlantic coast. He didn’t stay
anywhere very long because he
outgrew every town, house, and
ship there was. Eventually, he built
his own oversized ship. It was so
big that he had to hinge the mast
tips so he could pull them down to
let the moon pass. He had a lifelong
rivalry with a Kraken, a huge, squid
-like sea monster.
The legendary John Henry is said
to have worked as a "steel-driving
man"—a man tasked with hammer-
ing a steel drill into rock to make
holes for explosives to blast the
rock in constructing a railroad
tunnel. In songs and stories, John
Henry died after out-drilling a
steam drill. Some of the tales about
John Henry could have come from
events in a real person’s life, or
from feats performed by many
different people.
David (Davy) Crockett was a
real person, born in 1786 in
Tennessee. He was a hunter and a
frontiersman and who later became
a member of the United States
Congress. He died fighting against
Mexican soldiers at the Alamo in
Texas. Legends and tall tales about
Davy Crockett came from a series
of Crockett Almanacs that were
written between 1838 and 1856.
Storytellers have added to
Crockett’s impossible feats in the
almanacs, and their legends about
Crockett grow bigger each time
they’re told.
The real-life model for Mose
the Firefighter was Moses
Humphries, a printer for a newspa-
per and a fireman during the early
1800s. The tall tales about Mose, a
city folk hero, grew from a series
of New York plays about a rough-
talking, kindhearted firefighter who
was said to be 8 feet tall and had
hands as big as Virginia hams. On
stage he rescued ladies in distress
and saved babies using his huge
stovepipe hat. People claimed he
was able to lift trolley cars over his
head and swim across the Hudson
River with two strokes.
AMERICAN TALL TALES Page 2
LEARN
STORY LAB—WEEK #5
Early Chapter Fiction Books
American Tall Tales Series (4 books)
by M. J. York
Physical books—Evergreen
eBooks—Hoopla
Far Out Folktales Series (4 books)
by Various Authors
Physical books—Evergreen
eBooks—Libby
The Tumbleweed Came Back
by Carmela LaVigna Coyle
Physical book—Evergreen
Gullible Gus by Maxine Schur
Physical book—Evergreen
READ
Page 3
Fiction Books
American Legends & Folktales Series
(16 books) by Various Authors
Physical books—Evergreen
The Misadventured Summer Of
Tumbleweed Thompson by Glenn
McCarty
eBook—Hoopla
Outlaws of Time Series (3 books) by
Nathan D. Wilson
Physical books—Evergreen
eBooks—Hoopla
Paul Bunyan vs. Hals Halson : the
giant lumberjack challenge! by Teresa
Bateman
Physical book—Evergreen
Non-Fiction Books
Pro Tip: Tall Tales live in the same
section as fairy tales which is j398.2!
American Tall Tales by Mary Pope
Osborne
Physical book—Evergreen
eBook—Libby
Cut From the Same Cloth: American
Women of Myth, Legend, and Tall
Tale by Robert San Souci
Physical book—Evergreen
Stormalong by Eric Metaxas
Physical book—Evergreen
Write Your Own Tall Tale by Natalie
Rosinsky
Physical book—Evergreen
Johnny Appleseed: a poem by Reeve
Lindbergh
Physical book—Evergreen
eAudio—Libby
AMERICAN TALL TALES
MAKE
Page 4
Thought to be the basis of the fable of Johnny Appleseed, the exploits of Nova, Ohio, native John Chapman revolve around acres of apple orchards. Rather than share them with others, Chapman took his delectable fruit and turned it into a popular libation: hard apple cider. He had plenty of apples to keep his sup-ply of cider high, which benefited the settlers that became his frequent custom-
ers.
According to Howard Means, author of “Johnny Appleseed: The Man, the Myth, the American Story,” cider was a big part of frontier life. The drink was a staple that accompanied most meals, which provided Chapman the demand to be-
come a veritable Johnny Appleseed.
Do you know what you have left over once you turn acres of apples into cider or applesauce? Seeds! Lots and lots of seeds. Did you know that you can use the seeds from apples to make jewelry? Making jewelry from apple seeds was
actually popular in America in the 1960s. Such small, ordinary things, yet when they are strung together, they become
something more substantial.
1. Rinse apple seeds after removing
from apple.
2. Use a needle to string on a thread while they're still damp. That makes poking the hole
much easier.
3. Hang the thread with needle up
somewhere safe so they can dry
4. Keep adding to your string as
you eat more apples.
5. When they're dried and you have enough for your project, remove from storage string and add to new string in interesting
designs.
DID YOU KNOW? In the early 1900s, it was popular in America to send tall tale postcards. The pictures on these cards had been changed using photo distortion, such as enlarging part of a picture without enlarging the rest of it. Some of these results were huge fruits and vegetables that were too large to fit in a wagon; giant fish that could fill a railroad flatcar; and gigantic rabbits that appeared with saddles on them. These rabbits looked in the pictures
like they could be ridden as if they were horses. These cards made people laugh and were quite popular in the Great Plains states.
AMERICAN TALL TALES
SOLVE
Page 5
Try writing your own tall tale—a humorous story in which realistic
details have been exaggerated to the point of being unbelievable.
Main Character
Name:
Realistic job
Other super-human traits:
Setting
Time period:
Location:
Plot
Sequence of events / adventure, discovery of problem:
Conclusion / funny way problem is solved:
You can pick a little-known character from history or create a new
one. Don’t forget the exaggerated details! Instead of saying, “He
hit the ball over the fence” you can say “he hit the ball so hard that
it flew over the fence, through the atmosphere, around the moon,
and was never seen again!”
WRITE
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EXPLORE
Next Week
Be on the look out for next week’s
Story Lab edition which will be
available on Tuesday, July 7, 2020.
We’ll be
focusing on
Stories from
Africa
If you’ve ever been to Muncie, Indiana, you may have seen one of America’s most famous characters—Paul Bunyan!
The 25 foot tall Paul Bunyan statue, now located outside of the Timbers Lounge dates from the mid-1960s, when it was created to advertise Kirby Wood Lumber Co. He’s not the only statue of Bunyan around the United States. You could see one in any of the following
locations:
Klamath, California
Cheshire, Connecticut
Portland, Oregon
Bangor, Maine | Rumford, Maine
Akeley, Minnesota | Bemidji, Minnesota | Brainerd, Minnesota
Manistique, Michigan | Ossineke, Michigan
Lakewood, Wisconsin | Eau Claire, Wisonsin