As the story goes, Bill was born near a river that runs through Texas and New Mexico.  He was the youngest of 18 children born to a pioneering family in the 1830's.

 

Young Bill said his first words when he was just a month old, he did his teething on a bowie knife, and he rode a horse for the first time as soon as he was able to sit up on his own.  He even wrestled with bear cubs and other wild animals.

 

He was an infant when the family headed west in their horse-drawn covered wagon.  One day the wagon hit a bump near a river in New Mexico, causing Bill to fall out.  His parents didn't notice that he was missing until they were long gone!

 

After his ill-fated dumping, he was raised by coyotes.  Believe it or not, Bill once thought that he was a coyote until 15 years later when a cowboy—who turned out to be his brother—convinced him that he wasn't a coyote.  I've heard of babies being raised by coyotes or wolves, but I always doubted whether it was possible.

 

Bill's contributions to ranching are appreciated by ranchers all over the country to this day.  He invented the branding iron as well as the lasso; he once captured an entire herd of cattle with his lasso.  This larger-than-life cowboy even used a rattlesnake for a lasso once.

 

He once emptied the Rio Grande River onto his ranch to irrigate it.  He even, as legend has it, rode a cyclone once.  When he didn't feel like riding his horse, he would ride a mountain lion.

 

He worked as a buffalo hunter, a cattleman, a railroad contractor and an oilfield worker.  Later in life, when he lost the love of his live, a woman named Slue Foot Sue, he returned to live with the coyotes, and began howling at the moon as his way of dealing with her loss.  The other coyotes joined in, and thus began the tradition of coyotes howling at the moon.

 

Edward O'Reilly, on the other hand, didn't live quite as exciting a life as Bill did.  He was a magazine writer in 1916 at a time when cowboys told tall tales of those who settled the Wild West.  These stories were sometimes referred to as "fakelore" instead of "folklore."

 

What he did, though, was make Bill's story possible.

 

Like most of the characters profiled in this column, you've probably heard of Bill.  You see, part of his name came from the river where he fell off his family's covered wagon as an infant—the Pecos River.  Bill was known as Pecos Bill.

 

While Pecos Bill invented the lasso and the branding iron, there is something that Edward O'Reilly invented, too.  Or should we say there is some one that Edward O'Reilly invented ... because he is the writer who invented the fictional character of Pecos Bill.

 

But you knew that all along, didn't you?

 

 

 

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© Paul Niemann 2010