American Cowboy

Pecos Bill is a comic demigod, the culture hero of the cowboys, said to have invented most of the things connected with the business. He is the subject of many exaggerated tall tales.

There wasn't nothin' that Pecos Bill couldn't ride, but he was thrown on one occasion. He made a bet that he could ride an Oklahoma cyclone. He met the cyclone, the worst ever known, up by the Kansas line. Bill eared it down and climbed on. That cyclone did some terrible pitchin'. Down across Texas it went, knockin' down mountains and tyin' rivers in knots. The Plains used to be heavily timbered until that wind swiped the trees and left it prairie. But Bill just sat up there, floppin' the cyclone across the ears with his hat and rollin' a cigarette with one hand. Over Arizona, when it saw that it couldn't throw him, the cyclone rained itself out from under him. This is what washed out the Grand Canyon. Bill jumped off and landed in Death Valley.

Edward O'Reilly, "The Saga of Pecos Bill," in A Treasury of American Folklore, ed. B. A. Botkin (New York: Crown, 1944), 183.