Pecos Bill, the cowboy who fell out of a covered wagon as an infant, was raised by coyotes, ate dynamite, used a rattlesnake as a lasso, and rode a horse called Widowmaker, dies in some versions from laughing at a city boy in an alligator-skin suit. This episode walks through his outsized biography, including lassoing a storm cloud from California to end a Texas drought, dragging a stick to carve the Rio Grande, shooting the stars out of the sky to court Slue-Foot Sue, and the disastrous wedding day when Sue’s steel-spring bustle sent her bouncing toward the moon.

The bigger story is the twist behind the legend. The conversation reveals that Pecos Bill was not ancient oral tradition at all but the invention of writer Edward S. O’Reilly, known as Tex O’Reilly, who published The Saga of Pecos Bill in Century Magazine in October 1923 and claimed he was merely transcribing authentic cowboy tales. It explains how folklorists J. Frank Dobie and Richard M. Dorson found no earlier evidence and coined the term fakelore, how O’Reilly had used the name in silent films in 1921 and likely borrowed it from Civil War general William Shafter, and how the lack of copyright let comics, Italian publishers, Disney’s Melody Time, Patrick Swayze’s Tall Tale, and a Grammy-winning Robin Williams audiobook spin the character in wildly different directions.

• Why the legend has four contradictory endings for Slue-Foot Sue, including a mercy killing
• How attributing rivers and deserts to one goofy cowboy domesticated a terrifying frontier
• Why Widowmaker is described as Texas’s first serial killer rather than a trusty steed
• How 1920s nostalgia for a closed frontier made the public eager to believe the hoax
• What separates Pecos Bill from Paul Bunyan, John Henry, and Davy Crockett