The Man Who Sired Pecos Bill

Belly up to the bar with Tex O'Riley

A sub-set of folklore is the folk character, figures like Paul Bunyan, Mike Fink and a fellow with Texas roots, Pecos Bill.

Baby Boomers will recall that Uncle Walt Disney turned Pecos Bill into a cartoon character, but Ole Bill’s older than that mouse in Disney’s first successful animation, Steamboat Willie. Later the character became a bit better known as Micky Mouse.

The first-ever telling of Pecos Bill’s story starts out like this:

“It is highly probable that Paul Bunyan…and Pecos Bill, mythical cow-boy hero of the Southwest, were blood brothers. At all events, they can meet on one common ground: they were both fathered by a liar.”

Truer words have seldom been written about Pecos Bill, especially that part about being “fathered by a liar.”

Here’s the short version of ole Bill’s resume:

When someone had the audacity to settle only 50 miles from their cabin in East Texas, Bill’s family pulled stakes for the wide-open far West. When their wagon splashed across the snake-like Pecos River, Bill fell out.

Being one of “16 or 17” kids, no one missed him for a good while. Meanwhile, a pack of coyotes adopted him and he grew up thinking he also was a coyote. Eventually a passing cowboy, noting that Bill didn’t have a tail convinced him he was indeed human.

Bill “got to enjoying all the pleasant vices of mankind” and after some years of dissipation, he mended his ways and became a cowboy.

He performed all sorts of super-human feats. To get water for his ranch, for example, he dug an irrigation ditch that became the Rio Grande. He invented all sorts of things connected to ranching and cowboying, including the bucking bronco.

That turned out to be something of an irony when the love of his life, Slew-Foot Sue, pestered Bill into letting her ride his horse Widow Maker. That spirited steed bucked Sue so high she barely missed the moon. Landing on her spring-steel bustle, she kept bouncing for three days and nights. Poor Bill finally had to shoot her to keep her from starving to death.

After that, he was never the same. Some said he died from drinking too much nitro laced with fishhooks, others that he died laughing at a Yankee dressed up like a cowboy.

The author of this Texas-esque tall tale claimed that he first heard of Pecos Bill in his youth, sitting around a campfire listening to old cowboys tell windies as they drank coffee strong enough to float a horseshoe.

That point has been made in several later versions of the tale as well, but as it turns out, the father of Pecos Bill was indeed a liar. His name was Edward S. O’Reilly, for most of his 66 years far better known as Tex.

Tex O’Reilly’s Pecos Bill story first appeared in the October 1923 issue of Century Magazine, then a widely circulated national publication.

Unfortunately, you can copyright the text and images associated with a magazine article, but not a name. O’Reilly quickly lost any control of Pecos Bill. The name and his character took off, with a succession of authors adding more and more wild details to Bill’s story.

But none of these writers has ever bothered to offer any insight on the man who created the character they profited from. The truth is, Tex O’Reilly’s almost as interesting a character as ole Bill himself.

I first heard of O’Reilly in 1970 when I interviewed the late Edmunds Travis, a soft-spoken, pipe-smoking, derby-wearing old-timer who had been a reporter and newspaper editor in Austin in the early 1900s. He had met O’Reilly in 1909 when O’Reilly was managing editor of the old San Antonio Light.

During one of several long conversations we had, Travis told me a story about O’Reilly and I was hooked. Here, from a transcript of that long-ago interview, is how Travis described him:

“Tex was a very glamorous character. He had been a soldier of fortune, cowboy and newspaperman. He was six and a half feet tall, thin as a lathe. And…a very accomplished gunman.”

Tex also was a fine storyteller, as his Pecos Bill tale attests.

O’Reilly was born in Denison in 1880 but his family later moved to San Saba, where he grew up. His father, who had fought in the Civil War and ridden as a Texas Ranger, earned a living as a stone mason and traveled the state working on various courthouse, jail and bridge construction projects.

When the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898, young O’Reilly enlisted in the Army. He soon found that while he had a taste for fighting he did not care much for military discipline. No disparagement intended, but like many a person of Irish heritage, he also had more than a wee taste for whiskey.

After fighting in the Philippines and the Boxer Rebellion, O’Reilly left the military and hired on as an international policeman in Shanghai. He also spent some time as a drill instructor for the Chinese army, worked again as a police officer in Japan, and even taught school for a while.

Returning to the U.S. as a stowaway on a tramp steamer, he began a brief but successful-to-a-point career as a stunt cowboy in the 101 Ranch Wild West Show. He also performed in rodeos until he tried to impress a crowd by roping a steer from an automobile. He lassoed the steer OK, but when he jumped from the moving car to tie the animal’s legs, he broke one of his own.

O’Reilly’s next career move would make you think he had hurt his head in the fall, not his leg. He started working as a newspaperman. He learned the trade on various papers in Chicago and St. Louis before returning to his home state to work for the Light, one of two scrappy dailies in what was then the biggest city in Texas.

In addition to writing headlines, O’Reilly occasionally made headlines. He rode a horse from the Alamo City to Chicago to meet up with President Taft and invite him to Texas.

When the Texas Legislature became annoyed at the Light’s coverage of that august body’s proceedings, they barred the newspaper’s representative from sitting at the press table in the Senate. O’Reilly showed up at the Capitol strapped with a six shooter, marched past the sergeant-at-arms straight into the Senate chamber and announced that the Light would once again shine upon the lawmakers, beginning right then.

Beyond his flair for the flamboyant, Tex had wondering feet.

In 1910, he and his wife Dixie left San Antonio to live in Sanderson, then a thriving railroad town. Living with his family in a tent, he began publishing a humorous newspaper called the Rio Grande Coyote. So far as I have been able to learn, this marked his first visit to the Trans-Pecos, though it is possible his father might have taken the family to this part of Texas during his job-related travels.

When the Mexican Revolution broke out, O’Reilly sent his family back to San Antonio and alternated between covering the fighting for the Associated Press and participating in it. He rode with Francisco Madero’s rebels and later with Pancho Villa, who reportedly wanted Tex to write his biography.

About the time things began to slightly settle down in Mexico, America entered the war against Germany. Too old to rejoin the Army, O’Reilly joined the Texas National Guard as a captain commanding a machine gun company.

At various other times in the teens and early 1920s, he fought as a soldier of fortune in Venezuela, Honduras, Nicaragua and North Africa. In all, he participated in 10 wars on four continents.

Like many newspaper reporters before and since, O’Reilly realized that while he might have a lot of fun working as a journalist or hired gun, he’d never get rich that way. He and his wife lived on a strict budget. As he described it, one fourth of their income was allocated for food, one fourth for rent, one fourth for whiskey, and one fourth went for fines, court costs and incidentals.

Hoping to enhance his income to more adequately meet these expenses, he turned to free-lance writing. When the Pictorial Review, then a major national magazine, invited him to join its stable of writers, O’Reilly’s many friends in San Antonio collected money to send him to New York.

Unfortunately, he spent the money on a huge going-away party. When a police officer spotted O’Reilly hooting and singing on Commerce Street at 3 a.m., he placed him under arrest for public intoxication. Well, he tried. Seventeen officers later, O’Reilly finally went to jail. When a friend bailed him out the next morning, he found O’Reilly covering his face in shame. The friend assured O’Reilly being arrested for drunk and disorderly was not that disgraceful, especially for a newspaperman, to which O’Reilly said, “San Antonio’s not a big city yet I let only one police force arrest me.”

Having jammed more living into 38 years than most people manage in a lifetime, O’Reilly sold an action-filled autobiography called Roving and Fighting in 1918. He had started writing short stories in the late teens and really picked up the pace in the roaring 20s, also writing scripts for two-reeled silent Western films.

He was back in San Antonio when he wrote the Pecos Bill story in 1923. J. Frank Dobie, no slouch when it came to Texas folklore, believed O’Reilly created the story out of whole cloth. Indeed, O’Reilly had probably heard old Irish tales about giants from his father, knew of Paul Bunyan, and set about developing a mythical Texan merely to make a buck.

As a Spanish-American War veteran, he had doubtless seen the rotund Gen. William “Pecos Bill” Shafter, a Civil War veteran who had served for a time in West Texas during the Indian wars. O’Reilly’s awareness of Shafter’s nickname may well be how he came up with the handle for his cowboy character.

Still hoping to hit the big time, Tex again left his native state for the Big Apple in the late 1920s. In 1937, he and a partner marketed a Pecos Bill comic strip for newspapers, but it never caught on.

Rich only in experience, he died in Syracuse, New York in 1946 of a disease that had plagued him most of his life, tuberculosis. His son, John O’Reilly, who also went by “Tex,” was a famous war correspondent for the New York Herald-Tribune. That son died in 1981, but Tex’s other son, Pecos Bill, lives on as an American folk hero. As O’Reilly had written, Pecos Bill had indeed been fathered by a liar, albeit one with a hardy sense of humor

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