2.3 Immigrant Folklore

Local Legends are closely associated with specific places, either with their names, their geographic features, or their histories. Presumably these legends are unique regional creations, but in reality many of them are simply localized versions of migratory legends; even one that originates from a local feature or event tends to spread outward, changing and being localized as it moves. A good example of the transplanted migratory legend is the Maine-woods story of “The Man Who Plucked the Gorbey”, who later was plucked of his own hair while he slept. This tale evidently goes back to a Scottish and North- Country English legend about plucking a sparrow, but it has become solidly entrenched in Maine and New Brunswick, being locally credited there to some thirty different characters [3, p.224].

Local historical legends are a largely still-uncollected aspect of American narrative folklore, although folk ballads based on historical events have long interested folksong scholars. Such occurrences as lynchings, feuds, sensational crimes, scandals, fires and other natural disasters, Indian massacres, and labor disputes have generated legends that become formularized in characteristic ways as they pass in oral tradition and that eventually accumulate supernatural and other motifs [3, p.256]. Probably because of their preoccupation with other forms of folklore or because such legends may seem to be simply garbled local history of little value, few collectors have awarded them the attention, for example, that Dorson did in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan with “The Lynching of the McDonald Boys” and 'How Crystal Falls Stole the Courthouse from Iron River,” or that William Ivey did in the same region with “The 1913 Disaster,” a legend from the community of Calumet. Countless other legends based on local history could be collected and studied elsewhere.

Was colonial American folklore, then, nothing more than transplanted English folk beliefs? Not quite. Some minor variations may be noted. The covenant theology developed by American Puritans came to include covenanting relations between devils, witches, and sinners as well as between God and His saints. In effect New England theologians extended the covenant idea' to cover the figures of folk supematuralism. Tribal Indians presented a wholly novel element that distinguished the American scene from the English. Yet the Indians, whose odd manners and customs were described in repetitive detail by colonial writers, rapidly became incorporated into the existing religious folklore of the settlers. Believing in magicians and demons, they •readily credited the preternatural feats and marvels claimed by the Indian powaws [10, p. 188]. In 1621 Robert Burton, musing in his Anatomy of Melancholy over the state of magic in England, complained that “Sorcerers are too common, Cunning men, Wisards and white-witches... in every village.”⁵ These “cunning folk” occupied an ambiguous position in English society. They practiced the beneficent white magic of fortunetelling, healing, finding lost goods, and combatting witchcraft, but they also used their powers for harm, depending on which client they were serving, and some were themselves indicted as witches. The same ambiguity cloaks the powaws, who today would be called shamans or medicine men. Cotton Mather told of an Indian on Martha’s Vineyard, sick and tormented from witchcraft, who was cured by the very powaw who had enchanted him. In another like case a greater powaw relieved the suffering of a woman be witched by a lesser powaw through a fervent prayer to his god.

The prayer effected the release of the spirit of a drowned Englishman that had entered the woman, and the powaw trapped it in a deerskin. He advised the woman to move away, for the spirit being English, he could not contain it long. On another occasion a settler wishing to recover stolen goods repaired to a powaw, who insisted as a prerequisite that his client place faith in the Indian god. As with the “cunning folk” of English villages, so the powaws offered advice primarily on matters of health and lost property. From Maine to the Carolinas, settlers and planters reported wondrous eyewitness tales of Indian conjurations; Uniformly they ascribed the magic of the powaws to their traffic with the Devil. Writing of the red men, Edward Johnson, who led a westward trek from Boston to Woburn, Massachusetts, in 1640, sneered, “As for any religious observation, they were the most destitute of any people yet heard of, the Devil having them in very great subjection, not using, craft to delude them, as he ordinarily doth in most parts of the world, but keeping them in a continual slavish fear of him.” Johnson added that the powaws sometimes recovered their sick folk through charms used with help from the Devil, whom they consequently esteemed all the more. Instead of contributing a new element to folklore in the colonies, the Indians were fitted into the world-view and supernatural concepts of the Englishman [8, p.151].

If colonial folklore borrowed most of its content from the mother country, it did not borrow all that was available. A notable omission in North American legendry from the major folk traditions of Tudor and Stuart England is the fairy belief. The generic term “fairy covered a host of unnatural creatures: imps, elves, brownies, bogles, sprites, pixies, boggarts, hobgoblins, changelings, Robin Goodfellows. These beings cavorted and made mischief throughout the isles of Britain, but failed to take passage with the emigrants sailing for America. One explanation may be that they were absorbed in the new environment by the stronger figures of witches, ghosts, and devils with which they were closely associated in the folk mind. In Chaucer’s day house hauntings had been attributed to fairies, by the time of Shakespeare they were being credited in good part to demons, and the Mathers spoke only of demons and evil spirits when reporting the sensational occurrences that afflicted certain New England domiciles. Cotton Mather conceived of armies of demons or devils inhabiting they were absorbed in the new environment by the stronger figures of witches, ghosts, and devils with which they were closely associated in the folk mind. In Chaucer’s day house hauntings had been attributed to fairies, by the time of Shakespeare they were being credited in good part to demons, and the Mathers spoke only of demons and evil spirits when reporting the sensational occurrences that afflicted certain New England domiciles. Cotton Mather conceived of armies of demons or devils inhabiting the invisible world, and such catchall terms easily swallowed up individualized imps and fairies.

But a still more compelling reason exists for the nonmigration of fatty beings, No European, African, or Asian people entering American shores have brought with them the folk creatures of their Heimat, the spirits rooted in the soil—as Devil, witch, and ghost were not—of the homeland. The water nymph, the mountain troll, the garden gnome, belong irrevocably to the old culture and the Old Country [5, p.211].

Following the Civil War a flood of immigration swept into the United States, rapidly replacing the giant human losses of that holocaust. The Irish cop, the Italian fruit merchant, the Chinese laundryman, the Hungarian steelworker, the Jewish clothing salesman, the Armenian rug merchant, become stock figures of the American metropolis. New nationalities, little known in the American population, continued to pour into the northern states from the 1870’s to the First World War. Scandinavians and East Europeans swarmed into the cities where the demands of industry had created huge labor markets, and drifted into the countryside from Massachusetts to Oregon, to harvest crops on the farms, shovel ore in the mines, cut timber in the forests. With them they brought every species of European folklore, even to the Slovenian, the Basque, the Luxembourger.

The impact of the immigrant differs considerably in rural regions and urban centers, for in the country he enters into regional folk culture. By contrast with the Louisiana French, Pennsylvania Germans, and New Mexican Spanish, who settled on virgin land in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these later arrivals enjoyed less than a single century to leave their imprint on an already established population. Still, in a regional area such as the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the immigrant has already stamped the folk culture with indelible contributions. Into the Peninsula, colonized by the French early in the seventeenth century, came miners from Cornwall, nicknamed “Cousin Jacks,” hard upon copper and iron booms of the 1840’s. French Canadians from Quebec moved down to the white pine lumber camps of the Peninsula, sustaining the original French tradition. After the Civil War the Finns and the Swedes streamed into the country resembling their own, along with smaller groups from most of Europe: Italians, Germans, Irish, Belgians, Danes, Slovenians, Croats, Luxem- bourgers, Syrians. In the small, fraternal, easygoing, hard- drinking Upper Peninsula towns they mingled and intermarried. Meanwhile the Ojibwa Indians, whose legends Schoolcraft had collected and bequeathed to Longfellow for The Song of Hiawatha, stolidly held their reservation grants [4, p.130].

By 1940 the Peninsula presented a rich population complex of the aborigine, the pioneer, and the immigrant, channeled into the American occupations of farming, mining, lumbering, and sailing and fishing on the Great Lakes. A spate of separate folk traditions, both ethnic and occupational, coexisted, while arching over all a new regional folklore had emerged, in the dialect humor common to the whole Peninsula [4, p.136].