Comics-Pecos Bill TB

Please drop this item in rural OR Premium Member Only caches.  Do not place it in an urban cache or abandon it at a caching event.  Transport the bug in the original plastic bag for as long as the bag lasts; the bag keeps the trackable clean and prevents tangling with other items.  Otherwise, take the travel bug anywhere you wish.  No permission is needed to leave the U.S.

Travel bug photos in the logs are appreciated.  I will re-post them here, where they can be seen by other cachers.

My youth was in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  Drawing from that period, this is one of a series of travel bugs made to commemorate favorite characters from comic books, comic strips, movie cartoons, B-movies and animated feature-length movies.  Some of the characters had only a brief existence, some survived as radio and early TV programs and some have been digitally-modernized into some of the blockbuster movies of today.  There were many other characters, but these are the ones on which I was willing to spend my dimes (comic books) and quarters (movie and popcorn).  However, I didn’t pay for the daily comic strips or Sunday funnies that came with the newspaper.

Pecos Bill is an American cowboy immortalized in numerous tall tales of the Old West.  They first appeared as short stories and a book by Edward S. O'Reilly in the early 20th Century.  Folksongs and folklore were part of my grade school curriculum.  We learned the songs and were read the tales.  My teacher read several Pecos Bill stories and I remember one about a breed cows with legs shorter on one side so they could graze on steep hills (the sidehill breed).  There was also a horse name Widowmaker and a wife/girlfriend named Sluefoot Sue.

Pecos Bill was apparently a late addition to the "big man" idea of characters, such as Paul Bunyan or John Henry.  The first stories were published in 1917 by Edward O'Reilly for The Century Magazine, and collected and reprinted in 1923 in the book Saga of Pecos Bill (1923).  O'Reilly said they were part of an oral tradition of tales told by cowboys during the westward expansion and settlement of the southwest including Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.  But American folklorist Richard M. Dorson found that O'Reilly invented the stories as "folklore."  Later writers either borrowed tales from O'Reilly or added further adventures of their own invention to the cycle.  

Pecos Bill made the leap to film in the 1948 Disney animated feature Melody Time.  Disney also made animated features about Paul Bunyan and John Henry among many others.