"The story that stayed with a young Larry McMurtry, more than any of the cowboy exploits, was the one about a molasses barrel. McMurtry's grandfather had traveled by wagon 18 miles to Archer City for winter provisions, returning with an 80-pound barrel of sorghum molasses, the nearest thing to sugar at the time."
"What 'really happened,' he wrote, was that a sow had come along and pulled the spigot out of the barrel, causing it to run dry. The emptied barrel was discovered, and the children lined up at the scene of the catastrophe to cry. The fault was no human folly but an animal's."
"Truth and fiction have been two threads in the grand yarn of the American West since before the West was even settled; they are wound so tightly together that it becomes moot to distinguish one from the other."
"It was an 'inescapable fact' that the American West's so-called traditions were actually 'invented by pulp writers, poster artists, impresarios, and advertising men.'"
Family reunions for the McMurtry family featured storytelling by aging cowboy uncles. A memorable story involved a molasses barrel that was emptied by a sow, leading to children's tears. McMurtry preferred the fictionalized version of events over the truth. He noted that the narratives of the American West were often created by writers and advertisers before the actual settlement, blending truth and fiction in a complex relationship that defines the region's history.
Read at The Nation
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