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 claim ...