Radio Script #823

Little Talks on Common Things
December 7, 1969

Maine has had some famous tellers of tall stories. One such was Jones Tracy of Mt. Desert Island, whose life and yarns were investigated and reported by Richard Lunt, a graduate of Mt. Desert High School and the University of Maine for the Northeast Folklore Society, whose director, Edward Ives, I had the pleasure of successfully nominating for an Award of Merit by the American Association of State and Local History in 1968.

Jones Tracy was born in 1856 on Fosters Island near Harrington, Maine. His parents, living on Petit Manan, made a hurried trip for the mainland at Harrington, but didn’t quite make it, with the result that Jones was born on Foster, halfway between Petit Manan and Harrington. Jones Tracy was the sixth child of Petit Manan lighthouse keeper Harry Tracy and his wife Lydia. Losing his job as the result of change in national administration, Harry worked logging on the Machias River, while his family stayed in Harrington. In 1861 he bought a hundred acre farm on Mt. Desert.

In 1880 Jones Tracy married Rose Norwood and operated a farm owned by a Bar Harbor man near Sargent’s Mountain. It is now part of Acadia National Park. Jones and Rose had seven children. Then Rose died and Jones married Charlotte Richardson. He ran a farm for the Fernald Brothers and supplied vegetables to Northeast Harbor summer hotels. In 1902 Jones, then 56 years old, was stricken with arthritis and was in the hospital for eight months. He never fully recovered and wore overshoes instead of shoes for the rest of his life. In 1914 he agreed to take care of his ailing brother-in-law for the rest of that man’s life in return for a deed to the brother-in-law’s farm. There Jones died in 1939 and was buried in the village cemetery at Somesville. His son Ralph Tracy inherited the place.

Mr. Lunt interviewed many people who knew Jones Tracy well. Among them is a Northeast Harbor resident, Augustus Phillips, maker and distributor of the well known postcard maps of Mt. Desert and other parts of Maine. Phillips was a student of mine 55 years ago at Hebron Academy. It was he and others who knew Jones Tracy who told the investigator some of Jones’s tallest yarns. So let us now hear some of those famous stories.

One of the best concerned the split bullet. Out hunting, Jones spied two deer. He wanted both, and he knew that the moment he fired at one, the other would dash away. So Jones ran ahead and stopped near where the trail narrowed between huge rocks. Sure enough, the doe came walking ahead, with the buck behind her. Jones planted himself ahead of them, aimed at the doe, shot her through the neck, and the same bullet hit the buck in the head. What Jones didn’t notice until it was allover was that the bullet had gone on and killed a fawn trailing the buck and the doe. That was how Jones Tracy declared he shot three deer with one bullet.

On another hunt Jones saw a deer running around the mountain. Jones had only one bullet, and when that deer jumped behind a tree, Jones knew he couldn’t get a straight shot. So Jones bent the gun barrel and fired. The deer kept on running and it was a week before the bullet caught up with him.

Jones often told how they were cutting trees, and one fellow failed to yell “timber” when his tree came crashing down. “I was standing on the ledge”. said Jones. “That tree struck me on top of the head and drove me clear down to my knees into that ledge.”

One spring day Jones went to Ellsworth when the roads were deep in mud. Suddenly he saw a hat lying in the road. He thought, “That’s a pretty good hat. I guess I better pick it up.” So Jones edged into the soft mud and under the hat was a man’s head. “Gosh”, said Jones, “that mud must be deep.” “Deep”. the fellow yelled, “I’ll say it’s deep. I’m standing on a hayrack.”

On one occasion Jones skated on new ice from Northeast Harbor to Fernald’s Point. “When salt water freezes it gets kind of leathery”, Jones explained. “It will sink down under your weight and still hold. On that day the ice was so soft it buckled under me so that I couldn’t see Robinson’s Mountain on one side nor Brown’s Mountain on tother.”

Here is another of Jones Tracy’s many hunting stories. “We was out fox hunting and the shot got scarce. When I wanted to load my old muzzle loader, I didn’t have a single shot left. I’d been shingling earlier in the week, and sure enough, I had a few shingle nails in my pocket. So I loaded them in the gun instead of shot. When a fox passed in front of a tree I fired, and do you know, I nailed that fox’s tail so fast to the tree that fox jumped right out of his skin, saving me the trouble of skinning the critter.”

Jones Tracy was never flustered when he was caught in an obvious loser. Such was the case of his story about the snowshoes. This is the way Jones told it: “We was out in the field one Fourth of July haying when I see a big buck down in the field. I run to the house and grabbed my gun, rushed back and fired at that buck. He jumped and took off with me after him. I chased him about six miles when we came to a stream. Then I kicked off my snowshoes and went across the stream after that deer.” At that point in the story some listener objected, “For gosh sakes, Jones, what were you doing on snowshoes on the Fourth of July?” “By golly”, replied Jones, “I must have got two stories mixed up.”

A stranger once told Jones that the way to make an apple tree bear abundant fruit was to put iron around the tree, so the stranger said he got some pieces of old iron and put them around a tree that had borne only a few apples that only the hogs would eat. “The next year”, said the stranger, “this tree bore a big crop of delicious, tasty apples.” “Sure”, said Jones, “I know all about that idea of putting iron around an apple tree. Let me tell you about my experience. We had a tree just like yours. I got half a dozen horseshoe nails and drove them into the bottom of that tree. The next year that danged tree bore two cruisers and a battleship.”

When Jones told about catching three hundred trout weighing more than a pound a piece and bringing them home in two gunny sacks hung from the handlebars of a bicycle, the only response he got was, “Jones, how in heck did the bike stand it?”

One day Jones crossed Somes Sound to pick up firewood. There he found a keg of powder. He loaded firewood and powder into his boat along with his bucksaw. “Like a cussed fool”, Jones said, “when I got halfway home across the sound, I decided to light my pipe. When I did. that keg of powder took fire. Quicker’n lightning, I grabbed the bucksaw, sawed the keg in two and saved half the powder.”

Jones often told how he outraced the rain. “I had been up to Ellsworth with my horse and wagon. On the way home a smart shower came up behind me. Do yer know, I drove that horse so fast that when we got home only the back part of the wagon was wet.”

“One day”. said Jones, “I was working on the Fernald farm, and my oxen got peeved about something. They started to run, and the plow I was holding went right up over them oxen, me with it. As I went by, I grabbed one ox by the tail, and we was going so fast I hauled his backbone right out clear to his ears.”

One day Jones Tracy and Frank Thompson went over to Bar Harbor for supplies. Jones had a little cold, so he went in to see Dr.Morrison, Frank going with him. Jones said to the doctor, “Frank and I are going on a little trip, and with this cold I ought to have something to take along. Can’t you get me some whiskey?” The doctor allowed he might have a quart stored away. So he produced the bottle, handed it to Jones with the remark, “This might help your cold, but don’t drink too much at one time.” Then the doctor said, “How about you, Frank?” Frank replied, “I’m all right, doc. I ain’t got no col~.” But when Jones took a good swig there in the doctor’s office, Frank changed his mind. “Hey, doc”, he yelled, “I feel a smart cold coming on. I need some of that medicine too.”

Jones told how mad he got when he lost his Balm of Gilead tree. Jones was mighty proud of that tree which spread allover his front yard. Then the tree died. “What happened to your Balm of Gilead?” a neighbor asked. This was Jones Tracy’s reply: “Some son of a gun down to Otter Creek dug a well and cut off a tap root.”

Balm of Gilead roots were notorious in their wide spread, so Jones didn’t give a thought to the fact that Otter Creek was 15 miles away from his tree with two mountains in between. Jones Tracy was suspected of poaching deer out of season. One spring day, as he came into the store at Northeast Harbor, there was a warden talking with the storekeeper. Seeing Jones, the warden approached him, took a good look at Jones’ mackinaw and spied deer hair on the sleeve. “Ah”, said the warden, “I’ve got you now. How’d you get those deer hairs on your mackinaw?” “Well, you see, warden”, said Jones, “today’s the first time I’ve had that mackinaw on since last fall when I shot the big buck you know all about. I got him good and legal.”

Jones Tracy was what folklore students know as an active teller of tall tales. The passive tellers are folk heroes about whom stories are told. The active ones tell their own stories in which they themselves are the heroes. Maine had other such characters besides Jones Tracy of Mt. Desert. One was Arthur Church of Jonesport, a trickster and sharp dealer who was a.well known teller of tall tales. One day someone asked Art to tell a story. Art said he didn’t have time because he had to see a dog about a man. Someone had raided Art’s chicken house, and he was borrowing a neighbor’s dog to track the culprit down. More often, Art’s stories were about how he got the best of a sharp trade.

Another renowned story teller was Robert Townsend, who traveled the countryside peddling salve. He claimed his salve was so strong that when he applied it to a chimney that wouldn’t draw, the air rushed up that chimney so fast every stick of furniture in the room was sucked up with it.

They are now a vanishing breed, those famous tellers of tall tales in Maine. We should be grateful to the alert Maine Folklore Society for preserving some of those old stories.

Year: 1969