Romancing the Pioneers: ‘The Ballad of William Sycamore’

Homer Winslow expressed the joyful pioneer spirit in this 1858 wood engraving, "The Dance after the Husking." Public Domain

Of all our American poets, surely Stephen Vincent Benét (1898–1943) stands in the front ranks of those who wrote about our country’s past. “John Brown’s Body,” his 1928 epic about the Civil War, won him a Pulitzer, as did his posthumously published “Western Star,” his long narrative poem about pioneers and the settlement of the United States.

Many of his shorter poems about our country also won him garlands of praise and an audience. With his wife, Rosemary Carr, he wrote “A Book of Americans,” which is a collection of verse for children featuring Pocahontas, Columbus, Jesse James, Daniel Boone, and many more. His “American Names” remains a popular verse today with its signature last line, “Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.”

In addition, Benét gave us short stories based on the American past, of which the best-known is “The Devil and Daniel Webster.” In this tale of a New England farmer who sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for success on his farm, we meet a jury composed of infamous Americans “with the fires of hell still upon them” and receive a mini-lesson about wicked men from our nation’s history. This story was later produced for the theater, radio, television, and motion pictures. Another of Benét’s stories, “The Sobbin’ Women,” which transposed the tale of the Romans and their abduction of the Sabine women to the American frontier days, was later made into the hit film “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.”

One of the songs in this musical contains a clever play on words—"The Sobbin' Women"—that will clue the viewer in on what inspired "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers": the Roman tale of the Sabine Women. Public Domain

To capture the exuberance, clear-eyed patriotism, and descriptive powers of this poet, there is no better work than his 1922 poem, “The Ballad of William Sycamore.”

Portraits in Miniature

My father, he was a mountaineer, His fist was a knotty hammer; He was quick on his feet as a running deer, And he spoke with a Yankee stammer.

My mother, she was merry and brave, And so she came to her labor, With a tall green fir for her doctor grave And a stream for her comforting neighbor.

So begins William Sycamore’s account of his life. Right off the bat, the poet captures our attention with his rollicking verse and incisive description. Immediately, we know that here are a husband and wife who are fiercely independent, spirited, and brave. The young William is introduced from birth to this same life of pioneer grit, “cradled on twigs of pine/ And the skin of a mountain lion.”

Later, with a family of his own, William introduces readers to his sons:

They were right, tight boys, never sulky or slow, A fruitful, a goodly muster. The eldest died at the Alamo. The youngest fell with Custer.

Again, in just a few words, Benét gives us the measure of his subject characters. “Right, tight boys” is a grand summation of sons any parent would be proud to claim as their own. Here a mild objection is in order, as the deaths of two of those sons—the first at the Alamo (1836) and the last on the Little Big Horn River (1876)—are chronologically unlikely. We must assume that Benét indulged himself in this poetic license to mark two significant dates from the Old West.

"The Fall of the Alamo," by Robert Jenkins Onderdonk, depicts Davy Crockett's last stand against the Mexican Gen. Santa Anna and his men. Public Domain

My personal favorite of these descriptions belongs to the mother of these boys, William’s wife. He has come into his manhood and gone west, “as far as a scout could travel,” when he meets this woman:

Till I lost my boyhood and found my wife, A girl like a Salem clipper! A woman straight as a hunting-knife With eyes as bright as the Dipper!

The exclamation marks indicate William’s joy and delight in her, and in his brief description is a young woman who would likely appeal to any man. The “Salem clipper” refers to the sleek sailing vessels of the time, and those eyes “bright as the Dipper” not only reveal a sparkling and joyful girl but also are an indication of the direction she brings to William’s life, since the Big Dipper leads to the North Star.

The Lives They Led

In the first eight stanzas of his ballad, Benét vividly paints some impressions of frontier life. We learn that William grew up in “the Bloody Ground of Kentucky,” a state nickname that native Americans used to dissuade white settlers from exploring Kentucky. In the early 20th century, the moniker still had widespread recognition. From his boyhood, William recollects “a coonskin cap/ And the smell of bayberry candles.” There are “cabin logs, with the bark still rough,” and “the tall, lank visitors, brown as snuff,/ With their long, straight squirrel-rifles.”

In describing the square dances from his boyhood, William creates a fine picture of pioneers at play:

I can hear them dance, like a foggy song, Through the deepest one of my slumbers, The fiddle squeaking the boots along And my father calling the numbers.

The quick feet shaking the puncheon-floor, And the fiddle squealing and squealing, Till the dried herbs rattled above the door And the dust went up to the ceiling.

With the exception of the puncheon planking, which were floors made from split logs hewn smooth on one side with the rough side facing the earth, and the drying herbs on the ceiling (a common pioneer practice), some of today’s readers may have experienced this same squealing of fiddles and a caller announcing the dance steps, and can relate well to this scene.

Details from this pioneer life illuminate the rest of the narrative. When William sets out to make his own life in the West, he carries his father’s “great, old powder-horn,” and wears a “leather shirt to cover my back/ And a redskin nose to unravel/ Each forest sign….” When he and his Salem-clipper wife travel westward, “Unheard-of streams were our flagons;/ And I sowed my sons like the apple-seed/ On the trail of the Western wagons.”

The Death of a ‘Tired Fox’

At last an old man and grief-stricken “when they fenced the land,” William saddles an unbroken colt and dies when he “threw me down like a thunderbolt/ And rolled on me as I lay there.” His voice reaches us from beyond the grave. He says rather proudly, “I died in my boots like a pioneer,” and is now at peace lying in the “fat, black soil” of the prairie.

Caught at last in the snares of towns and civilization that had come to the West, William Sycamore rests with the buffalo. Here are the two final verses:

And my youth returns, like the rains of Spring, And my sons, like the wild-geese flying; And I lie and hear the meadow-lark sing And have much content in my dying.

Go play with the towns you have built of blocks, The towns where you would have bound me! I sleep in my earth like a tired fox, And my buffalo have found me.

Here, Benét has the old man mirror the thoughts found in Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Requiem”:

Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me: Here he lies where he longed to be; Home is the sailor, home from sea, And the hunter home from the hill.

We Could Do With Some Romance

Some who read Benét’s ballad may find that it romanticizes American pioneers and the westward movement, and I wholeheartedly agree. I offer that opinion not as a critique but as a compliment.

This short-lived poet did much to immortalize the pioneer years for generations to come. Public Domain

We could use a little more romanticizing when it comes to the past. The elixir of adventure, tribulations, and dreams experienced by our ancestors, when recollected, fires up our own imagination and ambitions. Too often we dwell on the warts and blemishes, the flaws and failings of those who came before us, forgetting to see their visions and their virtues, and those “eyes as bright as the Dipper.”

Our culture will always be in need of the virtues found in Stephen Benét’s idealized pioneer: independence, fortitude, and a zest for life. If a bit of romanticizing livens up such lessons as these from history, count me in.

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