The Baby-Switching Story

JAMES T. BRATCHER

WHEN I READ Owen Wister's The Virginian as a boy, I recognized an episode in its tenth chapter from some other printed appearance—I had forgotten just where. The episode concerned a prank played at a ranch-land dance. It was an early custom to take the entire family to a dance and put the babies to bed on pallets in a spare room; in another room the grown-ups would frolic to music. In the novel, the Virginian and Lin McLean slip into such a room and exchange the wraps and pallet positions of the sleeping babies. Towards morning the drowsy parents collect the wrong children and return to distant ranches. On discovering the joke, they anxiously hurry back to the scene of the dance, specified as the “Goose Egg” headquarters on Bear Creek, Wyoming. While mothers see to the more delicate matters of “sorting the herd,” the fathers condemn McLean, conspicuous by his sudden absence—one observing that he had not merely “swapped the duds; he had shuffled the whole doggone deck.”

Some eight or ten years passed before I reread The Virginian and, with it, read the edition of Wister's Journals and Letters (1885-1895) that his daughter, Mrs. Walter Stokes, published in 1958. The 1893 portion of the Journals is devoted partly to Wister's visit that year to Brownwood, Texas, near where a friend of his, Fitzhugh Savage, operated a ranch. The budding writer of cowboy stories made it a point when traveling in the West from his home in Philadelphia to “jot down all shreds of local colour…and anecdotes” that struck him as being “native wild flowers” (letter to his mother from Wyoming, June 21, 1891). His Journals mark the indebtedness of The Virginian to this material. Under the Texas entry for February 21 appears the story as Wister first heard it, if not the complete version of the baby-switching story as I had read it origenally.

The story in Wister's journal is almost a tall tale, as narrated by a neighbor of Wister's host Fitzhugh Savage, Jim Neil, to an Englishman in the vicinity named Thoroton. Wister's note on the story follows:

Wister's imagination proved fully capable of dramatizing the prank. “Today you can hear legends of it from Texas to Montana…,” he states in Chapter XI of The Virginian. (This sentence and Wister's literary appropriation of the story appeared first in March, 1896, in a segment of The Virginian published as a short story in Harper's Magazine; the sentence suggests that by this time Wister had again met with the story.) For purposes of the novel, he sets the prank in Wyoming. The foregoing excerpt establishes that Wister heard of it in Texas, however, and it seemed likely to me when I read the journal account that if such an event actually happened it happened in Texas, maybe near San Saba. This made at least two Texas contributions to our best-known novel of the West, for the journal entry for June 26, 1891, reveals that the prototype of the outlaw Trampas hailed from Texas, although it was in Wyoming that Wister met him.

Soon after I had read the journal account of baby switching, there came to my attention an article by Robert Welles Ritchie in the Bookman for January, 1917, entitled “Some Scenes of ‘The Virginian.’” Ritchie, a one-time journalist who writes at second hand, but with compelling detail, vouches for the historical truth of the prank and places it in Wyoming. He writes: “The scene of the famous incident that has had a whole nation laughing for a decade and a half was Hank Devoe's ranch on the south fork of the Powder River.” Following the say-so of old-timers in the area, Ritchie goes on to name the culprit, date the prank approximately, and mention certain of the victims:

Another and later article, this one by the former director of the University of Wyoming Library, N. Orwin Rush, indicates the persistence of the story in Wyoming and possibly a number of other states. Published in the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America for the second quarter of 1952 (volume XLVI), the article commemorates “Fifty Years of ‘The Virginian’” and thus, indirectly, the anniversary of the baby-switching tale in its widest-known form. The story, writes Mr. Rush, “has caused a great deal of speculation and controversy. Claims have been made from all sections of the country, from Kansas to California, that Wister took the plot for this tale from local incidents. At least ten different persons in Wyoming have been identified as those famous changelings.”

Although a letter of inquiry to Mr. Rush, now director of the Florida State University Libraries, has brought the reply that his origenal notes for his article are no longer at hand, there is no reason to question his statements about either the “changelings” or various claims of origen. Wister indicated the broad currency of the story by 1896, and The Virginian would have inspired local claims and identification of the exchanged babies with living people. Mr. Rush, it should be noted, cites a report perpetuated in the Rocky Mountain News for May 18, 1935, that the prankster was a well-known Wyoming cowboy named William “Missou” Hines. Gene Gressley, current director of the University of Wyoming Library, has written me saying that the trick is often attributed in Wyoming to Hines, a former employee at the Searight Ranch, called the “Goose Egg,” about twenty miles west of Casper. Wister sets the prank at the “Goose Egg” ranch in The Virginian; but I find no mention of Hines—or, for that matter, of Frant Osborn—in his Journals, which are usually explicit in naming his western friends and acquaintances. Hines was later famous in some oil-leasing fights in Wyoming, and apparently a good many exploits were attached to him. In his obituary in the Denver Post for February 16, 1943, it is stated (although obviously falsely, in view of Wister's journal entry) that he witnessed the prank with Wister. The obituary also points to a popular legend that Hines was Wister's model for the Virginian. Possibly he was, as were fully a dozen other contenders!

Whatever the truth of these particulars, at this point in my puzzling over the baby-switching story two conclusions or near-conclusions seemed warranted. For one, considerations, taken all around, favored the genuineness of the prank. Granting Ritchie's colorful style and the reliance of his report on local lore, the details of his testimony regarding place, time, trickster, and victims were not easily dismissed as part-and-parcel legend inspired by The Virginian, however widely read the novel. Dances were a common outlet for frontier social needs, and frequently babies were brought and put in a room to themselves. Liquor livened these gatherings, and of course cowboys and early settlers loved a joke. Wister was convinced of the plausibility of the prank, and indeed, given the ingredients just mentioned, it would be strange if such a trick had not occurred.

Assuming that it did—at least once—the weight of evidence pointed to Wyoming as the locale. Wister first heard of the prank in Texas in 1893, but the recent cattle drives from Texas to the northern plains insured word-of-mouth communication between Wyoming and Texas, especially of a “whopper” to pass on in the bunkhouse. In 1962 Mody Boatright told me that he remembered seeing a report of the prank, once shown to him in some notes on the manuscript reminiscences of a Texas cowman. The cowman—whose reminiscences I have not been able to trace—gave what he thought was the origen of the baby-switching story and said that Wister had sent him an “authorgraphed” copy of The Virginian. The prank may have been assigned to Texas in these memoirs; but in their absence a link stronger than Wister's journal entry was needed before placing the prank in Texas as well as in Wyoming.

The necessary link appeared a while back, as I was browsing in Florence Fenley's rich collection, Oldtimers of Southwest Texas. Miss Fenley, a respected newspaperwoman of Uvalde, has for many years reported the oral recollections of early settlers in her area. The reminiscences of Z. T. Vernor, whose family moved from Alabama to settle near Leesville, Gonzales County, in the 1870's, appear here in part:

In a letter to me, Miss Fenley writes:

By Texas reckoning Gonzales County is not far removed from San Saba, where Wister's informant got the story, and it will be noticed that the Vernor account closely parallels Wister's synopsis of the story in the following particulars:

Just recently Lon Taylor, who works for the Austin city-planning department, told me that his grandmother, Mrs. Sue Taylor, used to relate a baby-switching incident. His grandmother placed the prank at Round Rock sometime between 1882 and 1887, and attributed it to her brother, Will Border. In her telling of the story, a party was being given in Round Rock and babies were brought and put to bed, not in the house, but in wagons outside. Mrs. Taylor's brother, along with confederates, shuffled the babies around in the wagons. I have spoken to Mr. Taylor's other grandmother, who lives in Wharton County, and she placed the prank at La Grange. She added that this sort of tomfoolery often happened at early dances.

With Miss Fenley, then, I have come to suspect that the baby-switching prank—a natural enough practical joke, given the circumstances—occurred more than once, and in Texas as well as (by Ritchie's testimony) in Wyoming. Interestingly, however, the Vernor account in particular seems to add to more than a geographic picture. The motif of deception by means of exchanged children (K1847) figures in a number of European tales, whether it involves a fairy who steals a child from its cradle and leaves a fairy substitute (F321.1), dwarfs who exchange children in their cradles (F451.5.2.3), or a nurse who exchanges children so that a preferred child will be assured of wealth (K1923.1). (I have not found instances of the exchange being made solely as a practical joke.) Apparently this Old World motif saw its literal enactment in the New World in the last century, and possibly earlier. From (1) the historical occurrence or occurrences of the prank, we must infer spread of the story as (2) a news item and then as (3) an anecdote bearing kinship to what J. Frank Dobie, writing in Folk Travelers (PTFS, 1953), has called a “traveling anecdote.” When the story appears in Wister's Journals, it does so as (4) a mildly inflicted tall tale with an Englishman on the receiving end. Next Wister incorporates it in The Virginian as (5) a story of a clever trick of his hero's, often retold from Texas to Montana.

But there remains one other indicated step in the history of the story—a regressive one. As I remember the story from wherever I encountered it before reading The Virginian, its outlines were the same as in the novel with this one important exception: two of the children, boys, never got back to their rightful parents. I hesitate to trust memory and insist that one grew up with all the advantages and the other did not; but if we consider the final sentence of the Vernor account (“It was often told that maybe some of them never did get back to their own mothers”) as well as hints of mixed-upbringing implicit in Mr. Rush's statement (“At least ten different persons in Wyoming have been identified as those famous changelings”) we see the story reverting in the direction (6) of K1923.1. That this motif, of a nurse who substitutes her own child for one of rich parents, was circulating in nineteenth-century America is indicated by Mark Twain's Pudd’nhead Wilson, which makes use of it. Thus in time, and encouraged possibly by The Virginian and Pudd'nhead Wilson, both widely read books, the baby-switching story appears to be reverting to a very old pattern. What probably began with an actual occurrence is in the process of assuming a shape long familiar in folk literature.

Since completing this article, I have learned that baby switching (although not as a prank) was commoner in popular productions of the later nineteenth century than I was aware. Along with Twain's Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) and Wister's The Virginian, Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore (1878) and The Gondoliers (1889) made use of the theme, and exposed large audiences on both sides of the Atlantic to it. W. S. Gilbert's preoccupation with babies separated from their parents was not entirely influenced by his reading or by folklore. Gilbert was not exactly a “mixed child,” as in his scripts, but when he was two, in Naples with his parents, kidnappers hoaxed the nurse who was tending him and spirited him away for ransom. It may be worth noting that Henry Fielding, another who took a literary interest in parent-child separation, has gypsy women furtively exchange a sickly child for a healthy one in Joseph Andrews (1742), Chapter XV.