***STORY OF THE MONTH***

COUSIN JACK* AND THE BUCCAS**

“Cousin Jack” came from Cornwall*** to mine the Comstock Lode in Nevada in the 1880’s. Hiding in his knapsack was a bucca, a Cornish hobgoblin, who had come from the deep coal mines in Southwestern England. The buccas prospered more than the miners did, and soon every deep mine in Nevada had one or two living in its walls.

When Cousin Jack ate his pasties**** at lunch, he always left a bite behind in the shaft for the buccas. Bad luck came for sure if he neglected his imp-friends: his tools got misplaced, his lamp went out suddenly, or gravel fell in his lunchpail. But if he fed the little beasties, they would tap inside the walls and warn him in time of an impending cave-in.

Englishmen claimed the ghosts of dead miners haunted the mines and tapped in the walls; Cornishmen knew it was actually the buccas.

And the tapping before a cave-in saved many a Cousin Jack’s life!

This variant © 1991/2012 by Richard and Judy Dockrey Young. All rights reserved.

NOTES:

*Cousin Jack: the Cornish version of John Doe; after immigrating to the U.S., Cornishmen who did not know each other would greet each other as “Cousin Jack” until they were introduced. Americans in the western mining towns talking about Cornishmen called them “Cousin Jacks.” It is NOT an insult name.

**Buccas: imps or sprites, named in post-pagan times for the pagan Sea God Bucca; sort of a Cornish version of leprechauns.

***Cornwall: the most southwesterly county in England, an area rich in coal mines [represented so well in John Ford’s 1941 film “How Green Was My Valley” (even though the film was in black-and-white) that made a young Roddy McDowell a star.] Englishmen’s joking references to Cornwall are roughly like Americans’ joking references to Timbuktu...it’s past the edge of the civilized world.

****pasties: semi-circular, folded-single-crust meat pies, like a Spanish empanada or an Italian calzone, (not like a round mince-meat pie from England which is baked in a pan and has a separate upper and lower crust.) Pastie is pronounced like the English words “past” and “ee,” NOT like “paste” and “ee,” which is a tassle worn by a strip-tease dancer.

This story was told to us by Fred and Vivian Hurlburt, storytellers from Golconda, Nevada, in 1990. Mrs Hurlburt pointed out that “while Nevada has many ghost towns, it doesn’t seem to have a lot of ghosts.”

Further Note: Judy and Richard try not to publish any story in which the footnotes are longer than the story itself. This is an exception!