A Tall Tale

From Dynamite Stories, Judith Williams, Transmontanus-
New Star Books, Vancouver, 2003

p. 85 How stories like this grow, how nuggets of fact are found, rearranged, transposed and beaten into, well I could go on, but the story is pure gold. Combine a Native curse, Volcanic Brown and his buried jars of nuggets and his missing body ... and what we have ... is an archetype.... [A] boy’s adventure and the missing girls’ tragedy. Remember the teen-age girls? They never returned from their journeys with Slumach.
...
The constant is the tall tale, containing just enough verifiable elements to undermine disbelief, and how it moves through groups, is transformed and persists.