Folk tales serve as a cultural binder of sorts, bringing people together with a fomented sense of shared identity. They’re also used as explainers, similarly to how mythology worked for ancient Greeks. American folk heroes are richly textured and many-layered: Contemporary characters like Paul Bunyan explained the creation of America’s rivers and lakes and served as inspiration for workers exposed to grueling conditions while carving a way West and extracting resources for trade or infrastructure. Other tales, like those of Sacagawea and Pocahontas, served as scapegoats for a version of American history that sidesteps the Native American genocide enacted by early colonists, Western explorers, and even the U.S. government.

For enslaved African Americans, folklore provided subjugated people with heroic tales of bravery, defiance, and escape from Br’er Rabbit to Stack-O-Lee. Native Americans had hundreds of stories rooted in folklore from the Sleeping Ute Mountain to Kokopelli. Many folk heroes such as Hugh Glass and Annie Oakley are based on actual people, while others are pure fiction such as the Maid of the Mist and Bud Billiken. These tall tales come in the form of nursery rhymes, children’s tales, mascots, and cautionary myths and speak to us of strength, perseverance, and the celebrated intrepidness of rugged American individualism.

As is the case with any hero, much of American folklore features flawed characters. Some would certainly be villains today, whether Billy the Kid for his unchecked aggression against officers of the law or Hannah Duston for her violent slaughter of Native Americans.

Stacker scoured American history and mythology from books, news accounts, history lessons, and journal articles to curate a diverse gallery of 25 American folk heroes and the stories behind them. Some are well-known characters like Johnny Appleseed and Molly Pitcher, and others are much more obscure.

See how many you already know, and read on to learn about all the rest.

You may also like: "I have a dream" and the rest of the greatest speeches of the 20th century

Br’er Rabbit is a character with roots in African folklore who hit the mainstream when a white man, Joel Chandler Harris, published “Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings,” a collection of stories told to him as a child by “Uncle Remus,” an elderly man who had been enslaved his entire life. Br’er Rabbit is known as a trickster, getting his way with debatably questionable ethics and reverse psychology (asking for any punishment from Br’er Fox except to be thrown into the briar patch, which is of course exactly where Br’er Rabbit wishes to go). Publishing the tales undoubtedly served as a way to archive them and share them with the world, however, there has been much debate around whether Harris unfairly cashed in on Uncle Remus’ stories.

Some scholars have argued that those who see Br’er Rabbit as amoral have it all wrong and that, in fact, Br’er Rabbit represents a world where friendship and ethical boundaries are highly valued, and his stories served as inspiration for enslaved people seeking a means of survival.

Johnny Appleseed of American folklore was a bohemian eccentric who wandered the countryside in a tin-pot hat while planting apple trees. The character is based on a real man named John Chapman, a religious extremist born in 1774 in Massachusetts.

Chapman’s father, widowed while fighting the Revolutionary War, came home to care for his family. He taught Chapman to farm, and when the boy was older he apprenticed at an apple orchard. At that time, all it took to stake land as your own was to plant at least 50 apple trees. So Chapman did just that—across Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia—while handing out religious pamphlets and claiming the land as he went. He returned to Massachusetts as needed to restock his supply. Chapman resold parcels of property to white settlers as the trees grew. He still owned 1,200 acres when he died in 1845.

Many of us remember the story about Molly Pitcher, brave wife of a Revolutionary War soldier who carried pitchers of water to men at the Battle of Monmouth in 1778. According to legend, she also used water to cool the cannon and took her husband’s place among the gun crew when he couldn’t fight anymore (either due to collapsing or injury). The mythology paints a picture of American determination and loyalty to country by men and women on the battlefield.

The folk hero and her story came 100 years after the end of the Revolutionary War, and the person Molly Pitcher is supposedly based on—Mary Ludwig Hays McCarthy—doesn’t appear in any records (nor does her husband) of that time or location. In fact, Molly Pitcher is widely considered a “composite figure” of different women who did perform duties during the revolution such as bringing water to soldiers.

There was, however, another woman by a similar name who existed around that time but who lived further north and had a starkly different reputation. Moll Pitcher was a fortune-teller in Massachusetts whom sailors visited for insights before going out to sea.

The John Henry ballads that gained popularity in the 1870s tell a story of a highly skilled Black railroad worker who could drill into mountainsides faster than machines to make way for explosives used to blast open railroad paths. As the folklore goes, the steel-driver outran a steam-powered drill, digging a 14-foot hole to the machine’s nine feet before it quit. At the conclusion of the contest, John Henry dropped dead from overexertion.

The folk hero is lauded for his strength, determination, and grit, and “John Henry” is one of the most-covered folk songs in American history. But there’s more to the folklore than one might expect—namely, that the story is likely true. In his book, “Steel Drivin' Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of an American Legend,” historian Scott Reynolds Nelson posits that John Henry served as a Union soldier before being arrested for theft while working in Richmond, Virginia. Henry and other inmates from the Virginia State Penitentiary were put on work detail blasting tunnels to make way for the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway, which was being run directly through the Allegheny Mountains.

Nelson found records of Henry’s name on assignments for drilling the Lewis Tunnel section of the C&O Railway in West Virginia. The trail runs cold in 1874, suggesting Henry died while working. Even the ballad lyrics—“They took John Henry to the white house, and buried him in the san’,”—point to a clue, as the penitentiary’s front was painted white at the time.

Henry and his crew were indeed likely to have worked faster than the machines doing the same work, as the machines were notorious for failing. Nelson did make one distinction, which is that rather than overexertion, Henry was more likely to have died from silicosis, a lung disease caused by breathing in silicon dust broken loose during boring through the mountainous rock, which killed hundreds of workers at the time.

One of the most universally recognizable characters of American folklore, Paul Bunyan became the mythological hero of lumber camps during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Folklore tells us he was born a giant and gifted a large blue Ox named Babe for his first birthday. The two eventually set out into the wilderness to clear forests. The lumberjack is credited with carving out the Colorado River while dragging his axe behind him and the Great Lakes when he dug out watering holes for Babe.

Bunyan’s character is most likely based on a real French-Canadian logger called Fabian “Joe” Fournier, who was born in 1845 in Quebec, Montreal. Fournier came to the States following the Civil War, settling in Michigan in order to capitalize on lucrative logging gigs at the time. He was highly respected and feared by other loggers, gaining a reputation for being tall (6 feet) and baring two sets of teeth (supposedly). Fournier was 30 when he was hit in the head with a mallet during a fight and died. Rumors and tall tales about Fournier persisted and, over time, intermingled with those about Bon Jean, another war hero from Canada.

Red River Lumber Company in 1914 paid William Laughead to illustrate pamphlets about Bunyan for an advertising campaign that went viral. Soon there were Bunyan books, comics, and a lasting place in American folklore for the giant.

You may also like: What marriage was like the year you were born

Harriet Tubman more than earned her nickname of “Moses” from abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. While the hero of the Underground Railroad has had her story embellished as much as any folk legend, the crux of Tubman’s story is entirely true.

Born enslaved in Bucktown, Maryland, and named Araminta Ross, she married John Tubman, a free Black man, in 1844 and escaped Maryland for Philadelphia in 1849. She was helped along the way by members of the Underground Railroad and vowed to return to rescue her loved ones.

Return she did, rescuing 70 friends and family in all through repeated trips back to Maryland. To get back and forth, Tubman navigated by rivers and stars, wore disguises and used bribery, and sang two songs—“Go Down Moses” and “Bound for the Promised Land”—at different speeds to indicate when it was safe for people who were hiding while awaiting her arrival to come out.

Hugh Glass, on whom the 2015 film “The Revenant” is based, was a legendary fur trapper who made his way hundreds of miles after being left for dead following a bear attack. The mythology of the frontiersman’s survival begins with a simple goal of revenge and turns into a lesson in forgiveness for those who left him behind.

Kiviuq is an adored wanderer and heroic shaman from Inuit mythology, among Greenland, Canada, and Alaska. The compassionate hero—who also has an uncanny ability to stave off sea monsters—travels by foot, dog sled, kayak, and occasionally by fish, and is as heroic as he is cunning. His origin story legend comes in many parts that include rich, descriptive tales running the gamut from thwarting witch attacks and outsmarting bears to disguising himself as a seal. The stories also function as creation tales for natural phenomenon such as fog.

Annie Oakley was born Phoebe Ann Moses in 1860 in rural Ohio. From a young age, she preferred hunting and trapping with her father over playing with dolls or other hobbies traditionally considered more appropriate for little girls. Oakley claimed to have made her first shot at 8 years old (she shot a squirrel off the fence in her family’s front yard), and the rest, as they say, is history. Her kills were sold to a nearby grocery store that in turn sold the meat to Cincinnati establishments; one was a hotel where the innkeeper was so impressed with Oakley, he set up a contest between the 15 year old and traveling entertainer and sharpshooter Frank Butler.

Butler hit 24 of the 25 live bird targets; Oakley hit all 25. The two were married the following summer in August 1876 and went on the road together, most famously performing with Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show for 17 years. Things were put on hold when Oakley was partially paralyzed in a train accident, but she returned to show business and lived until 1926. A fictionalized version of her life’s story is the basis for the Broadway musical “Annie Get Your Gun.”

Few frontiersmen can hold a candle to the life and times of Wild Bill Hickok, a vigilante of the Wild West who served as a sheriff and marshall and hung around with the likes of Buffalo Bill Cody and Calamity Jane. The famed Wild Bill was widely known as the best shot in the West and is credited with shooting down around 100 bad guys throughout his tenure.

Hickok today is largely remembered as a hard-lined sharpshooter, thanks largely to an exaggerated 1867 article in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine that cast his celebrity coast-to-coast and around the world. In truth, Wild Bill was in his lifetime also a respected Civil War spy and scout who was soft-spoken and quite polite.

You may also like: Scientific breakthroughs from the year you were born