In those days, stealing horses was esteemed about as highly as dealing drugs is today, and the punishment was appreciably more swift. Years later, Granddad Post, now settled and prosperous, decided to trace his assuredly respectable family tree, his father among other things having fought honorably for the South at Shiloh. Like so many stories, this one resonates on more than one level. It says to the impressionable young listener that a measure of skepticism is in order when people strut their stories, and that a sense of irony and a capacity for self-satire are likewise in order when we compose our own. The story we would like to tell could be wrong, and we should not be all that surprised if it is.
Appearances are one thing, reality often another.
Many of the stories we inherit are metaphysical, in the sense that they are about the origins, the nature, the meaning, and the unity of the world. In West Texas, the inherited metaphysical story in the 1880's was drawn largely from Scripture. The world was created by God only a few thousand years ago, its plant and animal species much as they are now, its human beings dual in nature, having a material, corruptible body and an immaterial, immortal soul. The meaning of life was to be found in these terms or not at all. Hence people resisted anything that might undermine the fundamental story, including above all the accumulating evidence from the sciences for a much older earth, an earth on which all species, humans included, appear and evolve by purely natural means.