“The Cowboy,” by Frederick Remington, 1902
7 June 2023
Hell bent features in a number of slang phrases. To be hell bent is to be doggedly determined, and to ride or go hell for leather or hell bent for leather (or election) is to travel fast and recklessly. The etiology of hell bent is straightforward enough, a metaphor for being on a path that will end up in the bad place, but the additions of leather and election are seemingly nonsensical. And unfortunately, as is often the case with such phrases, the recorded history of the terms doesn’t offer much insight.
We see hellishly bent pop up in the c.1566 play The Bugbears. In the scene in question two men are discussing marriage plans:
Brancatius her father is content but my master Amedeus is so hellishely bent on the muck of this world, on his pelfe & his drosse that of three thousand crownes he wyll not bate a crosse of rownd redy payment in dowry to bringe with her.
But this use of hellishly bent appears to be a simple collocation of words, rather than the use of a set phrase. There are no other recorded uses of a similar phrase for several centuries.
The Oxford English Dictionary includes the following alleged use of hell bent in Ebenezer Cooke’s 1731 poem The Maryland Muse:
Of Ab-origines in Arms,
Who far and near did then resort,
In Haste to Susquehanna Fort,
Hell bent [Full bent?] on Thoughts of Massacre,
To cut off ev’ry Marylander.
I haven’t been able to verify it, however. While a number of transcriptions of the poem use hell bent, every scan that I have found of the 1731 edition clearly reads full bent. But these scans are all of a revised, third edition. It is possible that hell was expurgated from this printing and the original did indeed use hell bent.
But hell bent is definitely in use by 1824, when it appears in a story titled The Mohawk Chief:
It was then, that casting his eyes through the window by which he sate [sic], he discovered that he was in the midst of a large encampment of savages, hideously painted, and “hell-bent” on carnage.
We get the first of the nonsensical variants by 1882, when hell bent for election appears in a delightfully comic story about a drunk billy goat. Printed in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on 2 January 1882, it evidently appeared earlier in the San Francisco Post, but I have been unable to find that article:
“Yes, sir; and this morning, as it was rather sultry, I sent my youngest boy for a gallon of beer. He stopped on the way and put the can down to play marbles. McGinty’s old black billy-goat came along and drank up the beer—every drop of it.”
“Great Caesar!” said the court reporter, smacking his lips regretfully.
“He drank every drop of it, and nearly choked to death on the can. He stood blinking around a little for a while; then he started for a street car, with all colors set. He hit the horse square amidship, and it foundered at once.”
“Wrecked, I suppose?” said the editor.
“Precisely. The goat then glanced off, killed the driver and telescoped the car. I was sitting at the window all this time, and my attention was attracted by Gov. Perkins going down the street hell bent for election.”
“Gov. Perkins?”
“That’s the goat’s name, you see. McGinty is a strong Republican. There were four men getting a piano out of a wagon across the strreet [sic] when the Governor went through ’em like a pile driver behind time. The Steinway was sent to the manufactory and the men to the hospital. Terrible, wasn’t it?”
The fact that the goat was named for a governor—George Perkins was the Republican governor of California, 1880–83—hints that hell bent for election was already in use in reference to politicians doggedly determined to win office. And the political connection is made stronger by a one-line note appearing in the Buffalo Evening News on 10 September 1894: “Maine goes ‘hell bent for election’ today.” That day was election day in Maine that year.
And we see hell bent for election used in a context completely divorced from politics in a 15 July 1898 letter by an American sailor onboard a warship in the Spanish-American War, published in Michigan’s Jackson Daily Citizen:
As we sat around the deck waiting for the clouds (not to “roll by,” but to [“]unload”) and grumbled at our inactivity, we were suddenly greeted with the cry, “sail ho,” and away we went after her, “hell bent for election,” as Jud Smith used to say.
The variant hell for leather is attested a few years later. Why leather is unknown, although the OED includes a bracketed (i.e., not the same phrase, but perhaps related to it) citation to an 1881 glossary of dialect terms from the Isle of Wight off the south coast of England:
Hellfalleero. “They be aal quarlun and fightun hellfalleero.”
We see hell for leather in Rudyard Kipling’s 1890 The Story of the Gadsbys, a tale written as dramatic dialogue:
Capt. M.—(Jealously.) Then don’t say it! Leave him alone. It’s not bade enough to croak over. Here, Gaddy, take the chit to Bingle and ride hell-for-leather. It’ll do you good. I can’t go.
Junior Chaplain.—Do him good! (Smiling.) Give me the chit and I’ll drive. Let him lie down. Your horse is blocking my cart—please!
Capt. M.—(Slowly, without reining back.) I beg your pardon—I’ll apologize. On paper if you like.
Junior Chaplain.—(Flicking M.’s charger.) That’ll do, thanks. Turn in, Gadsby, and I’ll bring Bingle back—ahem—“hell-for-leather.”
While it’s possible that hellalleero could have morphed into hell for leather, the existence of the election variant casts doubt on this origin. Why leather? It’s anyone’s guess. Perhaps it has something to do with a horse’s tackle, the saddle, reins, etc., which are typically made of leather. That still doesn’t make much sense, but at least there’s some kind of logical connection.
And we get hell bent for leather by 1912, when it appears in the 31 October issue of the Riverside Enterprise:
When Becker took the family name and guaranteed to keep the same from shame and stain and blame in every kind of weather, he never dreamed the time was near when everyone he held most dear would look at him through eyes of fear and run hell bent for leather.
The gap in our knowledge of the phrase’s origins is unsatisfying, and hell bent for election/leather doesn’t make sense, but that’s the way with such idioms. Because such phrases come into common oral use before they appear in the published record, their origins are often murky. And language is not logical, or at least the logic driving an idiom’s coinage and spread is often lost in that murk of history.
Sources:
Buffalo Evening News (New York), 10 September 1894, 2/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
The Bugbears (c.1566). Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, vol. 98, Braunschweig: George Westermann, 1897, 1.2a, lines 49–53, 308. London, British Library MS Lansdowne 807, fols. 57–77. Archive.org.
Cooke, Ebenezer. The Maryland Muse, third edition. Annapolis, 1731, 1. Gale Primary Sources: Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Clark, James D. The Bugbears: A Modernized Edition. New York: Garland, 1979. Archive.org.
Dodd, Derrick “A Goat’s Spree.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 2 January 1882, 2/5. Reprinted from the San Francisco Post. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2023, hell bent, adj., hell, n.
Kipling, Rudyard. The Story of the Gadsbys. New York: John W. Lovell, 1890, 149. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
“Letter from a Member of the Michigan Naval Reserves (15 July 1898).” Jackson Daily Citizen (Michigan), 29 July 1898, 2/4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
“Little Enterprises.” Riverside Enterprise (California), 31 October 1912, 10.2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
“The Mohawk Chief.” The Port Folio (Philadelphia), March 1824, 179. Gale Primary Sources: American Historical Periodicals.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2008, hell-bent, adj. and adv., hellishly, adv., hell, n. and int.
Smith, Henry and C. Roach Smith. “Isle of Wight Words.” Original Glossaries, English Dialect Society. London: Trübner, 1881, 15. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Image credit: Frederick Remington, 1902. Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.