him, but when the foreman fell he had knocked over the last carboy of
alcohol, and the liquor poured over the nostrils of the blue ox and
trickled into his mouth. He groaned, he stirred, his legs quivered.
Then he sat up, looking eagerly about for more. He soon spied, through
the open door of the office, the glitter of the other containers of
liquor. Slowly, painfully, he staggered to his feet. His tongue lolling
feverishly, he stumbled towards the office. A desperate swing of his
horns crashed in the side of the building, a flirt of his hoofs knocked
the tops from the remaining carboys, and in nineteen minutes he had
emptied them all. A vat of Epsom salts was cleaned up in seven gulps,
barrels of pills and capsules, and cartons of powders were quickly
devoured; in half an hour there was nothing left of the old time
medicines of Johnny Inkslinger but splinters and broken glass.
Then the alcohol began to surge through the veins of the blue ox. The
frisky, exuberant spirit of his healthy days returned. He pranced and
sashayed. He lifted his tail and bellowed. His breath came in snorts as
he lightly pawed the ground. For a time he was content with such merry
gamboling, frolicking and romping about, then he felt a sentimental
longing for Paul Bunyan and his mates of the woods, and he started out
to find them. But the alcohol mounted to his head, it dimmed his eyes,
and he lost the trail. He wandered into the Wet Desert country and was
caught in a terrific rainstorm. He toiled stubbornly on, though his
befuddled senses had lost all sense of direction and he sank knee-deep
into the desert mud at every step. As he struggled ahead, weaving first
to the right, then to the left, then to the right again, water rolled
from his back and foamed in cataracts down his dragging tail. A river
coursed down the crooked path he left behind him. He grew weak again
after he had plowed through the mud for hours and the fever had left
his blood. When the storm passed his strength left him and he sought
rest on a high plateau.
There Paul Bunyan and the loggers found him, after a three weeks’
search which had begun when the Big Swede brought the news of his
disappearance. At first the loggers were sure he was dead, and groans
of sorrow rose in dismal thunders from the vast host. But Johnny
Inkslinger would not give up hope. He had repelled the lure of grand
ideas at last, and he had his old medicine case with him now. In a
moment he had emptied its store of alcohol and Epsom salts down Babe’s
throat. In a few minutes the blue ox opened his eyes. The loggers
frantically cheered. Babe answered them with a bellow that threw even
the loggers on the farthest hills to the ground. Though the blue ox was
thin and feeble still, the vitality of health was in his voice again.
“He is cured!” said Paul Bunyan.
“He is cured!” shouted the loggers, as they scrambled to their feet.
“Yah,” said the Big Swede blissfully.
Johnny Inkslinger alone said nothing. He, too, was cured.
Say the old loggers:
Ever since he took his drunken course through the Wet Desert a stream
has flowed down the crooked trail made by the blue ox. It is called
Snake River in all the geographies. The great whale corral is known
as Coos Bay. And Babe’s unfinished grave has become the islands and
waters of Pugent Sound. The Cascade Mountains of Washington were made
from the dirt thrown up by the loggers and Paul Bunyan when they began
to dig the grave, and a bitter dispute still rages regarding the name
for the loftiest peak. The loggers and the people of Seattle call it
Mt. Bunyan, the people of Tacoma and the Indians call it Mt. Tacoma,
and the geographers and tourists have named it Mt. Rainier, after the
weather, which is rainier there than in any other part of the country.
So say the old loggers.
And loggers are truthful men.
NEW IOWA
Paul Bunyan, a historian first, an industrialist second, an inventor
third, an orator fourth, was perhaps an artist in the fifth degree of
his importance. Most authorities among the loggers of to-day insist
that he was a great man of only four parts; they declare there was
no art in him. The authorities of the classroom, less reverent and
generous in their judgments, refuse to consider him as more than an
industrialist; but the professors must be doubted a little, because
they are certainly jealous of the great logger’s simple eloquence and
his popularity with the plain people.
In the camps I have heard college loggers quote a teacher whom they
called Professor Sherm Shermson as follows: “Fellows, there is no use
talking. Paul Bunyan was a conscientious logger, I guess. Maybe he
wrote _big_ histories but, fellows, he didn’t write _great_ histories.
And his inventions were only useful in his logging operations; not one
of them has become a universal boon to humanity. I expect he could make
a right good speech; but, mark this point now, there is a _difference_
between a right good speech and eloquence. Eloquence, fellows, must
have morals and ideals in it to _be_ eloquence. And as Paul Bunyan had
French-Canadian blood, I must believe that his orations had more of
Latin emotionalism in them than of Real American ideals and morals.
I guess we’ll agree, fellows, that his Nordic foreman was a man of
greater moral force and of purer mind.”
I do not know the rest of the professor’s argument, as the college
loggers would listen to no doubts against the teachings of Professor
Sherm Shermson. So I would always leave them when they went too far in
their educated talk. Some might think that Professor Sherm Shermson
was misquoted by his boys; but the first thing college loggers hear
when they come to the woods is warnings about the dangers of telling
falsehoods in the bunkhouses; so it is probable that the words which
they attribute to Professor Sherm Shermson are typical of the teachings
about Paul Bunyan in American universities.
But so long as trees are felled the race of loggers will hold to a
staunch faith in Paul Bunyan as the supreme historian and maker of
history, the most resourceful inventor, and the most powerful orator,
as well as the most enterprising industrialist of all time. But they
too question his art. He appreciated the folk songs and tales of his
men, it is admitted, and he had his playhouses, wherein he painted and
sculped about. His Paint Pots are still to be seen in the Yellowstone,
and his wall painting in the Grand Canyon shows that he was clever
with the brush. Most of his sculpture was left unfinished, but it
is impressive, for all that. His beginnings for the busts of Johnny
Inkslinger and the Big Swede, the unfinished works in the Yosemite
which are called North Dome and Half Dome, plainly show that he was no
crude chiseler. But, it is no wonder that loggers have little to say
about their hero’s artistic creations, for these works had nothing to
do with the logging industry, and he had no help from his men in making
them. He only amused himself with art when he had no difficult labors
to perform. Then, it is known that he opposed the teaching and practice
of art among his loggers. He was particularly opposed to the writing
of poetry by his men. He encouraged the making of simple songs and the
telling of true tales by picked men, bunkhouse bards; but even these
favored minstrels dared not attempt the making of grand, grave and
lofty verse.
The earnest and reverent critic who studies Paul Bunyan will come to
reason, however, that the master logger’s Camp Rule 31,721, which
prohibited the writing of poetry, is no fair indication of his own
feeling for noble rimes; it only proves that he thought his loggers
no more fitted for the enjoyment of art than they were fitted for the
understanding of history or the comprehension of scientific inventions.
It is very probable that Paul Bunyan himself wrote tragic blank verse
in his exuberant youth, and happy hunting songs in his elder years of
discouragement. But he kept them to himself. He felt that all art was
dangerous for his loggers; he knew that poetry was especially so. This
he learned in his attempt to log off New Iowa. For there the loggers
all turned poets and nearly ruined the logging industry.
Paul Bunyan’s decision to move to New Iowa developed from the thought
that its healing climate would hasten the convalescence of Babe, the
blue ox, and that its orange palms would give his men the tough logging
which they sorely needed. Babe, having fallen sick, had been near
to perishing from Johnny Inkslinger’s new-fangled cures; but he was
saved when the camp doctor got sense and returned to his old-fashioned
reliable remedies. The blue ox was now cured, but he was far too weak
to begin hard labor at once. So his master was put to it to devise a
plan that would let Babe regain his strength and yet give natural labor
to the loggers.
Since leaving the Hickory Hill country, they had done little of the
grand work for which they were born. They had lost a great deal of
their innocent pride and self-respect in toiling with picks and
shovels; and Johnny Inkslinger’s abandonment of scientific medical
practice for medical oratory had shaken their faith in the integrity
of his knowledge and the scope of his power. In the time when he
had written his figures and made his cures without explaining and
glorifying them the loggers had regarded him as a worker of mysteries
and had been in great awe of him. But now that he had revealed his mind
from a soap box the loggers only remembered his eloquent boasts and his
failure to make good. Alcohol and Epsom salts seemed common to them
now, and they laughed at the camp doctor for having had to go back to
them.
Paul Bunyan heard them poking rough fun at Johnny Inkslinger’s folly on
their first night in the Oregon camp, after the return was made from
the Wet Desert country.
“In words there is a magic poison which is more powerful than the plain
substance of them,” mused Paul Bunyan. “This magic whips emotions and
stuns sense, and it overpowers any mind which is one part sense and
nine parts emotion. And these loggers of mine ... these loggers of
mine....”
Another clamor broke out in the bunkhouses, and Paul Bunyan, smiling
sadly, listened to hear what nonsense his men were talking now. The
bunkhouse cranks were the leaders in the new uproar, and when the
master logger heard their words and the applause that followed, his
eyebrows drew down in a frown which the moonlight could not penetrate,
and his eyes had a hard glitter in the shadows.
For the bunkhouse cranks were saying that it looked like logging
couldn’t last much longer now; the old blue ox was in a bad way and
it was hard to think he’d ever be himself again in this here world;
Johnny Inkslinger was getting so childish that he’d probably lose his
figuring power, just as he had blundered in his doctoring; and old Paul
himself--it looked like even he was losing his hold, as he had started
to dig Babe’s grave before the blue ox was even near dead. Old Paul
would never have given in that soon in the days on Onion River, said
the bunkhouse cranks. Things would surely go from bad to worse, they
agreed, and it was no use to look for the good old times to come back.
The same talk was going on in all the bunkhouses and the bards had
few cheerful arguments against it. The loggers were losing their old
innocent, exuberant, devil-may-care spirit.
Paul Bunyan sat down on six of the high hills above the whale corral,
pulled up a young fir tree and began to brush his beard and ponder. He
had no doubts of his own powers and he felt that Johnny Inkslinger was
as great as ever. The timekeeper’s recent obsessions and eccentricities
were due to the lowness of spirit, the stagnation of soul, which
comes sometime to all mental men. He was now recovered, and he would
certainly do his part in the making of logging history as well as
before, perhaps better. The trouble now was with the loggers. True men
of muscle, the best virtues for them to possess were unquestioning
loyalty and faithfulness to their leaders and simple confidence in
them. Oratory was good for them when it stimulated these virtues, but
ideas were poisonous; for they caused the loggers to become critics
and independent thinkers, and their minds were not fitted for such
occupations.
“Work and discipline will repair the damage,” decided Paul Bunyan.
“Work is the great consoler, for in it men forget the torments and
oppressions of life. And nothing is more tormenting and oppressive to
men of muscle than ideas. My loggers shall forget them. And strong
discipline shall release them from the troublous responsibilities of
independence. Again I shall have a camp of men who toil mightily and
make the hours between supper and sleep jolly with merry songs and
humorous tales.”
Saying this, Paul Bunyan rose and looked over the fir forest which
covered all the hills and threw shadows far over the silent waters
of the whale corral. The great logger regretted that he could not
remain here and fell these splendid trees; but something more than
plain logging was needed for his present purpose. A powerful task must
be set for his men, but a task that would not require arduous labor
from the blue ox. New Iowa best suited his need. There the climate was
as healing and mild as the one which Kansas had possessed before the
turnover of its sinfulness. Paul Bunyan’s maps showed that New Iowa had
great forests of orange palms in its valleys, and his samples proved
that these trees were tough cutting. The start for the New Iowa country
should be made at once.
Paul Bunyan went first to the camp office and called out the Big
Swede. He gave orders for Babe to be harnessed and hitched to the camp
buildings; then he called, “Roll out or roll up!” for the loggers. They
came out slowly, rubbing their eyes and expressing wonder, for they
had been sleeping only a short while. When their leader told them that
he was going to take them down to New Iowa they did not display their
usual childish excitement over a move; but they looked from one to
another with knowing grins and much eye-winking. The bunkhouse cranks
whispered, “Ol’ Paul’s off on another wild goose chase”; and some of
the boldest among them declared that they had never seen better logging
than the Oregon country offered, and if they had their way about it
they’d stay right here.
Paul Bunyan did not reprove them for their doubts and impertinent
remarks. With a shrewd show of patience and forbearance, he made them
a speech in which he cunningly portrayed their unreasoning enthusiasm
for Johnny Inkslinger’s new cures. Had it not been for their applause,
the timekeeper would have quickly abandoned his unscientific notions,
Paul Bunyan said, and the recent troubles would have been avoided. He
hoped they had learned a lesson, the leader continued, that they would
never again look for hurtful ideas in speeches, but for excitement,
jollity and contentment only, as that was the best that oratory could
give them. Their business was not to think, but to fell trees. They
were, beyond a doubt, the greatest tribe of loggers that would ever
march through the woods, he said in conclusion, and as Paul Bunyan’s
men they would have glory in history. But as thinkers they were no
better than prattling children.
“Back to your bunks!” ordered the leader-hero. “And I want no more
nonsense from you about ideas.”
The loggers, blushing with shame and contrition, were quick to obey;
and they all crawled under their blankets and hid their red faces.
The Big Swede had the buildings wired together by this time; the blue
ox was hitched to the cookhouse; Paul Bunyan, the foreman, and the
timekeeper took hold of the traces to help pull the long load, and the
start for New Iowa was made.
Babe had a hard pull over the mountains, and, with all the help that
was given him, he labored slowly up the slopes. He was wearied out when
the Tall Timber country was reached at dawn. Paul Bunyan stopped for a
rest, and the loggers came out to gaze upon the trees whose tops were
as lofty as the clouds. The great logger himself was delighted to
find trees that towered far above his head, and he got an overpowering
desire to try an ax and a saw on them. Here were trees that were too
tall and large for his loggers to work on; this timber was made for him
and it offered him the chance for the historical individual logging
accomplishment that he had always dreamed about. Paul Bunyan swore
loudly that, redeemed loggers or no redeemed loggers, cured ox or
uncured ox, he would send the camp on in charge of the Big Swede and
the timekeeper and enjoy a holiday of powerful, pleasant labor. So he
set up his workshop and built himself a crosscut saw that would span
even the largest trunks, he made a regulation felling ax of a size to
fit his hands, and he devised some wedges from Babe’s old ox shoes.
The next morning the camp was started on its way again; and as it left
the Tall Timber country the loggers looked back on the vanishing figure
of their hero-leader, and their eyes got dim, and a doleful loneliness
whispered in all their hearts.
“Paul Bunyan’s a good and mighty man,” they said sincerely.
Happily, New Iowa was a country of such enchanting colorful aspect that
the loggers were consoled when the camping place on Lavender River was
reached. There had lately been considerable argument in the bunkhouses
as to whether Kansas before the turnover of sinfulness was not a more
ideal country than that around the old home camp. But here was a land
which seemed to surpass both regions. The blue of the sky looked as
though it had been painted there, and the hills, too, huge heaps of
daisies, bluebells, poppies and buttercups, were out of a picture-book.
The river got its name from its lavender color, and its unblemished
stream curved delicately through the forests of orange palm, and the
meadows of pink clover, which were like vast but dainty rugs on the
valley floor. Pale green moss hung over the river banks to hide any
ugliness of soil, and mauve and lemon blooms of water lilies made a
lovely variance of color in the lavender water. The orange palms were
as tall as coconut palms, and they resembled them in shape also. The
foliage, blossoms and fruit were all in the thick crests of the tree
tops; the leaves and blooms were like those of the common orange trees
of to-day; the bark of some of the trees was purple, on others it was
gold, and a few had bark which was wine-red. All were now in heavy
bloom, and the forests were roofed with solid masses of white blossoms,
for the orange palms stood so close together that a logger could hardly
squeeze between their trunks.
All that day Paul Bunyan’s loggers wandered about, savoring the
deliciousness of the scene; at suppertime they could not eat, for the
odors of beans and stewed onions were repugnant, after breathing the
heavy-sweet fragrances of the drowsy New Iowa air. Nor could they enjoy
songs and stories that evening, for they still heard the canaries
singing among the orange blossoms. Neither could they sleep, for their
honest blankets seemed tough and unclean after their rollings of the
day on the pink clover and the daisies and buttercups.
But there was no poetry in the Big Swede’s soul, and he called them
out at sunup with a vulgar “Roll out or roll up, by yeeminy!” He only
thought of the job before him, and he was out to show Paul Bunyan that
the camp had been left in capable hands.
The loggers, beguiled by the charms of their new delicacies, all shaved
and donned clean underclothes before they came out to work, and the Big
Swede growled at them for being late.
“We gat bum yob har noo,” he said. “We gat swamp har first, for, by
yeeminy, these trees too close for fall noo. You gat broosh hooks;
climb tree; an’ aye tank you better swamp first noo. Aye gas so.”
The Big Swede was in a tremble from his greatest oratorical effort, and
he hastened to give the blue ox some hay, that he might recover his
composure. When he had returned, the loggers were moving slowly for the
forests, each man carrying a brush hook over his shoulder. When they
reached the orange palms each man selected a tree and climbed it; and
by noon thousands of purple, gold and wine-red trunks were bare and
glittering in the sun, their tops swamped away. The ground around them
was piled six feet high with blossom-laden boughs. This, though the
loggers had swamped languidly.
For a week the swamping went on with fair progress, and the Big Swede
rejoiced in the thought that he was so conducting operations that Paul
Bunyan would give him high praise.
Then the loggers spent their first Sunday of indolence in this
hyacinthine land. Hot Biscuit Slim, alarmed by the piles of uneaten
food which were left on the tables from each meal, prepared a grand
feast; he and the baker and their helpers used their skill to the
utmost on it; but it was a vain effort, for at dinner-time not one
diner appeared. The loggers had all flocked over the hills, and they
were now swimming in the waters of the Southern Sea--those warm,
crystal waters which lapped languorously on the golden strands of New
Iowa. And the loggers got pink and white sea shells, and when they
heard the soft music of them they began dancing, and when sundown came
they were singing also. Prancing and warbling, they returned to camp in
the moonlight, forgetting their clothes.
Imagine now the wrath and perplexity of the Big Swede next morning when
he saw the loggers running nakedly about, hopping, skipping and posing.
He roared at them till they remembered their work and recovered their
boots and clothes from the sea-shore; but when they were once more
aloft in the orange palms they swamped off few of the blossom-laden
boughs. Instead, most of them brought out pencils and paper and began
to write.
It is certain that Paul Bunyan would never have sent his camp to New
Iowa if he had known that its scenery would evoke longings to write
poetry in even the simplest souls, thus taking their energies from
useful labor. The loggers could not be blamed; for a week now they
had been tramping back and forth through piles of orange blossoms
which reached to their armpits; a sky of painted blue had glittered
above them; lavender waters, pale green banks, pink meadows, hills of
daisies, bluebells, poppies and buttercups had bewitched them also; and
the honied melodies of canaries had poured into their ears from dawn to
dusk each day. The devil himself, coming to such a land, would throw
down his pack of sins and temptations and sit upon it to think out a
sonnet.
But the Big Swede had no soul, and the loggers’ abandonment of labor
puzzled and angered him. He yelled at them until some were shaken from
the trees. But not one lost his pencil and paper. Johnny Inkslinger,
hearing the uproar, left off his figuring and delivered an oration; but
the loggers went on writing dreamily, paying no heed to the timekeeper.
“You will have to give them up,” he said to the Big Swede. “It’s a case
which only Mr. Bunyan can handle.”
He went back to his ledgers, and the foreman reluctantly set out for
the Tall Timber country. The Big Swede found Paul Bunyan in such
happiness over his labor that it seemed evil to tell him disturbing
news. The great logger had all the tall trees felled by now and he was
grubbing out the stumps. He was at work on the last row of them when
the Big Swede found him.
“Needing me already?” he asked jovially. “Well, first help me drag out
these stumps, then tell me your difficulties.”
He said this, seeing the embarrassment of the Big Swede and hoping
to make him easy in mind. The two mighty men then tackled the row of
stumps, and in a short time they were uprooted, leaving an enormous
chasm, the chasm which in this day is called Yosemite.
“Now, there is a historical accomplishment for all to read about,” said
Paul Bunyan, with great satisfaction.
Followed by his foreman, he then strode over to the Bay and washed away
the stains of toil. This done, he sat down and began to brush his beard
with a young redwood tree.
“Now I will listen to you,” he said.
The Big Swede’s account of the loggers’ strange doings astonished him.
The foreman had said nothing about their writing, for he had never
heard of poetry and had hardly noticed the papers and pencils in the
loggers’ hands.
“Aye tank dey yoost gat lazy noo,” he said, nodding sagely.
“I hope it is nothing worse,” said Paul Bunyan. “Laziness I can cure.
But come; we must reach New Iowa before sundown.”
The two great men traveled swiftly, and they reached the orange palm
forests just as the sun was touching fluffy clouds on the Western
horizon. The loggers, gathered in the meadows around the camp, were
reading aloud from pages which they held in their hands. They did not
observe the approach of their leaders, and when Paul Bunyan got within
hearing distance of them he stopped and listened.