_By_ CLOICE R. HOWD AND OTIS T. HOWD
Paul Bunyan was the logging industry; not, to be sure, as it is found in
_Forest Service Reports_ or in profit and loss statements, but rather as
it burned in the bones of the true North Woods lumberjack. To understand
the significance of the Bunyan stories one must know something of the men
who first told them.
While the lumber industry has found a place in every section of the
country except the treeless plains, it was the pineries of the Lake States
which furnished most of its romance. Logging had begun on the Atlantic
Coast even before the first permanent English settlement, but it never
reached a size sufficient to challenge the imagination until it came to
the Lake States. While the industry had begun on Lake Erie about 1800, its
development in the West was slow until after the Civil War. By that time
saw mill machinery was ready to make lumber rapidly and cheaply, and the
fast growing population of the Mississippi Valley brought the market
within reach of the forests. After 1865 the lumbermen swept across
Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota like a whirlwind, laying waste with ax
and saw that mighty pine forest, until by 1900 all that remained were
small fragments of the original forest and hundreds of miles of stumps.
Then they passed on to the Gulf States or the Pacific Coast.
"Down East" logging had been largely a side line to agriculture or other
occupations, although there were some men who were full-time loggers, but
with the opening up of the Lake States, logging became a distinct
profession, with a professional pride in work and a devotion to it which
kept the logger from straying off into other industries. The logger went
into the woods early in the fall, spent the entire winter snow-bound in a
lonely camp with other men like-minded with himself, a dozen to a hundred
or more of them. With the spring thaw they brought the logs down the river
in a great drive, and then spent their winter stake in a blaze of glory
among the bright lights of a sawdust town. Then they went into the saw
mills till it was time to return to the woods in the fall. It was during
the long winter evenings in the bunk houses, with the loggers gathered
about the red-hot stove and the air full of the smell of drying clothes
and tobacco smoke, that the Paul Bunyan tales were born and grew.
These stories find their original in a French-Canadian, Paul Bunyon, who
first came into prominence during the Papineau rebellion in 1837, when, by
remarkable feats of strength and daring, he won the admiration of his
countrymen. Then for many years he was the outstanding logging boss in all
the St. Lawrence River country. When the loggers from this region went
into the Michigan woods about 1850 they took with them the stories of
their great hero, which stories, naturally, lost nothing in the telling,
particularly as they served admirably as a form of compensation device for
their feelings of inferiority. Nor is it remarkable that the Yankee
loggers should parody these stories to ridicule the French-Canadians.
Another element which entered into the making of the Bunyan myth was the
tendency to exaggeration which is common to all of us and which finds
expression on so many occasions. The lumber camps had long been filled
with extreme stories of many sorts, but these were usually only isolated
tales. Many of them had been told to impress the tenderfoot, while many
others had been wish projections, a sort of day-dreaming in which one was
able to do that which he never could accomplish when he had to work with
stern reality. After the French-Canadians brought Paul Bunyon to the camps
and the practice had begun of improving on these stories, it became easy
to invent a new Bunyon tale or connect up one of the other stories with
the Bunyon cycle wherever the need arose for over-awing a tenderfoot or of
securing a refuge from the sense of frustration, or just for simple
amusement. In the process the French-Canadian Bunyon became naturalized
into the Yankee Bunyan and all contact with reality was lost. Bunyan, his
old Blue Ox, Babe, and their exploits grew to fantastic extremes. Size was
never measured in terms of feet or pounds and so it is difficult for us to
give exact dimensions, but it was agreed that the blue ox, Babe, measured
forty-two axehandles and a plug of tobacco between the eyes, while Bunyan
himself once had the misfortune to lose two large logging engines in his
mackinaw pocket and did not find them for a month.
Yet these stories were never told lightly, for a true lumberjack will
never, by word, look or tone, give any suggestion that these stories are
not the exact truth. In fact elaborate precautions are taken to establish
their veracity and citation of proof is nearly universal. Sometimes the
evidence cited is the word of one from whom the story was heard, for few
of the tales are told as the personal experience of the story teller. The
story came direct from one of Bunyan's loggers, from a pioneer, the Bull
Cook, or some one else equally well informed and reliable. Sometimes the
proof is to be found in the continued existence of something connected
with the story. Thus the lack of stumps in North Dakota is cited as proof
of the fact that Bunyan drove all the stumps into the ground when he
logged off that country, while the story that the Mississippi River was
started when one of Bunyan's water tanks broke is proven by the fact that
the river is still running.
According to the best authenticated stories, Paul was born in Maine some
time before the Revolutionary War, so far back that a century or so one
way or the other made little difference. He had been a lusty infant and a
good-sizeable boy, but he did not reach his full growth until he went to
Michigan. It was then that he really began his life work of logging off
the regions south and west of the Great Lakes. He gained experience and
some reputation in his logging operations on the Big Onion, the Big Auger,
the Little Gimblet and the Big Tadpole Rivers, but it was the logging of
the Dakotas that really made his reputation. Legend has played around this
event even more than is usual with Bunyan exploits. This was really done
to provide room for the Swedes who were coming to the United States. There
were many lesser things which Bunyan did, most of which are mentioned only
incidentally, such as the logging of Missouri, the accident when he
dragged his skiing pole and so made the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, or
the building of Crater Lake or the Island of Cuba. Later Bunyan went to
the Pacific Coast where he did many mighty feats of landscape engineering;
in fact he largely made the West, but he never seemed to find logging on
the West Coast congenial, probably due to the fact that machinery had
invaded the Western woods by the time he got there. And Paul never could
endure those "pesky" donkey engines. While it was sometimes necessary for
him to resort to the use of power machinery in his cook house, he would
never have it in the woods. Even when he had a crew so large that it took
eight cement mixers to stir the batter for their hot cakes and a
stern-wheel steamer to stir their soup, the Blue Ox could easily haul all
the logs they could cut without help of any donkey engines or any other
such "fandangoes."
Bunyan, however, was not alone in his logging ventures. He had many
helpers, but none of them were cast in quite such an heroic mould as was
Paul himself. There were the seven axemen who helped him the winter he
logged Dakota, who kept a cord of four-foot wood on the table for
toothpicks, and whose singing could be heard of an evening down on the
Atlantic. There was the little chore boy who turned the grindstone which
was so large that every time it turned around once it was payday. There
was Johnny Inkslinger, the bookkeeper, who made the first fountain pen,
which held twenty-four barrels of ink, and who kept two complete sets of
books, one with each hand. Brimstone Bill cared for Babe and made for him
those wonderful yokes of cranberry wood, which made it possible for Babe
to pull anything which had two ends to it. Big Ole, the blacksmith, had
two tasks. One was to shoe Babe, and every time he did it he had to open
up a new iron mine. The other was to punch the holes in the doughnuts for
the cook. Another helper was Cris Crosshaul, a careless cuss, who was
responsible for taking wrong logs down to New Orleans, which made it
necessary for Paul to bring them back up the river. This was done by
feeding Babe a large salt ration and then letting him drink out of the
upper river. He drank the river dry and the logs came up stream faster
than they went down. Of the other helpers it is perhaps sufficient to
mention only Joe McFrau, who was able to ride anything which ever floated
and in any water, and the two cooks, Sourdough Sam and Big Joe. Sourdough
Sam made everything except coffee out of sourdough. When Shot Gunderson
put his winter's cut of logs into Round River and then drove them around
its whole course three times before he found that it did not have any
outlet, Sam made up a large batch of sourdough and dumped it into the
river and when it got to working it lifted the logs over the divide. But
Sam was seriously injured one day when his sourdough barrel blew up and
Big Joe was employed. His famous Black Duck dinner was so fine that none
of the American loggers cared to eat again for five weeks; but he could
only satisfy the French-Canadians by dumping a car load of split peas in a
boiling lake.
The most authentic group of Bunyan stories came from the Lake States where
they originated. A comparison of these older stories with the newer ones
from the Pacific Coast shows a marked difference. (And it is noteworthy
that the Bunyan tales never had much of a vogue in the South.) According
to the Lake States version, Bunyan always stayed in the logging camps or
on the drives, he attended strictly to business, while according to the
Western tales he branched out into all sorts of enterprises. The Lake
States tales were the product of the true, the professional lumberjack,
the winter recluse, who was shut in with others like minded with himself
and with none but his kind as auditors. The Western logger was not so
exclusive a type. There were many of the professional loggers, but there
were many men in the woods whose main interest was elsewhere, and so the
story teller did not have such a select audience. There were other
interests in the West to divert Bunyan from his real job and naturally it
suffered in consequence.
It was perhaps inevitable, but none the less unfortunate, that the Bunyan
stories did not reach the outside world directly from the Lake States
story tellers, but first passed through the hands or mouths of the Western
loggers. Of all the publications perhaps W. B. Laughead, in _Paul Bunyan
and His Big Blue Ox_, published by the Red River Lumber Company of
Minneapolis, has most nearly preserved the Lake States flavor of the
stories. Certainly James Stevens and Esther Shepperd in their books of the
same title, _Paul Bunyan_, have more nearly portrayed the Western Bunyan
than the Eastern one. The same is largely true of the poems here given.
They take the Western point of view, and most of them are Western stories.
The first of these represents the Western conflict between the
professional and the part-time logger, the second is unwarranted in
bringing Noah into the picture, where he does not belong, while the others
all deal directly with the West. But certainly the Western tales make
better stories than do the Eastern ones.