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Hero of the North Woods

Paul Bunyan

American Folk-Lore : Paul Bunyan Tales; ...
Johnny Quick : The Modern Paul Bunyan (by Mayo, Ralph)
The Marvelous Exploits of Paul Bunyan (by Laughead, W. B.)

Few folk tales from ages past endure in today’s children’s literature. Paul Bunyan is no exception. The folk hero was portrayed as a giant of a man at seven feet tall, renowned for his great strength, powerful voice, massive pipe, and memorable sidekicks, not the least of which was Babe, the blue ox. Tales of his illiteracy recount entertaining errors when ordering supplies.

In his book Out of the Northwoods: The Many Lives of Paul Bunyan, Michael Edmonds claims that stories of Paul Bunyan circulated in oral tradition at least 30 years before becoming published. The folk tales first appeared in wide circulation in 1914, in booklets published by the Red River Lumber Company.

In 1922, Charles E. Brown prepared a booklet of tales about the giant lumberjack and Babe for the use of students at the University of Wisconsin. He introduced the stories: “The mythical hero of the lumberjacks is Paul Bunyan and tales of his great strength and wonderful exploits are, or formerly were, told by the fires of the bunkhouses in the logging camps from Maine to Oregon, Washington and California.”

The fabled lumberjack managed a crew almost as impressive: Brown wrote, “Jim Liverpool was a great jumper. Planting his feet on the bank of a river, he could jump across it in three jumps.” Other well-known members of Paul Bunyan’s crew included Black Dan McDonald, Tom McCann, Dutch Jake, Red Murphy, Curley Charley, Yellow-head, and Patsy Ward.

W. B. Laughhead’s paper “The Marvelous Exploits of Paul Bunyan” claims that the lumberjack is the only American myth. The legendary ox, “constituted Paul Bunyan’s assets and liabilities.” A character in his own right, Babe matched his owner’s impressive size. The ox was said to have measured “seven axehandles wide between the eyes” or “two axehandles and a plug of tobacco.” The legends contradict each other, but agree that, with Babe in harness, Bunyan could haul logs to the landing “a whole section (640 acres) at a time.” Testament to the ox’s strength are tales of Bunyan using Babe to “pull the kinks out of the crooked logging roads.”

As myths and legends do, the tales grew in scope. A shovel was needed to fill Bunyan’s pipe. Bunyan scooped out the hole that formed Lake Superior. Babe’s hoofprints created thousands of lakes. Bunyan himself was reputed to have taken a logging contract in Europe and, finding the early airplanes too slow, crossed the Atlantic Ocean in his bark canoe and “passed the Statue of Liberty three lengths ahead” of the wireless message sent to New York announcing his return home.

The Red River Lumber Company built upon the legend in an example of effective marketing. The company’s book, Paul Bunyan’s Log Cabin Book: A Guide for Cabin Builders, republished in 1932, can be downloaded from the World Library. The 19th century lumberjack even made it to comic books in the form of Johnny Quick, “the Modern Paul Bunyan” created by Ralph Mayo for DC Comics in the 1940s and again in the 1980s, proving that legends never really die.

By Karen M. Smith