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The gargantuan companion to lumberjack hero Paul Bunyan, Babe the Great Blue Ox was said to be so enormous that he could be measured between the eyes by the span of forty-two axe handles, with a plug of tobacco thrown in for good measure. It was a day’s journey as the crow flies to get from the tip of one of Babe’s mighty horns to the other. Seemingly ever Paul Bunyan’s faithful and steadfast helper, Babe grew into the role of Bunyan’s sidekick. Babe and Bunyan met during the infamous “Winter of the Blue Snow,” when the mercury plummeted so low that cuss words froze in the air and everything touched by the frost turned blue. While he was out in the bitter cold, Paul heard a strange sound, a sort of a mix between a moo and a snort; when he looked down he saw a tiny ball of fur, an angry little ox calf that had turned blue all over. The noise Paul had heard was the calf’s cry of frustration: As high as the little fella could jump, he couldn’t quite see over the snow drifts.
These iconic Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox statues stand along the shores of Lake Bemidji in Bemidji, Minnesota. Eighteen feet tall, the Bunyan figure was erected in 1937. The Babe by Paul’s side traveled the country as an attraction until finally retiring to Bemidji. (AP Photo)
Bunyan took his new little friend home with him, and although the ox calf didn’t stay small for long, he never lost his bluish tinge. Living in Bunyan’s lumber camp and eating the food provided by Sourdough Sam the camp cook, the blue ox soon grew to massive proportions, and Bunyan dubbed his companion “Babe.” Soon Babe the Blue Ox would have been eating Paul Bunyan out of house and home (if Bunyan had a house or a home in the first place). For breakfast Babe was said to gobble down two and a half dozen bales of hay, not pausing to take off the bindings; in fact, because of that wire, it took half a dozen hardy loggers to floss Babe’s teeth with logging hooks every morning. Babe then ate a ton of grain every day for lunch, always pestering Sourdough Sam for a snack between meals.
Babe reputedly was mighty useful, though. The laundrymen ran a line between Babe’s horns and had room for all the clothes and to spare. Moreover, the wind was so fierce at that great height that the laundry was dry in no time at all. Babe’s size could be a problem, too, like when he knocked over trees rubbing his back against them; he learned eventually just to use a handy cliff to scratch his itch.
Babe was a great help to Bunyan as a beast of burden, and he was so big and strong, in fact, that Paul could hitch the Great Blue Ox to one end of a lumber road, and Babe would pull and stretch that trail until it was straight as a ruler. This was a great help for hauling logs out, of course, but it also had the added benefit of providing Bunyan with the leftover road that used to be necessary when the trail twisted and turned. This surplus Paul kept on hand until he needed a new lane, and then he just had to unroll it to wherever he needed to go. The lumberjacks coated the timber-roads with ice in the winter to make hauling logs easier, and it was Babe’s job to pull the water tank used for making the ice on a mighty wagon. One unfortunate year, however, the tank burst by accident; the water overflowed the wagon, gushing down the road, a rupture that caused a spill so large it ran all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, becoming the Mississippi River. If Babe had a flaw, it was that, as much as he loved hauling logs over the ice in wintertime, he just didn’t enjoy the job in the summer, and always tried to get out of it. Bunyan fooled his bovine buddy, however, by whitewashing the roads to look as if they were frozen, and the Big Blue Ox happily kept hauling logs.
One summer day, as Babe was toting a load of lumber down one of these faux snow trails, he spied a beautiful golden-haired heifer grazing in a lush roadside meadow. Babe slipped his traces and galloped over to make the lady’s acquaintance. The big blue ox was so smitten by this blond beauty, in fact, that Paul had to buy her from the farmer who owned her just to get Babe to move on from that spot. Bessie the Yeller Cow returned to camp with Babe and Paul, and Sourdough Sam soon had her fattened up to proportions comparable to those of her gargantuan blue boyfriend. Bessie was a big hit with the lumbermen, as she had curly eyelashes so long that when she blinked or batted her eyes coyly at Babe, she tickled the loggers clear across the camp. Bessie also was a big boon to the lumberjacks; she produced so much milk that old Sourdough could grease his giant skillet with her butter and, on good days, could butter all of their toast.
Bessie and Babe were two turtledoves together, with one notable exception: While Babe loved the snow and hated the summer, Bessie longed for green fields and pined for warmth all winter long. One cold year it seemed as if she would waste away, and her milk was drying up. Paul was clever enough to rise to this challenge, however, just as he had dealt with her mate’s hatred of the summer slogs hauling logs: Bunyan arranged for a pair of green glasses for Bessie, so that it seemed to her that it was summer all year round. She soon recovered her usual buoyant spirits, and in fact produced so much milk that Bunyan was able to use the surplus butter to slather the whitewashed roads that summer, so that Babe really had nothing to complain about. Henceforth the two lovebirds were as happy together in one season as the other, and they kept Paul Bunyan’s logs moving and his lumbermen well fed.
There are a number of giant statues of Babe, especially across the Midwest, and the Great Blue Ox is generally next to his pal Paul, seemingly almost an afterthought rather than a display designed to be admired on its own. By far the most famous of these great monuments is that which now resides in Bemidji, Minnesota, which has a unique and very interesting history in its own right. In 1937, the same year the great statue of Paul Bunyan was raised on the shores of Lake Bemidji, the town fathers determined to commission a companion piece in the form of a Great Blue Ox. Like the figure of Bunyan himself, this Babe was built on a three-to-one scale. Moreover, an actual lumber camp ox provided the model for this Babe, a beast of burden attached to the Headwaters Camp, a nearby logging operation operated by the government. Careful measurements and sketches were employed in the development of the finished statue, but with one significant deviation from anatomical correctness: Bemidji Babe was designed to be wide enough in the chest that it could be mounted on a truck and utilized as a mobile tourist advertisement for Lake Bemidji and the town on its shores. Constructed of a wooden framework covered with wire mesh and fabric, with a canvas outer hide, Bemidji Babe was outfitted complete with a smoking device in his nostrils and battery-operated lights in his eyes. His horns were constructed of metal and stretched fourteen feet from tip to tip. Bemidji Babe crisscrossed the country, logging thousands of miles before wear and tear caused him to be retired on the shores of Lake Bemidji, taking his rightful place next to Paul Bunyan. The canvas hide and fabric filling was removed and replaced by a concrete coating painted in Babe’s signature shade of blue. Because of their significance to American folklore, the National Parks Service recognized the Bemidji Bunyan and Babe as cultural icons, and in 1988 the site was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
C. Fee
See also Captain Alfred Bulltop Stormalong; Febold Feboldson; Jumbo Riley; Lumberjack Tales; Paul Bunyan; Pecos Bill; Tall Tales
Further Reading
“Bunyan, Paul.” 2000. The Penguin Dictionary of American Folklore. New York: Penguin Reference, pp. 80–81.
“Bunyan, Paul.” 2004. The Oxford Companion to American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press.
“Bunyan, Paul.” 2006. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature. New York: Oxford University Press.
Marling, Karal Ann. 2000. The Colossus of Roads: Myth and Symbol along the American Highway. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
“Paul Bunyan.” 1999. Myths, Legends, and Folktales of America: An Anthology. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 135–136.
Schlosser, S. E. 2010. “Babe the Blue Ox.” American Folklore. http://americanfolklore.net/folklore/2010/07/babe_the_blue_ox.html. Accessed August 24, 2015.