Paul Bunyan is remembered by generations of American school children as a larger-than-life “lumberjack” or logger responsible for clearing vast swathes of primordial forest in the Upper Midwest and Northwest of the United States to make room for farmers and to fuel the fires of industry and progress. Assisted by his constant companion Babe, the Great Blue Ox, Paul Bunyan is in many ways the archetypal workingman’s hero, a symbol of American pride in taming the wilderness and making way for “civilization.” As such, Bunyan may in some sense be seen as a manifestation of both Manifest Destiny and the American dream, in that through sheer force of will and vast physical prowess he is able to tame the forces of nature and bend them to his will.
While some argue that Paul Bunyan is a classic example of “fakelore,” a folklore-like creation of latter-day advertisers and journalists, others argue that before his birth in print the giant logger was gestated in stories told around the fire in lumber camps from Pennsylvania to Michigan and beyond. Some trace Bunyan’s roots further north, however, to a figure by the name of Bon Jean popular among the French Canadian lumbermen of Canada, and it even has been suggested that such a giant of the great northern French lumber camps was in some measure the oral descendant of the literary figures Gargantua and Pantagruel, the giant and his son who were the protagonists of five satirical books by French novelist François Rabelais (1494–1553).
Whatever his origins may have been, some scholars of the subject in fact maintain that to dismiss Paul Bunyan out of hand as merely a commercial and literary invention is to ignore the all-encompassing nature and transformative power of folklore. In brief, this view maintains that the salient fact is that Paul Bunyan was indeed embraced by working lumberjacks themselves, who took his stories to heart as representative of the adventures of a heroic “super-logger,” who embodied a fanciful and yet relevant response to the trials and tribulations of the occupation of logging and the lived experience of the lumber camps. In other words, it is the function of folklore to provide such figures, which help us to understand and articulate our hopes, fears, and transformative aspirations. The ultimate origins of these icons, therefore, are less important than what they mean to the communities about whom and to whom they speak most directly. In simplest terms, Paul Bunyan might have been a product of “fakelore” storytelling, yet he was eventually transformed by working lumberjacks who initially identified with him and his trials and tribulations, and they embraced him as an archetypal figure. His perseverance in the face of such obstacles ultimately rendered him an ideal vocational icon who contained the essence and provided the face of the Lumberjack Hero.
A magazine advertisement depicting giant lumberjack Paul Bunyan carrying a massive log. The archetypal Great North Woods logger hero of the Upper Midwest and Great Lakes regions first appeared in print in “The Round River Drive” in The Detroit News-Tribune in 1910. A long-running advertising campaign by the Red River Lumber Company featuring Bunyan began in 1914, and Paul Bunyan has been a well-known figure in American pop culture ever since. (Blue Lantern Studio/Corbis)
Although in the first published account of his exploits he is not a giant per se, the details of the story are outsized, and in most examples of the tradition Paul Bunyan is a hero of literally larger-than-life proportions. In this way, Paul Bunyan is a classic example of the tall tale tradition. He is gigantic, his loyal sidekick Babe the Blue Ox is likewise outrageously supersized, and these two boon companions have appetites and adventures on a titanic scale. In some stories Paul Bunyan seems to achieve a mythic creator status and is said to be god-like in his capacity to shape the contours of the natural world. In such a world, the Great Lakes are the water-filled footprints of the great logger, and geographical features such as the Black Hills, the Grand Canyon, and Puget Sound can be attributed to Bunyan, his trailing ax, or his loyal pal and behemoth beast of burden, Babe. One might assume that that Bunyan and Babe cleared the Great Plains of trees, dug mighty rivers as furrows, and piled whole mountain chains out of the heaps of leftover soil. This is a world in which the king of all lumbermen boasts a camp stove an acre in size, upon which a giant griddle is greased by full-grown men skating across the cast-iron rink with great slabs of bacon fat strapped to their feet. This Paul Bunyan is also a culture hero, the inventor of the double-bitted ax, which was to prove indispensable to lumberjacks everywhere, making their lives that much easier.
The challenges and obstacles of the Great North Woods depicted in these tales are similarly monumental and seem almost to have been transplanted from Jotunheim, the land of the giants in the mythology of the ancestors of the Scandinavian settlers of the Upper Midwest and Great Lakes regions. In this context, it is perhaps not surprising that Paul Bunyan once fought a mighty battle with the lumber-camp foreman Hels Helsen, whom Paul dubbed the “Bull of the Woods,” but who is also known simply as the “Big Swede.” Their wrestling match kicked up soil that resulted in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Other impediments include mammoth mosquitoes and untold months of unstinting rain, which might have been left over from Noah’s Flood. Indeed, even the elements themselves were likewise proportionally fiercer and more brutal in relation to the giant hero, such as when the cold weather was so bitter during the winter of the blue snow that cuss words froze right in the air; these curses didn’t thaw until the next Fourth of July, when they caused quite a din.
Although clearly developed in the mold of the tall tale of the American West, Paul Bunyan traces his earliest roots as a literary character to the pen of James MacGillivray, a writer for the Detroit News-Tribune, who published “The Round River Drive” in the summer of 1910. MacGillivray seems to have drawn upon an oral workingman tradition of tall tales from the lumber camps of Pennsylvania, which moved north and west to the Big Woods of Wisconsin and beyond, eventually reaching the forests of the Pacific Northwest. In the decades after Paul Bunyan first appeared in print, many other writers followed in MacGillivray’s footsteps, including American poets of the stature of Frost and Sandburg; Benjamin Britten went so far as to score an operetta about Bunyan, for which no less famous a writer than W. H. Auden penned the libretto. In 1958 Disney even produced an animated film about Bunyan, which was repackaged as recently as 2000 as part of the “Disney American Legends” series.
Frost’s vision of Bunyan’s personal life in “Paul’s Wife,” first published in 1921, takes the raw material of the folkloric tales of the Lumberjack Hero and transforms them in verse to give a glimpse of the soul they embody. In his poem, Frost recasts the Pygmalion myth in the context of the tall tale and the setting of the great North Woods. According to Frost’s telling, the one question guaranteed to send the otherwise amiable Paul Bunyan packing from any lumber-camp was the deceptively innocuous “How’s the wife”? As the poem has it, witnesses to this phenomenon posited many theories. They conjectured that Paul had no wife and was thus ashamed; that Paul was a jilted lover and hated to be reminded of the fact; that Paul had once had a wife, who ran off with another man; that Paul still had a wife, of whom he was ashamed; and that Paul was so much under the thumb of his wife that the mere mention of her sent him off to check in with her. All of this gossip fell short of the mark, however, according to Frost’s version.
In this telling, Paul’s wife was born of a hollow pine tree, a sort of New World dryad (tree nymphs in Greek mythology) whom Bunyan coaxed forth from a mysterious wooden womb. Paul was so jealous of his spirit of the forest spouse, in fact, that he begrudged any who spoke of or even thought of her. The poem’s climax occurs when Murphy and some of the other men spied Paul and his bride and shouted a coarse lumberjack blessing of sorts across a darkening valley, through the murk of which they could discern the girl, bright like a firefly, contrasting sharply with the shadowy Bunyan. With the lovers’ privacy invaded, the girl’s light went out, and she was never seen again. Murphy always maintained that Paul couldn’t share his love with the world, and that the world couldn’t speak to Paul about this love in any language known to it. “Paul’s Wife” both explores Frost’s notions of the hidden life of an American icon and underscores a tension between the conquest of nature and a spiritual affinity with the wilderness, a tension that is part and parcel both of the figure of Paul Bunyan himself and those aspects of the American psyche that he represents.
In his 1932 novel Nineteen Nineteen, John Dos Passos reinterpreted Paul Bunyan as an archetypal hero of the American worker, the empowered working stiff writ large through his association with the many “little guys” who followed him. In this reading Bunyan is magnified through the lens of collective action, and he becomes a symbol for the labor union. Only an indefatigable worker with an unsinkable spirit could confront the magnitude of the obstacles facing the American worker in hard times. These obstacles include the wintry desolation of poverty and unemployment all around, in combination with the common hazards of the workplace, not to mention the greed and injustice of the big bosses. The typically workingman’s experiences are to be aligned, in this reading, with the outsized hurdles overcome by Bunyan: the brutal and abiding cold of seemingly endless winters, giant stretches of forest, swamp, and mountain, the insatiable blood-sucking mosquitoes. To Dos Passos, Paul Bunyan is an icon of the American working class.
Sandburg’s 1936 epic-length poem “The People, Yes” extends Dos Passos’s depiction, asking rhetorically, what must be the wellspring of this giant of the American woodlands? Paul Bunyan was born of no lesser midwife than the American imagination itself, answered Sandburg, and his stories are the fruits of the American storytelling tree. Sandburg thus envisioned the stories of Paul Bunyan as a manifestation of the creative greatness of the collective American genius, an iconic figure whose very size reflects the commensurate magnitude of the innate folksy brilliance of the American people.
Whatever his origins, Frost, Dos Passos, and Sandburg all clearly saw Paul Bunyan as a representation of core aspects of the American spirit and experience, and their works seek to explore how the story of Paul Bunyan is in some measure the story of what it means to be an American. Literary reinterpretations of the Giant of the Woods aside, however, perhaps the most archetypally prosaic American versions of the Bunyan tradition are Paul’s numerous appearances in various publication organs of the lumber industry. Notable among the propagators of such folkloric company advertising campaigns are W. B. Laughead and James Stevens. In his advertising pamphlets for the Red River Lumber Company, to cite the most impressive example—a series that he penned over a thirty-year period beginning in 1914—Laughead is credited with taking the innovative step of relocating Paul Bunyan to the North Woods of Minnesota. It is perhaps a peculiarly American phenomenon that a tall tale would be born in a lumber camp, finally become a popular and highly successful public relations organ of the lumber bosses, and eventually find a firm foothold in the canon of American children’s classics.
In any case, Paul took firm root in the American popular imagination, becoming a phenomenon that sprouted up in widespread Bunyan Festivals and Bunyan-lands, which were especially popular in the upper Midwest. The legend of Paul Bunyan continues to fuel the American imagination today and is brought to life in amusement parks, statues, and recreational areas across the country. For example, located in Brainerd, Maine, Paul Bunyan Land is a lumberjack-legend-themed amusement park, complete with a twenty-six-foot-high talking statue of the giant logger. Another talking Bunyan is forty-nine feet tall and has been leaning on its ax in Klamath, California, since 1961. A special commemorative Paul Bunyan was erected for the Oregon Centennial and has towered thirty-one feet over visitors to Portland since 1959. A terrifying side of Paul Bunyan was revealed in 1986, however, when the thirty-one-foot tall, ton-and-a-half Paul Bunyan in Bangor, Maine, was brought to life in one of the horror novels of Stephen King, Bangor’s most famous resident. In Akeley, Minnesota, on the other hand, tourists take turns crawling into a twenty-five-foot Bunyan’s palm to memorialize their meeting with America’s most genial giant.
Founded in 1935, Paul Bunyan State Forest in Minnesota includes 150,113 rolling acres of forested hills chock full of swamps and waterholes, a landscape that might have been drawn from the legends of the mighty woodsman himself. One key difference, however, is the composition of the forest. The earlier pinewoods were decimated by a number of terrible forest fires between 1913 and 1926, and now the forest is comprised mostly of aspen. When completed, the Paul Bunyan State Trail in Minnesota will stretch over a hundred miles from Lake Bemidji State Park to Crow Wing State Park; significantly, in 1937 one of the earliest giant statues of Bunyan, an eighteen-footer, was raised on the shores of Lake Bemidji. Paul came to town that year to advertise a winter carnival—and aptly, by all accounts, since the winter of 1937 was said to have rivaled that of the blue snow for bitter cold.
The environmental movement in general and fear of climate change in particular (coupled with a postindustrial sensibility that no longer honors “progress” at all costs) renders Paul Bunyan a somewhat less palatable hero today. Although no longer celebrated in terms of his vocation, Paul Bunyan’s indefatigable energy and buoyant cheerfulness in the face of adversity render him in some ways a transcendent figure, a heroic icon of a bygone age who remains appealing despite—or perhaps even because of—his anachronistic occupation.
C. Fee
See also Babe the Blue Ox; Captain Alfred Bulltop Stormalong; Febold Feboldson; Jumbo Riley; Lumberjack Tales; Pecos Bill; Tall Tales; Tony Beaver
Further Reading
Edmonds, Michael. 2009. Out of the Northwoods: The Many Lives of Paul Bunyan. Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society.
Hoffman, Daniel. 1999. Paul Bunyan: Last of the Frontier Demigods. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.
Marling, Karal Ann. 2000. The Colossus of Roads: Myth and Symbol along the American Highway. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
“Paul Bunyan: America’s Best-Known Folk Hero.” 2014. Wisconsin Historical Society website. http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Content.aspx?dsNav=Ny:True,Ro:0,N:4294963828-4294963805&dsRecordDetails=R:CS504. Accessed November 10, 2015.
“Paul Bunyan Story: The Giant Lumberjack.” 2014. Paul Bunyan Trail website. http://www.paulbunyantrail.com/talltale.html Accessed November 10, 2015.
Paul Bunyan—Primary Document
Charles E. Brown, Paul Bunyan Tales (1922)
The figure of Paul Bunyan personifies the tall tales tradition in American storytelling, and perhaps no student of folklore had a larger role in preserving Bunyan stories than Charles E. Brown. Brown served as the director of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin Museum; in the early decades of the twentieth century, he collected archeological relics, material culture, and oral and literary traditions of the people of Wisconsin. In 1922, Brown put together a pamphlet of Bunyan tales for students at the University of Wisconsin, a publication from which this selection derives. The careful reader will note a casual racism indicative of its time.
PAUL BUNYAN
Bunyan was a powerful giant, seven feet tall and with a stride of seven feet. He was famous throughout the lumbering districts for his great physical strength. So great was his lung capacity that he called his men to dinner by blowing through a hollow tree. When he spoke limbs sometimes fell from trees. To keep his pipe filled required the entire time of a swamper with a scoop shovel.” He could not write and ordered the supplies for his camp by drawing pictures of what he wanted. Once he ordered grindstones and got cheeses. He forgot to draw the holes. He kept the time of his men by cutting notches in a piece of wood.
No undertaking was too great for Paul. Lumberjacks say that he is the man who logged the timber off North Dakota.
He also scooped out the hole for Lake Superior. This he used for a reservoir as he was needing water to ice his logging roads. The Mississippi river was caused by the overturning of a water tank when his ox slipped.
HIS LOGGING CREW
His logging crew on the Big Onion river, “the winter of the blue snow,” in about 1862 or 1865, was so large that the men were divided into three gangs. One of these was always going to work, a second was at work and a third was always returning to camp from work. This kept the cooks busy, for when they had finished preparing breakfast for one crew they had to prepare dinner for another and supper for a third.
To sharpen their axes the men sometimes rolled boulders down steep hillsides and running after them ground the blades against the revolving stones.
Jim Liverpool was a great jumper. Planting his feet on the bank of a river he could jump across it in three jumps.
Black Dan McDonald, Tom McCann, Dutch Jake, Red Murphy, Curley Charley, Yellow-head and Patsy Ward were other well-known members of his daredevil crew. One of the men had two sets of teeth which could saw through anything. One night, while walking in his sleep, he encountered a grindstone and before he awoke chewed it up.
THE CAMP
The cook shanty was so large that it took half a day to walk around its outside. Three forties had to be cleared each week to keep up a fire in the big cook-stove. An entire cord of wood was needed to start a blaze. The loaves of bread were gigantic. When the men had eaten the insides the crusts were used for bunks (some say bunk-houses).
One day, Joe Mufferon, the cook, put a loaf in the oven and started around to the other side to remove it, but before he got there it had burned to a crisp. Before he began to make pancakes he strapped hams on the feet of his two colored assistants and had them skate over the top of the stove to grease it.
His eyesight being poor, one day he mixed some blasting powder with the batter. It blew up and the colored assistants went through the roof and never did come back. That was “the winter of the black snow.”
Seven men were kept busy with wheelbarrows hauling prune stones away from the camp. The chipmunks ate these and grew as big as tigers.
Paul had much trouble with his cooks. He was always having to hire new ones. One got lost between the potato bin and the flour bin and nearly starved to death before he was found. The horn which Paul or the cook used to call the men to dinner was so big that it once blew down ten acres of pine. Next time the cook blew it straight up and that caused a cyclone.
The dining room was so large that when a man told a yarn at one end it grew so big by the time it reached the other that it had to be shoveled out.
Doughnuts (sinkers) were carried from the kitchen by two men on poles which they carried on their shoulders. Sometimes they were rolled down the length of the tables, the men catching them as they went by. Big Ole, the blacksmith, cut the holes in them with a punch and sledge.
THE BLUE OX
Bunyan was assisted in his lumbering by a huge blue ox, Babe, of whom he was very fond. This ox had the strength of nine horses and it weighed ten thousand pounds. It measured seven axe handles between the eyes. Its horns were of immense size. The men tied a line to their tips and hung clothing on it to dry. The original color of the animal was pure white. One winter it snowed blue snow for seven days and the ox lying down in it all winter was dyed blue.
With the ox Paul dragged a whole house up a hill, then he dragged the cellar up after it. When he wanted to peel a log he hitched the ox to one end and himself took hold of the bark at the other.
The ox pulled and out came the log “as clean as a whistle.” Babe sometimes got into mischief. Once he broke loose at night and ate up two hundred feet of tow line. Sometimes he slipped in behind the crew, drank the water in the river and left the drive high and dry. Some of the lakes in Wisconsin and Minnesota are in holes made by his feet.
Bunyan had many other oxen besides Babe. When strung out in a line if each took the tail of the other in his mouth they would stretch halfway across the state. Their yokes piled up made one hundred cords of wood. One day he drove his oxen through a hollow log which had fallen across a great ravine. When they came through he counted them and saw that several were missing. These, he found, had strayed into a hollow limb.
Source: Brown, Charles E. Paul Bunyan Tales. Madison, WI: State Historical Museum, 1922.