Tony Beaver is a heroic lumberjack in the tall tales tradition of Paul Bunyan. In fact, a few tales insist that Beaver and Bunyan were cousins. Like Bunyan, there is no evidence that a lumberjack named Tony Beaver ever lived. In most stories Beaver resides “up Eel River” in West Virginia, although states throughout Appalachia, including Tennessee, claim Beaver as their own. Tales note Beaver’s considerable size and strength. He bests other men in feats of strength, chops down trees faster than any other lumberjack, and can eat an exorbitant amount of food. He sometimes engages in competition with Bunyan, including a famed skating race on a griddle. Beaver’s tall tales occasionally incorporate elements from other folklore traditions, including an episode in which Beaver is outwitted by Brer Rabbit, the famous trickster from African American folklore.
Most stories about Beaver survive in books from the early to mid-twentieth century. In Paul Bunyan and Tony Beaver Tales (1930), Charles Brown wrote that Beaver was a cousin, or at least a distant relative, of Bunyan’s. Like Bunyan, Beaver’s size and his propensity to do “everythin’ in a big way” represents an important part of his manly identity (Brown 1930, 14). He is giant in stature. In one tale, he is so tall that the top leaves of an eighteen-foot maple tree shake when he breathes. In other tales, Beaver is able to smoke a pipe so large that people think the mountains have caught fire. In addition, he would drink such strong liquor that one swallow would make a bear turn inside out. According to Brown, Beaver’s “loggin’ crews were large, his camps were of huge size, and he had a real genius for pickin’ out the tallest and the best timber” (Brown 1930, 14). In an oft-repeated tale, Beaver has oxen so large that it takes a crow one week to fly between their horns. In the tall tales tradition of oversized people and animals, Beaver appears much larger than life.
In his appetites, Tony Beaver could eat more than any man alive. A particularly common story involves Beaver eating his grandmother’s buckwheat pancakes. In The Hurricane’s Children, published in 1937, Carl Carmer wrote, “Tony ate a hundred cakes that day before he started in using syrup and after that he ate a couple hundred more with syrup” (Carmer 1937, 94). Beaver asks his grandmother to wrap up the remaining pancakes so that he can take them with him. After leaving his grandmother’s, he encounters Brer Rabbit, a famous character in West Virginia and throughout the South. Rabbit, who had persimmons with him, promises Beaver that he can double the amount of food the two have with a spell. Beaver lays out his pancakes on a log, and Rabbit then puts a persimmon between each cake. It was a trick, though, and after yelling “Bingo!” Rabbit ran off with all the pancakes and persimmons. Beaver could not be tricked so easily: “Brer Rabbit was in the air on his first hop when Tony Beaver fetched him a lick that knocked him higher than a kite. The wind caught his big ears as if they were sails and away Brer Rabbit went, sailing around all over West Virginia for seven days, dropping persimmons and pancakes all the while he was up there” (Carmer 1937, 95–96). Children, the tall tale concludes, still talk about when it rained pancakes and persimmons in West Virginia.
Another well-known tale tells of how Beaver built the candy dam. There was a particularly wet autumn one year, which made the Eel River rise to a dangerous level. Beaver understood the danger of a rising river and commanded the people to “Open up your molasses warehouses and bring me every barrel of molasses you’ve got. And open up all your storage houses and bring me every bag of West Virginia peanuts you can find!” (Carmer 1937, 100). In one version of the story, Beaver has his men roll the barrels of molasses and peanuts six miles up the river. There, they release the molasses and the shucked peanuts into the river. Beaver even empties salt from a shaker as large as the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. As the crowd makes its way back downstream, the sun gets hotter and the river gets “thicker and thicker and slower and slower. Just before they got to town the flow stopped altogether” (Carmer 1937, 101). Beaver saves the town by creating a river of peanut brittle.
In Tony Beaver: Griddle Skater, a children’s book published in 1965, Elizabeth and Carl Carmer retell the most well-known tale of Beaver competing against Bunyan. Beaver learned how to skate on griddles (or large, flat pans) greased with bacon fat when he was a child, and he eventually challenges Bunyan to an ice skating race. The story of the griddle skate race, out of all the tall tales that include both Beaver and Bunyan, is the only one in which Beaver consistently wins. One version of the book’s cover depicts Beaver as the quintessential woodsman. He has a big, broad chest and wears a red shirt with his shirt sleeves rolled up, denim jeans, yellow suspenders, and a handkerchief around his neck. This cover shows exuberant spectators cheering him on as he skates. Another edition portrays Beaver as a child. The cover’s illustration has him tying on his griddle skates. He sits on a tree stump, which has been pierced with his ax. Like the other edition of Tony Beaver: Griddle Skater, the protagonist wears denim jeans and suspenders. This cover, however, has one key difference: Beaver wears a coonskin cap on top of his head. Boys (and sometimes girls) wore coonskin caps in the 1950s and 1960s because of the immense popularity of Davy Crockett. It is likely that this influenced the illustrator to place a coonskin cap on Beaver’s head.
Frank Shay’s 1930 classic Here’s Audacity! American Legendary Heroes included tales about Beaver before he was a lumberjack. These stories show how Beaver’s size and strength work against him in some circumstances. The tall tales discuss Beaver’s occupation as a farmer. In one account, Beaver grows watermelons large enough for him. (These watermelons are, for Beaver, like a peach for a normal-sized man.) Although he grows large watermelons, only one is small enough to fit in a wagon to take to market. After loading the melon onto the wagon, Beaver climbs on top of the watermelon and remains there as his oxen begin to pull. The trip is going well until the wagon hits a bad piece of road: “the forward off wheel hit a rut, the big melon leaned over against the hill and then bounced back the other way. Before Tony could scramble down the melon had gone over the side and was tumbling down the river bank.” Beaver’s farmhands and neighbors, who had joined him for the trip to the market, jump in to rescue him. The river is “just a mass of red foam and those who remained on shore were sure that it was the blood and mangled bodies of Tony and his rescuers” (Shay 1930, 233–234). Beaver is fine, though, and he rides a giant watermelon seed down the river. It is another example of the famed lumberjack surviving a precarious situation.
Chris Babits
See also Crockett, Davy; Fakelore; Febold Feboldson; Jumbo Riley; Lumberjack Tales; Paul Bunyan; Tall Tales
Further Reading
Brown, Charles E. 1930. Paul Bunyan and Tony Beaver Tales: Tall Yarns of the Prince of American Lumberjacks and His Southern Cousin, Tony Beaver, as Told in the Logging Camps of the North and South. Madison, WI: C. E. Brown.
Carmer, Carl. 1937. The Hurricane’s Children: Tales from Your Neck ’o the Woods. New York: Farrar & Rinehart.
Carmer, Elizabeth, and Carl Carmer. 1965. Tony Beaver: Griddle Skater. Champaign, IL: Garrard.
Rees, Ennis. 1964. The Song of Paul Bunyan and Tony Beaver. New York: Pantheon Books.
Shay, Frank. 1930. Here’s Audacity! American Legendary Heroes. New York: Macaulay.