Babe the Blue Ox

The tracks filled with water and never drained. That is how the loggers accounted for northern Minnesota, and if you believe them, every lake up there is the print of a single hoof set down by an animal too heavy to argue with. One account has a settler, his wife and their baby falling into one of those prints. The son climbed out at fifty-seven and reported the accident.

Nobody who worked with the ox could agree on his dimensions. The bull-whackers who fed him said he was seven axe handles wide between the eyes. Others, equally sure of themselves, said forty-two axe handles and a plug of tobacco. Both camps were right, since seven of Paul Bunyan’s axe handles came to a little more than forty-two of the ordinary kind, and the confusion tells you most of what you need to know about the standards of measurement in a logging camp. On the colour there was no dispute at all. He was blue, a blue that photographs badly and paints beautifully, which is one reason he outlived nearly everything else in the stories.

Where he came from is genuinely unsettled, and the earliest printed telling admits it outright: history disagrees as to when, where and how Paul first got hold of him. The version most people carry around came later, from a 1925 book, and has Paul finding him as a calf frozen into a bay during the Winter of the Blue Snow, thawing him out, and watching the colour refuse to fade. That blue snow is older than the ox in print. A Duluth newspaper was already referring to the year of the blue snow in 1904, back when Paul Bunyan was a name passed between timber cruisers and nothing more.

Winter mornings he stood in the yoke on a road packed to grey ice while the chain came taut behind him, link by link, with a sound like a slow gate closing. Then a section of land moved. Six hundred and forty acres of felled pine came off the skidway in one piece and went to the landing, because it had never occurred to anyone to ask him for less. In the mountains they used him differently, walking him along the crooked hauling roads to pull the kinks out of them, and on one of those jobs he drew a chain of three-inch links into a straight bar.

His keeper was Brimstone Bill, who claimed to know that pernicious old reptile as though he had been through him with a lantern. Bill made the wet-weather harness out of buckskin, which stretched so badly in rain that the ox could reach the landing while the load sat untouched in the woods, so Bill took to anchoring the far end and letting the sun shrink the leather and bring the logs in on its own.

The story the camps liked best involved a mistake. A foreman named Chris Crosshaul took a drive down the Mississippi and delivered the wrong logs to the boom at New Orleans, where the owners read the bark marks and refused every stick. Somebody had to bring them back up. Paul fed the ox a heavy salt ration, walked him to the upper river and let him drink. The water went upstream. So did the logs, faster than they had come down.

Everything he could do followed from the same two facts, that he was enormous and that he pulled without stopping. He could move anything with two ends to it. He made lakes by walking. He made rivers behave. His limits came from the same place. He ate in a day what a full crew could tote to camp in a year, and no camp could hold him for two nights running; fifty bales of hay went down as a snack, wire and all, and six men with picaroons worked steadily afterward picking the wire out of his teeth. No sling could be built strong enough to hoist him for shoeing, and the problem was only solved once Dakota had been logged flat enough for him to lie down in. He was docile, and he had a sense of humour, which in an animal that size meant he would come up behind a drive and drink the river dry, leaving several million feet of pine sitting in mud. His yokemate Benny, the little blue ox, showed where the appetite ended: he broke into the cook shanty after pancakes, swallowed a red-hot stove in his greed, and nothing could be done for him.

Here is the plain part. The name is advertising. In 1914 a former lumberjack called William B. Laughead was hired by his cousin at the Red River Lumber Company to sell a new mill in Westwood, California to buyers on the eastern seaboard, and he reached for a folk hero the trade already half knew. Laughead wrote and drew the pamphlets, and in doing so he invented Brimstone Bill, sharpened Johnny Inkslinger, and gave the ox the name Babe. The blue ox itself was not his; an unnamed one had appeared in print in a sportsman’s magazine in February 1910, and the oral tales run back at least to a timber cruiser near Tomahawk, Wisconsin in 1885. What Laughead supplied was the name, the face and the distribution, and the pair stayed the company’s trademark until it shut in 1946. That the root underneath was real is not in doubt. In 1916, while the pamphlets were going out in the mail, a University of Wisconsin student named K. Bernice Stewart was sitting with Wisconsin woodsmen and writing down what they told her, and she published the results with her professor Homer Watt as the first field study anyone made of the cycle. The folklorist Richard Dorson later coined the word fakelore largely for what had been done to that material, a synthetic product wearing the clothes of oral tradition. Michael Edmonds, going back through the logging-camp record a century afterward, argued the other way: the bunkhouse tradition was genuine, and what buried it was its own success.

What the ox displaced is the part the postcards leave out. The Ojibwe and Dakota accounts of that country credit Gichi Manitou and Wakaŋ Taŋka with the lakes and the rivers, and the Bunyan stories quietly replaced all of it with a hoofprint, on land the treaties of 1837, 1854 and 1855 had only just taken. The Ojibwe answer at Red Lake is the sharpest thing anyone ever said about him: the forests there survived because Paul Bunyan lost a fight with Nanabozho, who had been in the neighbourhood a great deal longer.

He is still standing on the shore of Lake Bemidji, ten feet of concrete over steel mesh and wire, horns out of all proportion, head slightly lowered. Locals built him for a winter carnival in 1936, and he spent a while afterward working as a parade float before settling in beside Paul for good.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Babe the Blue Ox?

Babe the Blue Ox is the giant blue ox who serves as the draft animal and companion of Paul Bunyan in North American logging-camp tall tales. He does the hauling in almost every story, and the tales credit his hoofprints with forming the lakes of northern Minnesota. His name was given to him in 1914 by an advertising man, William B. Laughead, working for the Red River Lumber Company.

How big was Babe the Blue Ox?

The stories measure him between the eyes rather than by height or weight, and they give two answers: seven axe handles, or forty-two axe handles and a plug of chewing tobacco. Both are treated as correct, because seven of Paul Bunyan’s own outsized axe handles equalled a little more than forty-two ordinary ones. No source gives him a weight.

Why is Babe blue?

The best-known explanation comes from a 1925 book of Paul Bunyan stories, in which Paul finds Babe as a calf frozen into a bay during the Winter of the Blue Snow, and the colour never leaves him. The Winter of the Blue Snow is older than that book; a Duluth newspaper referred to the year of the blue snow in 1904. Earlier tellings simply describe the ox as blue without explaining it.

Did Babe the Blue Ox really create the Great Lakes?

Within the tales, Babe’s hoofprints fill with water and become lakes, and later retellings extend this to the Great Lakes and other North American landmarks. These are tall tales, not creation accounts, and they were laid over Ojibwe and Dakota traditions that credit Gichi Manitou and Wakaŋ Taŋka with making the region’s waters. Ojibwe storytellers at Red Lake responded with their own version, in which Paul Bunyan loses a fight with Nanabozho.

What was Babe the Blue Ox’s weakness?

His appetite. He ate in a single day what an entire crew could haul to camp in a year, which meant no logging camp could keep him more than one night. He also could not be lifted for shoeing, since no sling would hold him, and his habit of drinking rivers dry stranded log drives. His yokemate Benny died from the same fault, swallowing a red-hot stove while bolting pancakes.

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