Johnny Inkslinger

Also Known As: also Johnny Inkslinger the camp clerk; from “inkslinger”, genuine North Woods slang for the clerk of a logging camp
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Urban Legends & Contemporary Folklore
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: He keeps the accounts of the largest logging outfit ever claimed to exist, writing with a pen fed by a hose from a standing barrel of ink.
Role in Mythos: He is Paul Bunyan’s headquarters clerk, the one member of the crew whose work is done sitting down.
Relation to Humans: He handles every dollar the lumberjacks earn and every dollar they spend at the camp store, and the stories insist he never cheated any of them. He is the only figure in the Bunyan camp whose job a reader is likely to have had.

The ink came out of a barrel. Not a bottle and not a well sunk into a desk, but a full barrel standing against the wall of Paul Bunyan’s camp office with a hose running out of it to the pen in Johnny Inkslinger’s hand, because nothing smaller could keep pace with what he had to write down. He was the headquarters clerk of the biggest logging outfit anyone ever claimed to have seen, and the arithmetic of it would have buried an ordinary man.

He invented bookkeeping, the stories say, at about the same time Paul invented logging, and the two developments were related. Somebody had to know what the crew was owed, what the camp store had sold them on credit, what the horses ate and what the blue ox cost to keep. Johnny was the only man in camp who could hold all of it at once. He built his own office equipment because nothing available was adequate to the scale, and the barrel and hose were his design. So was whatever contrivance let him write out a man’s discharge faster than the man could knot the rope on his bundle and get through the door.

The shaggy dog that spent most of its working life pretending to sleep in front of Johnny’s counter was Fido, the camp watchdog. Greenhorns were told that Paul starved Fido all winter and then, just before payday, fed him the swampers, the barn boys and the student bull cooks, and the thought froze the marrow in their heads. Their fears were groundless. Paul would never let a dog go hungry or mistreat a human being, so Fido was fed the watch peddlers, the tailors’ agents and the camp inspectors, and thus served a very useful purpose.

An inkslinger was a real job long before he was a character. In the white pine camps of Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota the clerk worked out of the wanigan, the office building that doubled as the camp store, sharing a stove and a lamp and the smell of drying wool with the scaler and the foreman, so that the three men responsible for the season’s money could argue about it without going outside into the cold. He drew about thirty-five dollars a month, better than the road monkey shovelling horse droppings off the ice roads for fifteen, well short of the foreman’s seventy. He sold the jacks their blankets and work clothes and stamps and medicine on credit, at prices that ran comfortably above town prices, then deducted the whole total from each man’s time check when the logs reached the mill. The men called his building the swindle shack. They called him the inkslinger.

Where the name attached itself to Paul Bunyan is documented rather than lost. In 1914 Archie D. Walker, secretary of the Red River Lumber Company, hired his cousin William B. Laughead, a former lumberjack working as a freelance advertising man, to sell the company’s new mill at Westwood, California to buyers on the eastern seaboard. Walker suggested hanging the campaign on Paul Bunyan, whose stories had circulated in Great Lakes bunkhouses for decades without ever quite reaching print. Laughead wrote and illustrated a run of booklets: *Introducing Mr. Paul Bunyan of Westwood, California* in 1914, a second volume in 1916, and in 1922 *The Marvelous Exploits of Paul Bunyan*, whose first ten thousand copies were gone within months and which turned a regional yarn into a national property. The Forest History Society, which holds Laughead’s papers, credits him with naming Babe the Blue Ox, creating Brimstone Bill, and bringing the penny-pinching clerk Johnny Inkslinger into focus, and Laughead claimed as much himself in a 1957 interview. Paul Bunyan’s bookkeeper was largely the work of an advertising man selling pine.

His one great feat is an economy. One winter he left off crossing his t’s and dotting his i’s and saved nine barrels of ink. That is the entire story, and it is a precise joke about a certain kind of man: the saving is real, the labour it cost is invisible, and nobody in camp thanked him for it. The jacks accused him instead of using a split pencil to charge up the tobacco and socks they bought at the wanigan, which was bunkshanty talk and nothing more. Johnny never cheated anyone. He also priced the ox, and found that upkeep and overhead on Babe ran expensive while operation and depreciation stayed low and efficiency came out very high, which is how a bookkeeper says that an animal who hauls six hundred and forty acres of logs at a go is worth his feed.

He got his best hour some twenty years later and a long way from the woods. On 5 May 1941 an operetta called *Paul Bunyan* opened at Columbia University, music by Benjamin Britten, words by W. H. Auden, and its human centre is not Paul, who never walks on stage and speaks only as a voice from the wings, but Johnny Inkslinger, written for tenor and sung at the premiere by William Hess. Auden’s Inkslinger arrives at the camp with nothing and turns the job down. He will not take the soup, he will not take the beans, he will not take the wages, and he walks on out of pride while Paul observes that a man with no resources will be back. He is back by nightfall and he takes the work. Later he sits with the dog and tells it that the fire of his existence began out in the sticks and has been going to waste ever since. At the Christmas party that closes the piece he reads out the announcements, receives a telegram from Hollywood inviting him to advise on an all-star lumber picture, and asks the question nobody else thinks to ask: Paul, who are you?

What he can do is hold a scale nobody around him can hold. The camp runs on the assumption that the numbers are right, and they are right because Johnny keeps them, in a hand quick enough to outpace a departing employee and a head steady enough to cost out a blue ox without flinching at the figure. What he cannot do is anything else at all. He has no axe, no strength worth mentioning, and no feat that does not involve a pen. When the crew finally turns ugly in Auden’s version it is over food, and the grievance is settled not by the bookkeeper but by a cook who can make flapjacks. Auden saw the shape of the character and sharpened it: Johnny’s principles last exactly as long as his supper does. Everyone else in the Bunyan stories is a body doing something enormous. He is the one in the warm office, working out what it cost.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Johnny Inkslinger?

Johnny Inkslinger is Paul Bunyan’s camp clerk and bookkeeper in American logging folklore, responsible for the wages, supplies and accounts of the largest lumber camp in the stories. He is best known for a fountain pen fed by a hose running from a standing barrel of ink, since no smaller supply could keep up with his ledgers. He is one of the few named members of Paul Bunyan’s crew whose work is entirely clerical.

Was Johnny Inkslinger a real folk character or was he invented?

Johnny Inkslinger was brought into focus by William B. Laughead, a former lumberjack turned advertising man, in booklets he wrote for the Red River Lumber Company beginning in 1914 and culminating in *The Marvelous Exploits of Paul Bunyan* in 1922. The word “inkslinger” itself was genuine logging camp slang for the camp clerk, so Laughead built his character on a real job with a real nickname. The Forest History Society, which holds Laughead’s papers, credits him with developing the character, and Laughead made the same claim in a 1957 interview.

What did a real inkslinger do in a logging camp?

A real inkslinger was the camp clerk, who worked out of the wanigan alongside the scaler and the foreman and tracked every dollar the camp earned and spent. He ran the camp store, selling lumberjacks clothing, stamps and medicine on credit at prices above those in town, and deducted what they owed from their time checks at the end of the season. The men called the store the swindle shack, and a clerk in the Minnesota pine camps earned around thirty-five dollars a month.

What is Johnny Inkslinger’s most famous story?

The most famous story about Johnny Inkslinger is the winter he stopped crossing his t’s and dotting his i’s and saved nine barrels of ink. The lumberjacks repaid the economy by accusing him of using a split pencil to overcharge them for tobacco and socks at the camp store, an accusation the stories dismiss as idle bunkhouse talk. Johnny Inkslinger is consistently described as honest.

Why is Johnny Inkslinger important in Benjamin Britten’s opera?

Johnny Inkslinger is the central human character of *Paul Bunyan*, the operetta by Benjamin Britten and W. H. Auden that premiered at Columbia University on 5 May 1941, where he is a tenor role. Paul Bunyan himself never appears on stage and speaks only as an offstage voice, so the drama belongs to Inkslinger, who refuses the job out of pride, returns hungry, and takes it. He closes the work by asking Paul who he actually is.