Paul Bunyan

Also Known As: occasionally derived from the French-Canadian Bon Jean; the giant lumberjack of North American logging-camp tall tales
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Urban Legends & Contemporary Folklore
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: Paul Bunyan possesses strength and scale so far past human measure that his ordinary working day rearranges the map of North America.
Role in Mythos: He is the occupational hero of the logging camps, a boasting figure through whom lumberjacks turned brutal work into comedy.
Relation to Humans: He is himself a working man, the boss of a crew rather than a god above one, and the stories are told by the men who claim to have worked for him. His feats flatter the trade that invented him, and his later career as a commercial mascot handed him back to the public as a symbol of American bigness.

The bunkhouse smelled of wet wool, pipe smoke, and pine pitch, and the stove ticked as it cooled. Somebody had already told the one about the winter so cold the flames froze in the lamps. Then a man in the top bunk said he had worked a season for Paul Bunyan up on the Big Onion, and the room settled, because everyone knew what was coming and everyone wanted it anyway.

That is where he begins. Not in a temple or a saga but in a heated room full of exhausted men who cut timber for a living and needed something to do with their mouths before sleep. Loggers in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Maine, Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington traded anecdotes about a lumberjack too large for any camp to hold, and the tales moved with the crews as the cutting moved west. The stories were not written down for a long time. They did not need to be. A man carried them in his head from one river drive to the next, added a foot to the giant’s height, and passed them on.

The scale is the whole joke, and it is a joke told with real affection. Paul’s cookstove covers an acre. The griddle is so wide that the cooks grease it by strapping sides of bacon to their feet and skating. His crew eats through mountains of hotcakes and thinks nothing of it. Rain falls for months and he is unbothered. Mosquitoes arrive the size of birds and he deals with them. Where he drags his axe or his tools, the ground remembers it, and the tales cheerfully credit him with digging Puget Sound, carving the Grand Canyon, and heaping up the Black Hills. The geography of a continent becomes the byproduct of one man’s overtime.

The best of the early material has a technical flavour that gives away its authors. In the Round River story, a crew puts a winter’s cut into a river and drives the logs around its whole course three times before anyone works out that the river is a closed loop with no outlet at all. That is a joke only a river driver finds funny, and it is funny because it is a nightmare. The camp cook Sourdough Sam, who made everything except coffee out of sourdough, dumps a batch into the water and the rising dough lifts the logs clear over the divide. Johnny Inkslinger keeps the books with a fountain pen holding twenty-four barrels of ink, writing two complete sets at once, one with each hand. Brimstone Bill looks after the ox and builds him yokes of cranberry wood, which will pull anything that has two ends to it.

The ox is Babe, and Babe is blue. He turns up in the Winter of the Blue Snow, a season when the snow came down coloured, and Paul finds a calf half buried in a drift and carries him home to thaw by the fire. The calf dries out fluffy and stays blue for the rest of his life. Whatever the camps originally said about Paul’s animals, Babe as we have him was drawn and named by William B. Laughead, and this is where the story stops being simple.

In 1914 the Red River Lumber Company needed to sell pine from a new mill at Westwood, California, to eastern buyers who had never heard of the place. The company secretary, Archie D. Walker, hired his cousin Laughead, a former lumberjack turned advertising man, and between them they landed on the half-known camp giant as a way of saying that the operation was enormous and reliable. Laughead wrote and illustrated a postcard-sized booklet, Introducing Mr. Paul Bunyan of Westwood, California, followed by Tales About Paul Bunyan, Volume II in 1916. He invented Babe, Brimstone Bill, Johnny Inkslinger, and the cook Big Joe, fixed the giant’s face and figure in cartoon form, and gave him a personality he had not previously required. The first mailing flopped. Buyers outside the timber country did not know who Paul Bunyan was and threw the pamphlets away, which is why the first editions are now rare.

The 1922 revision, The Marvelous Exploits of Paul Bunyan, did what the first one could not. A long review in the Kansas City Star put it in front of the general public, the ten thousand copies were gone within months, a reprint of five thousand could not keep up, and letters came from teachers, librarians, soldiers, and children. Laughead reckoned the book eventually ran to thirteen editions and well over a hundred thousand free copies. The company trademarked his drawing of Paul’s head and put it on the lumber. Esther Shephard’s Paul Bunyan followed in 1924 and James Stevens’s in 1925, both aimed at a wide audience, both leaning on the giant’s size rather than on any knowledge of how timber is actually cut. Newspapers ran reader-submitted tales. Paul dug the Panama Canal, struck oil in the Southwest, and stopped belonging to the woods at all.

He was in print before any of that. James MacGillivray, who had worked the Michigan camps as a young man, published a short Round River piece in the Oscoda Press on 10 August 1906, and an expanded version, The Round River Drive, ran in the Detroit News-Tribune on 24 July 1910. An anonymous poet set it to verse in American Lumberman in 1914. Those appearances reached lumbermen and almost nobody else.

Folklorists have been arguing about him ever since. Richard Dorson coined the word fakelore partly with Paul in mind, for material dressed as ancient tradition that was in fact recently manufactured for money. The charge is fair as far as it goes. It also misses that the camps had him first, that working loggers went on telling him after the pamphlets, and that a story can be sold and still be believed in. Some writers look for a man underneath: Fabian Fournier, a French-Canadian logger known in the Michigan woods as Saginaw Joe, whose violent life became public when his killer was tried in 1875, and Bon Jean, a name from an 1837 rebellion in Canada that may have worn down into Bunyan. Others reach further back to Rabelais and his giants. None of it is settled.

His powers follow from the trade that made him. He is strong because the work was hard, tireless because the season was short, and capable of moving rivers because a river driver’s worst enemy is water that will not cooperate. His weakness follows just as neatly. He is a creature of the standing pine, and the pine ran out. As the great Lakes forests were cut over, the giant who had cleared them was left with nothing to cut, and he survives now in fibreglass, standing beside Babe outside Bemidji and at the edge of a California highway, drawing tourists to places the logging left behind.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Paul Bunyan?

Paul Bunyan is a giant lumberjack from North American tall tales, originally told among loggers in the camps of the Great Lakes, New England, and the Pacific Northwest. He represents enormous size, strength, and appetite, and the stories credit him with reshaping the landscape of the continent while simply doing his job.

Was Paul Bunyan a real person?

No. Several real people have been proposed as partial inspirations, most often the French-Canadian logger Fabian Fournier, known as Saginaw Joe, who was murdered in 1875, and a figure called Bon Jean connected to an 1837 rebellion in Canada. None of these identifications is proven, and the giant of the stories is a folk exaggeration rather than a historical man.

Who created Babe the Blue Ox?

Babe the Blue Ox was created by William B. Laughead, an advertising man and former lumberjack, in the promotional pamphlets he wrote and illustrated for the Red River Lumber Company beginning in 1914. Laughead also invented Brimstone Bill, Johnny Inkslinger, and the cook Big Joe, and fixed Paul Bunyan’s now-familiar appearance in his cartoons.

What landscapes did Paul Bunyan supposedly create?

The tales credit Paul Bunyan with digging Puget Sound, carving the Grand Canyon, and raising the Black Hills, all as side effects of ordinary logging work. Later newspaper stories extended the list still further, giving him credit for the Panama Canal and for striking oil in the Southwest.

Why do folklorists call Paul Bunyan fakelore?

The folklorist Richard Dorson coined the term fakelore for material presented as old tradition that was actually manufactured recently, often for commercial reasons, and Paul Bunyan is his best-known example because the Red River Lumber Company pamphlets made him a national figure. The label is only partly fair: loggers were telling Bunyan anecdotes before any of it was printed, and they kept telling them afterwards.