Tony Beaver

Also Known As: Tony Beaver of Eel River; called in the 1930s tellings the Southern cousin of Paul Bunyan
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Urban Legends & Contemporary Folklore
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: A giant West Virginia lumberman whose strength, appetite and pipe smoke are all scaled to the mountains he works in.
Role in Mythos: He is the Appalachian answer to Paul Bunyan, the boss of an impossible logging camp up the mythical Eel River who fixes whatever nature throws at his neighbours.
Relation to Humans: The mountain folk send for him when weather or bad luck threatens them, and he answers with firewood, food or a candy dam. He is a helper and a braggart’s dream, never a menace, though his own bulk sometimes lands him in trouble.

The snow drifted high against the doors that winter, and the families along the ridge sat in their cabins watching the woodpile vanish under white. Nobody could get out to cut more. Then the treetops outside started to move. Tony Beaver was walking across the drifts like a man crossing a meadow, snapping off crowns of timber by the hundred, and dropping the firewood straight down the chimneys into the cold hearths below.

Tony Beaver is West Virginia’s giant lumberjack, and his paper trail is short and easy to follow. He first appears in print in two stories by Margaret Prescott Montague, a writer born at White Sulphur Springs in 1878, published in 1923 as “Up Eel River” and “The Today Tomorrow”. She gathered her Tony Beaver tales into a book, also called Up Eel River, in 1928. Montague said the river and everyone on it came out of the imaginations of West Virginia woodsmen, and the West Virginia Encyclopedia describes her collecting his exploits from real lumbermen around the turn of the century. The same encyclopedia’s entry on Montague herself allows that she may have invented him. Both positions stand in the record, and nothing yet printed settles which is right.

What is certain is where the tales claim to come from. The woodhicks, West Virginia’s name for its logging-camp men, spent their evenings trying to out-lie each other, and Tony Beaver is the kind of hero that contest produces. After Montague, others took him up. Charles E. Brown of Madison, Wisconsin, printed a pamphlet in 1930 pairing him with Paul Bunyan as his cousin, or at least a distant relative. Frank Shay gave him a chapter the same year in Here’s Audacity!, a book of American legendary heroes. Carl Carmer retold him in The Hurricane’s Children in 1937, and Mary E. Cober collected his history in 1953. There is no evidence that a lumberjack named Tony Beaver ever lived.

His camp sits high on a mountain up Eel River, a river that is on no map. Brown’s version stresses scale above everything: the crews were huge, the camps were huge, and Tony had a genius for picking out the tallest and best timber. Other tellings make him so tall that the top leaves of a maple shake when he breathes. His pipe is so large that people seeing its smoke think the mountains have caught fire. He drinks liquor strong enough that one swallow turns a bear inside out, and Montague’s own camp brews moonshine powerful enough to make a rabbit spit in a bulldog’s eye. His oxen are so broad that a crow needs a week to fly from one horn to the other.

When folks need him, they send word by a jaybird. One cold, late spring, when the planted crops kept failing, he put his whole effort into growing a single potato. It covered four acres and fed everyone for weeks. His appetite runs at the same size. At his grandmother’s table he ate a hundred buckwheat cakes before he bothered with syrup, then a couple of hundred more with it, and asked her to wrap the rest for the road.

That parcel led to his most famous humiliation. On the way home he met Br’er Rabbit, who carried a load of persimmons and promised a spell that would double their food. Tony laid the pancakes out on a log. Br’er Rabbit set a persimmon between each one, shouted “Bingo!”, and bolted with the lot. He got one hop. Tony caught him a blow that knocked him higher than a kite, the wind filled his ears like sails, and for seven days Br’er Rabbit sailed over West Virginia dropping pancakes and persimmons. Children, Carmer says, still talk about the day it rained pancakes and persimmons in West Virginia.

The best-loved tale is the candy dam. One autumn it rained until Eel River rose high enough to take the town. Tony ordered the molasses warehouses opened and every barrel brought out, then every bag of West Virginia peanuts in storage. In one version his men rolled the barrels six miles upriver and poured molasses and shelled peanuts into the flood, and Tony shook in salt from a shaker the size of the Capitol in Washington. The walk back downstream was hot. The sun beat on the water, and the river ran thicker and slower, sweet and sticky, until just before the town it stopped moving altogether. The flood had set into peanut brittle.

Montague’s book stays closer to camp life. Tony and his crew cut timber, ride logs, raise a garden of monstrous vegetables and entertain Miss Preserved Green, a soul-saving missionary woman from Maine or from Spain; the men cannot remember which. They send her home enlightened, which is not what she came for.

The tales set him against Paul Bunyan more than once, and Bunyan usually has the better of it. The one contest Tony wins consistently is a skating race. As a boy he had learned to skate on griddles greased with bacon fat, and the children’s book Tony Beaver: Griddle Skater, by Elizabeth and Carl Carmer in 1965, makes that race the centre of his story. Tennessee and other states across Appalachia have claimed him too, but most tellings keep him up Eel River.

His power is size, and every problem he solves, he solves by being bigger than it: more trees felled, more food grown, more molasses poured. The same size is his weakness. In Shay’s farming tale he grew watermelons that were to him what a peach is to anyone else, and only one would fit a wagon. He rode on top of it to market until a wheel hit a rut and the melon rolled down the bank into the river with him aboard. The water churned red, and the watchers on shore were sure they were looking at the remains of Tony and his rescuers. It was melon. Tony came out of the river riding a watermelon seed.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Tony Beaver?

Tony Beaver is a giant lumberjack from West Virginia tall tales who runs a logging camp up the mythical Eel River. He is often called the Southern cousin of Paul Bunyan. His stories first appeared in print in Margaret Prescott Montague’s 1923 stories and her 1928 book Up Eel River.

Was Tony Beaver a real person?

No. There is no evidence that a lumberjack named Tony Beaver ever lived. Margaret Prescott Montague said the tales came from West Virginia woodsmen, while the West Virginia Encyclopedia allows that she may have invented him herself.

How did Tony Beaver stop the Eel River flood?

Tony Beaver dammed the flooding Eel River with peanut brittle. He had every barrel of molasses and every bag of West Virginia peanuts poured into the river, added salt from an enormous shaker, and the hot sun thickened the mix until the river stopped flowing just before it reached the town.

Is Tony Beaver related to Paul Bunyan?

Some tellings make Tony Beaver Paul Bunyan’s cousin or distant relative, a link printed by Charles E. Brown in 1930. Montague believed the two were the same giant lumberman known under different names in different regions. In the stories that pit them against each other, Tony Beaver consistently wins only the griddle skating race.

What happened when Tony Beaver met Br’er Rabbit?

In Carl Carmer’s 1937 retelling, Br’er Rabbit tricked Tony Beaver out of a pile of his grandmother’s buckwheat pancakes. Tony Beaver struck him as he fled and sent him flying over West Virginia for seven days, dropping pancakes and persimmons the whole way.