Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox

Paul Bunyan is the giant lumberjack of North American tall tales, and the striking thing about him is that his story can be dated layer by layer. In the oldest record made from the lumberjacks themselves -- a field collection published in 1916 by K. Bernice Stewart and Homer A. Watt -- Paul is seven feet tall, not a mountain; his blue ox has no name at all; and the ox is blue because it was white until a winter when it snowed blue snow for seven days. The great exploit is the Round River drive, down a river that turns out to have no outlet. The name Babe, the forty-two axe handles and the Great Lakes dug as a drinking hole all arrive later, in a book written for the Red River Lumber Company by its advertising man, W. B. Laughead, who stated in print that the animals' names were his own inventions. The beard combed with an uprooted pine, the ten thousand Minnesota lakes and the Grand Canyon come later still, from a children's book of 1926 -- and in that book the canyon is a comparison, not something Paul dug. None of which makes him fake: the camp tales were real, and were collected from named informants before any of the advertising was written.

Paul Bunyan was a big man before he was a giant, and the difference is documented. The oldest attempt to write the tales down as they were actually told is a field study: "Legends of Paul Bunyan, Lumberjack", by K. Bernice Stewart and Homer A. Watt, printed in 1916 in the Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. Stewart had been hearing the stories from the lumberjacks of Wisconsin and Michigan for years; she and Watt then wrote to and interviewed lumbermen and gathered versions from as far as Oregon, Washington and British Columbia. They printed an address at New York University and asked readers to send more. Some of what they collected, they noted drily, was "too coarse for publication". The Paul Bunyan of that 1916 record is "a powerful giant, seven feet tall and with a stride of seven feet". Seven feet. He keeps his men's time by cutting notches in a stick and orders supplies by drawing pictures of what he wants; on the one occasion his ingenuity fails he orders grindstones and receives cheeses. His ox is never given a name. It is simply "his blue ox", with the strength of nine horses, "seven feet -- or seven ax-handles -- between his eyes, and fourteen feet between his horns". And it explains its own colour: the ox "was pure white" until "one winter in the woods it snowed blue snow for seven days (that was the winter of the snow-snakes)", and it never lost the colour. The great exploit is not a canyon or a lake system. It is a single forty-acre parcel shaped like a pyramid, cleared of a hundred million feet of pine, floated down a river that turns out to be circular and to have no outlet at all: the Round River drive. The pancake griddle is real too, greased every morning by cooks with hams strapped to their feet -- and an Oregon variant has two hundred cooks doing it with bacon-rinds. The tales reached print before that. The earliest printing that scholars have brought to light keeps moving backwards: the Forest History Society, reprinting the story in 1986, identified an unsigned anecdote titled "Round River" on an inside page of the Oscoda Press for Friday 10 August 1906, in Michigan, and its introduction by Mary Jane Hennigar was careful to add that Bunyan tales "may have been printed before 1906 in other local newspapers in the timber regions". They had been. Michael Edmonds, in 2009, put the first known appearance in print at a Duluth newspaper item of 4 August 1904, and traced the telling itself back to timber cruisers around Rhinelander, Wisconsin, in the winter of 1885-86. The 1906 anecdote was written up again by James MacGillivray and published as "The Round River Drive" in the Detroit News-Tribune of 24 July 1910; Douglas Malloch turned it into rhyming verse in the American Lumberman of 25 April 1914, unsigned and uncredited. Stewart and Watt thanked Malloch by name for a copy of that poem, and cited its date, in 1916. Then the advertising department arrived, and this is the part the older versions of this story tend to soften. The Red River Lumber Company -- a Minnesota firm that cut its last Minnesota log at Akeley in 1915 and moved its operation to Westwood, California -- put Paul Bunyan on its promotional literature. Its copywriter and illustrator was W. B. Laughead, who produced small booklets in 1914 and 1916 and then the book that did the work: the first edition of Paul Bunyan and His Big Blue Ox appeared in 1922 in ten thousand copies, followed the same year by a printing of five thousand, with further editions in 1924, 1927 and 1931 and a revised printing in January 1934. The company gave the copies away on request and never copyrighted the stories. What Laughead added is not a matter of inference, because he wrote it down. In the editorial note to his own book he states that "the names of the supporting characters, including the animals, are inventions by the writer of this version", and that "the oral chroniclers did not, in his hearing, which goes back to 1900, call any of the characters by name except Paul Bunyan himself". Babe is Laughead's. So is Johnny Inkslinger, so is Brimstone Bill, so is Benny the little blue ox. So is the ox's famous size: "Babe was seven axehandles wide between the eyes according to some authorities; others equally dependable say forty-two axehandles and a plug of tobacco." That is Laughead reconciling his own new figure with the seven ax-handles the lumberjacks really said, and he even supplies the joke that squares them -- "seven of Paul's axehandles were equal to a little more than forty-two of the ordinary kind". And so are the Great Lakes: "The Great Lakes were first constructed to provide a water hole for Babe the Big Blue Ox." The same editorial note also claims, of the 1914 and 1916 booklets, "so far as we know, this was the first appearance of the Paul Bunyan stories in print." That was already untrue when it was written, and by the company's own reckoning: Malloch's verse had run in a lumber trade journal in April 1914, MacGillivray's story in a Detroit paper in 1910, the Oscoda anecdote in 1906. The rest of the modern portrait comes from the children's books of the 1920s. Wallace Wadsworth's Paul Bunyan and His Great Blue Ox (George H. Doran Company, 1926) is where Paul acquires the beard he grooms by pulling "up a young pine tree by the roots" to use "its stiff branches in combing and brushing it smooth"; where "the ten thousand lakes that to-day lie in northern Minnesota" are made not by footprints but by the leaking bucket of the Little Chore Boy; where Babe's footprints, sunk knee-deep in solid rock under a winter's supplies, "later filled with water and became the countless lakes which are to be found to-day scattered throughout the state of Maine"; and where Paul is born on the northern coast of Maine before the Revolutionary War. The Grand Canyon is there too, and it is worth reading exactly: Paul lets his peavy -- a logging hook, not an axe -- drag behind him and gouges "a tremendous gash many miles long and hundreds of feet deep", and Wadsworth then says that "any one who has seen the Grand Canyon can have no doubts about the size of the great logger". The canyon is the comparison, not the result. Bemidji, Minnesota, built the figures that fixed all of this in the eye. For the town's Winter Carnival, unveiled on 15 January 1937, Cyril Dickinson's lumber company oversaw an eighteen-foot Paul of concrete and plaster, modelled at three-to-one scale on the sitting mayor, Earl Bucklen; Jim Payton of the Bemidji Electric Company built Babe from a wooden frame wrapped in wire netting and covered with wool and canvas, mounted on a vehicle so it could be driven in parades, with tin horns fourteen feet across. Fourteen feet is the figure Stewart and Watt had recorded from the lumberjacks in 1916 -- not Laughead's forty-two axe handles. The pair were listed on the National Register of Historic Places on 10 March 1988, reference number 88000204, as Minnesota's first and best-known "roadside colossus".

The statues are free, outdoors and always accessible. Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox stand together on the south shore of Lake Bemidji in Bemidji, Minnesota, at the corner of Third Street and Bemidji Avenue, beside the lakefront visitor centre. There is no gate, no ticket and no opening time; you can walk up to them at any hour, and the paved apron around them is level and easy to reach by wheelchair. A small marker between the two figures reads "BEMIDJI PAUL BUNYAN 1937", which is the quickest way for a visitor to check the date against anything a guide says. Two practical notes. The first is that this entry's map pin is placed on the Bemidji lakefront about 370 metres north-north-west of where the statues actually stand: the figures themselves sit at roughly 47.4704 N, 94.8789 W. Aim for the corner of Third and Bemidji Avenue rather than the pin. The second is that Babe is not the concrete monolith he appears to be. He was built on a vehicle frame so that he could be towed through parades, and he has spent his life outdoors in a northern Minnesota climate; both figures have been repainted and repaired many times, and the surfaces you see are maintenance, not 1937 originals. Be aware that Bemidji is one of several towns with a claim, and that the claims are worth knowing before you plan a trip around them. Akeley, Minnesota, about 60 km south-west, calls itself Paul Bunyan's birthplace and has a kneeling statue of its own -- and its claim rests not on any tale but on the fact that Akeley was a Red River Lumber Company town, the firm whose advertising made Bunyan national. Brainerd, Minnesota, opened the Paul Bunyan Land amusement park in 1950. Bangor, Maine, unveiled a thirty-one-foot Paul in 1959 for the city's 125th anniversary and keeps an oversized birth certificate in City Hall giving Bunyan the date the city itself was incorporated, 12 February 1834. Oscoda, Michigan, was recognised by the Michigan House of Representatives in 2005 as the birthplace of the literary Paul Bunyan, on the strength of the 1906 Oscoda Press printing. Each claim is real; none of them is about the same thing.