By Cloice R. Howd and Otis T. Howd
Paul Bunyan was the logging industry; not, to be sure, as it is found inForest Service Reports or in profit and loss statements, but rather asit burned in the bones of the true North Woods lumberjack. To understandthe significance of the Bunyan stories one must know something of the menwho first told them.
While the lumber industry has found a place in every section of thecountry except the treeless plains, it was the pineries of the Lake Stateswhich furnished most of its romance. Logging had begun on the AtlanticCoast even before the first permanent English settlement, but it neverreached a size sufficient to challenge the imagination until it came tothe Lake States. While the industry had begun on Lake Erie about 1800, itsdevelopment in the West was slow until after the Civil War. By that timesaw mill machinery was ready to make lumber rapidly and cheaply, and thefast growing population of the Mississippi Valley brought the marketwithin reach of the forests. After 1865 the lumbermen swept acrossMichigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota like a whirlwind, laying waste with axand saw that mighty pine forest, until by 1900 all that remained weresmall fragments of the original forest and hundreds of miles of stumps.Then they passed on to the Gulf States or the Pacific Coast.
“Down East” logging had been largely a side line to agriculture or otheroccupations, although there were some men who were full-time loggers, butwith the opening up of the Lake States, logging became a distinctprofession, with a professional pride in work and a devotion to it whichkept the logger from straying off into other industries. The logger wentinto the woods early in the fall, spent the entire winter snow-bound in alonely camp with other men like-minded with himself, a dozen to a hundredor more of them. With the spring thaw they brought the logs down the riverin a great drive, and then spent their winter stake in a blaze of gloryamong the bright lights of a sawdust town. Then they went into the sawmills till it was time to return to the woods in the fall. It was duringthe long winter evenings in the bunk houses, with the loggers gatheredabout the red-hot stove and the air full of the smell of drying clothesand tobacco smoke, that the Paul Bunyan tales were born and grew.
These stories find their original in a French-Canadian, Paul Bunyon, whofirst came into prominence during the Papineau rebellion in 1837, when, byremarkable feats of[Pg 2] strength and daring, he won the admiration of hiscountrymen. Then for many years he was the outstanding logging boss in allthe St. Lawrence River country. When the loggers from this region wentinto the Michigan woods about 1850 they took with them the stories oftheir great hero, which stories, naturally, lost nothing in the telling,particularly as they served admirably as a form of compensation device fortheir feelings of inferiority. Nor is it remarkable that the Yankeeloggers should parody these stories to ridicule the French-Canadians.
Another element which entered into the making of the Bunyan myth was thetendency to exaggeration which is common to all of us and which findsexpression on so many occasions. The lumber camps had long been filledwith extreme stories of many sorts, but these were usually only isolatedtales. Many of them had been told to impress the tenderfoot, while manyothers had been wish projections, a sort of day-dreaming in which one wasable to do that w