Edmonds - Out of the Northwoods: the Many Lives of Paul Bunyan, With More Than 100 Logging Camp Tales

WHEN I RECENTLY ASKED MY ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD if shed ever heard of Paul Bunyan, she answered, Sure. Hes that great big guy with the blue cow. She was less certain about why he was famous and couldnt remember exactly how shed heard of him. Folklores funny that way. Everybody knows it, but most of us arent sure how we first heard it, and nobody seems to know where it comes from.

Although Id encountered Paul Bunyan as a child in the 1950s, my professional curiosity about him was aroused only in 2005 when I stumbled across a 1916 newspaper photograph of a young woman under the headline, Extracts from Paul Bunyan Yarns. She was Bernice Stewart, who, as a college student during World War I, traveled through logging camps to collect Bunyan stories from lumberjacks. As if that werent strange enough, when I looked into her work further I learned that, although everyone recognized his name, no one actually knew where Paul Bunyan came from.

Here was a puzzle worth investigating, one that even had an analogue in a Bunyan tale from Wisconsin: As a trailer of game [Bunyan] was unsurpassed. Once he came on a moose in the woods that had died of old age. Having some spare time, Paul in a short time traced this moose back to the place where it was born.

I, too, had some spare time, so I set out on his trail. I soon discovered that previous researchers had overlooked many early Bunyan publications and manuscripts from Wisconsin. These documents suggested that some widely repeated facts about the talessuch as that they started in Maine in the mid-nineteenth century, that a real-life Paul Bunyan had fought in an 1837 Canadian rebellion, and that the stories were first printed in Michigan in 1906were mistaken.

From that point on, the game was afoot, as Sherlock Holmes would say. I spent much of 2007 and 2008 pursuing it, and at almost every turn a new mystery or paradox greeted me. If the stories were created by macho lumberjacks in all-male settings, why werent there any dirty jokes about Bunyan? Where did Charles Brown, the most prolific Wisconsin publisher of the tales, acquire his stories? Why did the W.P.A. Wisconsin Folklore Project records on Bunyan disappear? How did the private jokes of working-class loggersthe Hells Angels of their dayturn into the cutesy caricature that every eleven-year-old recognizes a century later?

As I ferreted out answers to questions such as these, I was astonished at the hold that Bunyan took on me. Ive always been fascinated by the ways that knowledge travels across time and space, but I was surprised at how thoroughly I enjoyed digging up Bunyans roots. The early stories themselves, with ironic touches reminiscent of Mark Twain and logical contradictions worthy of Lewis Carroll, had much to do with it. They are, quite simply, fun. And the people who produced, promoted, and perverted the tales were fascinating characters. More than one of them had lied, stolen, or cheated to make tales told by wilderness lumberjacks into a commodity that could be sold for profit. All told, Bunyans strange career was a fascinating episode in American intellectual history.