Giant, fictitious logger capable of Herculean deeds and perhaps America’s best-known folk hero, a demigod symbolic of American aspirations and identity. His protean manifestations include the oral traditions of loggers, literature written for children, advertising symbols, honorific statues, and community festivals and pageants. The name probably originates from a 19th-century logger who actually worked in Canada or the United States, although an unlikely phonetic link to the popu-lar but diminutive French trickster figure Bon Jean has been suggested. Folklorists and popular writers have adduced some evidence of the existence of Bunyan tales among late-19th-century loggers in eastern Canada and the American Northeast and Upper Midwest. However, the first description of a Paul Bunyan tale in print did not occur until journalist James McGillivray wrote several essays entitled “The Round River Drive” for Upper Midwest newspapers in 1906 and 1910. In 1914, William B.Laughead, an advertising executive for the Red River Lumber Company, a large logging firm known for its eccentric advertising strategies, initiated a publicity campaign and a series of publications featuring the exploits of Paul Bunyan. Booklets of Bunyan stories and colorful illustrations were distributed by the company free of charge for decades; no attempt was made to copyright the figure of Bunyan; and the company vigorously encouraged its adoption outside the industry by writers in order to enhance its own name recognition. Laughead was the author of the booklets’ stories, which he freely admitted were literary embellishments of a small amount of oral tradition he had encountered over a decade before in the logging camps around Bemidji, Minnesota. Laughead’s tales clearly draw upon the outrageous character and motifs of American tall tales, with all of their comic extravagance. The giant logger himself is depicted as a leader of men, incredibly strong and hardworking, and blessed with an innate sense of entrepreneurial ingenuity. To accompany Bunyan, Laughead fabricated or reinvented a complete cast of larger-than-life characters, often with a distinctly Scandinavian flavor: Babe, Paul’s giant Blue Ox, was joined by such logging camp companions as Johnny Inkslinger, camp clerk; Big Ole, the blacksmith; Sourdough Sam, the cook; and Shot Gunderson, Paul’s foreman. The stories often had an etiological theme: Paul dug the Great Lakes to serve as Babe’s water hole; theMississippi River sprang forth when Paul’s water tank leaked. Other tales revolved around superhuman deeds: to shoe Babe, who was seven ax handles wide between the eyes, required the ore of an entire Minnesota iron mine; to expedite logging, Paul and Babe simply hauled entire sections of forestland to where trees could be cut as if shearing sheep; a winter of blue snow was caused by Paul swearing a blue streak after hitting his thumb with a sixteen-pound hammer. Through the 1920s and 1930s, other writers built on Laughead’s foundation with their own literary embellishments. Ida V.Turney, Esther Shephard, James Stevens, and many other authors wrote articles and books, first for adults but then almost exclusively for a juvenile audience. By the end of World War II, Bunyan had been incorporated into virtually all aspects of popular and elite art, including plays, vocal and instrumental music, ballets, murals, and paintings, the poetry of Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg, and even an operetta by W.H.Auden and Benjamin Britten. On a regional level, tales of Bunyan as a master driller in the Texas oil fields circulated in local oral tradition. In the Upper Midwest and Pacific Northwest, community festivals and pageants celebrated local lumbering heritage with tributes to Bunyan and the average working logger. Respected men and women were selected to serve as honorary Paul and Pauline Bunyans, representing the social order of married model employees in the new paternalistic company towns that replaced transient logging camps. The fascination with Paul Bunyan continues in local and popular culture. As the subject of television cartoons and children’s books, he is in the late 20th century more likely to be portrayed as a reformed, ecologically minded woodsman who loves wilderness than as a rapacious destroyer of nature’s forests. Giant statues of Bunyan— with his classic muscular build, beard, plaid shirt, and stocking cap—delight tourists in areas that have had logging-dominated economies. Folklorists still record the occasional Bunyan tale from older loggers and woodsmen, although such stories almost certainly derive from literary texts. Those same workers are now more likely to write songs and poems that highlight Paul’s abilities as both a logger and a tree planter. Community festivals still feature honorary Paul Bunyans and Bunyanesque loggers participating in local competitions of occupational skills. Interpretations abound of Paul Bunyan’s significance to American culture. Folklorist Richard M.Dorson argued that Bunyan was pure “fakelore,” a spurious, commercialized creation that belonged in the pantheon of other contrived American “folk heroes”: Pecos Bill, the cowboy; Joe Magarac, the steelworker; Febold Feboldson, the Nebraska plainsman. Most folklorists agree that such big, powerful, efficient workers of our industrial age were symbolic embodiments of the heroic virtues of American identity, models of resilient rugged individualism, and symbols of American’s mastery over nature. Folklorist Alan Dundes believes that Bunyan, as a giant, indefatigable industrial worker, was a concise assertion of early-20th-century national identity and strength and thus fulfilled a national psychic need, appearing when America suffered from an acute national inferiority complex, before becoming an acknowledged superpower. Paul Bunyan’s significance also lies in how he was used in relationship to the labor force from which he purportedly originated. Bunyans emergence through corporate sponsorship during a period of intense labor unrest early in the 20th century, and the accompanying explosion of imagery and concocted narrative in publications loggers read (including local newspapers and trade journals), made woodsmen well aware of his presence. Paul Bunyan became a quintessential model for labor, a paragon of conformity to an unattainable work ethic—for Paul Bunyan represents the single, male, superproductive laborer for whom the work and its attendant lifestyle are their rewards, who is able to shun all notions of social mobility for the pride of group membership and the nobility of toil. Bunyanesque loggers do not quit or complain and, by extension, do not revolt. Labor, management, and the nation thus collaborated in containing and ennobling the American logger, a proud producer of American consumable natural resources, a hero of free enterprise.
Robert E.Walls
References
Dorson, Richard M. 1956. Paul Bunyan in the News, 1939–1941. Western Folklore 15:26–39, 179193, 247–261. Fowke, Edith F. 1979. In Defense of Paul Bunyan. New York Folklore 5:43–51. Haney, Gladys J. 1942. Paul Bunyan Twenty-Five Years After. Journal of American Folklore 55:155–168.
Hoffman, Daniel. G. 1983. Paul Bunyan: Last of the Frontier Demigods. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.