Wisconsin Public Television University Place  Michael Edmonds Out of the Northwoods  October 30, 2012 UP795   cc >> So, today we are pleased to introduce author Michael Edmonds' presentation, "Out of the Northwoods," as part of the Wisconsin Historical Museum's History Sandwiched In lecture series. The opinions expressed today are those of the presenter and not necessarily those of the Wisconsin Historical Museum. Please join me in welcoming Mr. Edmonds to the stage as he recounts the stories that created the lumberjack hero Paul Bunyan. [APPLAUSE] >> Thanks. Thanks, Melissa. Do you have audio back there? Okay. And thank you all for coming Thank you all for coming. How many of you have heard of Paul Bunyan? Raise your hand if you've heard of Paul Bunyan? Of course, of course. We all know Paul Bunyan today, right? What I'm going to do in the next 45 minutes is to explain why that is, because a hundred years ago the only people who knew about Paul Bunyan were guys like this, lumberjacks working in the woods. And if I had stood here in Madison in 1912 or 1898 and said, how many of you have heard of Paul Bunyan? None of you would have raised your hand because it was private. 

It was an oral tradition and it was private. And this is who they thought they were talking about. This is a sketch done in 1915 by the person who did more than anyone else to make the stories popular. And Paul Bunyan looked like a lumberjack looked when he came out of the woods at the end of the winter. He had dirty, unshaven, but somehow we went from that to this. [LAUGHTER] In just two or three generations. How many of you have seen statues like this somewhere? I can't remember where this one is. Yeah, you've been there. You've been to Bemidji, or whatever. There's even a Paul Bunyan mall in Minnesota. 

>> Cool. >> So, what I want to do is explain how that happened and how that changed Paul Bunyan along the way. There were really four Paul Bunyans. If you look at the scholarly literature of folklore, what the academics said in the 1940s and '50s and '60s and '70s, they'll say Paul Bunyan is not folklore at all. Paul Bunyan was just made up by advertisers. And when I started this research project three or four years ago, that's where I started except I knew that they were probably wrong because I had seen earlier stuff, and as I did more and more research, I realized that, indeed, lumberjacks did tell stories about Paul Bunyan. The professors were wrong. There's an oral tradition, and the story circulated privately by word of mouth for about a whole generation, 30 or 40 years. Then, in the 1920s, they escaped the forest, and they made it into print. This book was one of the first. 

It came out in the '20s. They were not children's stories. This was fiction for adults. Grownups were the audience for the Paul Bunyan stories, and they were wildly popular almost from the very start. That led that advertisers to jump on the bandwagon. Anybody eaten here in the Dells? And there's another one in Hazelhurst or Minocqua. And by the 1930s, you get Paul Bunyan used by advertisers. We'll look at some of those examples. And then, finally, after that, Paul Bunyan becomes a children's hero. So, somehow, Paul Bunyan goes from being the culture hero of rugged, uneducated, working-class guys alone in the woods to being something every kid knows. 

So who was Paul Bunyan anyway? I'll read you some stories from the book today. The book covers much of the same ground as the presentation. About a third of it is about lumberjacks and their culture, how they worked, what they talked about and so forth. About a third of it is about how Paul Bunyan became famous, and about a third of it is stories out of the oral tradition. So what I'll read today is all stories that lumberjacks really spoke aloud to one another. Nothing that you'll hear today is by advertisers or children's writers. Bunyan was a powerful giant, seven feet tall with a stride of seven feet. He was famous throughout the lumbering districts for his physical strength and for the ingenuity with which he met difficult situations. He was so powerful that no man could successfully oppose him, and his ability to get drunk was proverbial. [LAUGHTER] Thank you for laughing. 

You should laugh whenever you want to. These are funny stories. They were meant to make people laugh. And who is his sidekick? >> Babe. >> Babe the Blue Ox. That's right. Babe the Blue Ox. The blue ox measured 42 ax handles and a plug of tobacco between the eyes. On one occasions, Paul dragged a whole house up a hill with the help of this ox, and then returning, they dragged up the cellar. [LAUGHTER] Paul had 18 miles of crooked logging road. 

It was so crooked that the new teamster couldn't make the short turns on account of the teams not being able to hold the loads back because the road was downhill all the way to the landing and halfway back. So Paul hooked Babe the Blue Ox on one end of it and jerked the road straight. And we all know Paul lumbered off the Dakotas. If you don't believe me, go to the Dakotas. You won't see any trees. [LAUGHTER] So this is who they were talking about. But you can't really understand the stories, like that last reference to the logging road downhill all the way from the landing. What's a landing? What's a logging road? So I'm going to spend a few minutes reviewing how logging was done. Anybody here grow up in northern Wisconsin or Minnesota? Anybody go up there on vacation? Most of you, right? This is real Northwoods stuff. All of these steps show up in the stories somewhere. 

The first step in logging was that a person called a timber cruiser would go out into a forest on land that a lumber company had bought and survey the trees that were there to see how many trees there were that could be cut into lumber. What was the financial value if they harvested these trees? And this is the Chippewa River about 1910. The Chippewa River Valley. You can see a carriage here. Person, horse. It was not at all uncommon, initially, for the woods of northern Wisconsin to contain trees three to four feet in diameter and ten stories tall. We go up there now and we say, ah, back to nature, and there are all these trees about this big, right? Those were all trees planted since the forest was clear-cut. So those are little trees compared to what the loggers saw. So the timber cruiser would go up and map this off into 40-acre parcels that could be cut. In the early fall, September or October, an advanced crew would go up and build structures like the two you see here. 

In the early days of logging, it was all done under one roof, but by the 1870s and '80s logging camps have two different buildings, one for sleeping and one for eating. And a lot of the Bunyan stories take place in either of those settings as well as out in the woods. So they build these things, and then around Thanksgiving, after the ground had frozen, the snow had begun to fall, the rivers had begun to freeze, the lumberjacks would come up. And here's how they cut trees. They worked in pairs. They would cut with an ax from the back side, notch out a tree, and then saw from the opposite side. So which way is this tree going to fall? [INAUDIBLE] That's right. And why do you suppose they want it to fall to the right of the picture as we look at it? >> It's clear. >> It's clear, exactly. It's not going to get hung up on any branches or anything. 

It's going to fall right down. The same pair of guys would strip the branches off it and then cut the trunk into whatever lengths the lumber mill needed. Might be 8-foot, 16-foot, 20-foot. And then they would drag those out of the woods to a place where all the logs could be staged. >> Wow. >> Exactly, wow. Now, we know this is not a typical load, because they took a picture of it. So it's unusual. It's a big deal. But even half that many would be an amazing thing. 

To roll those logs by hand using a peavey or using manual labor, chain them on there, was obviously really dangerous, and there's lots of Bunyan stories about guys who are injured or crippled or whatever. See what looked like railroad tracks down here? That's the ice road. At night they would scoop out a pair of gullies, trenches, the same width as the sled runners and fill them with water. So by morning it would ice and the horses could pull a load like that. >> How did they get the logs up on to that? >> The question there was, how do they get the logs up? One at a time, really hard. I don't know how they did it. [LAUGHTER] They pulled, they had chains, not ropes, and they pulled them up. There would be guys on top, there's a technical vocabulary and if you look at some of the books about logging in the Great Lakes region, you can learn all about it. I didn't do that for the book. >> Paul put them up there. 

>> Yeah, I should have said that. [LAUGHTER] Next time, Paul Bunyan put them up there. So, all winter long they would bring the logs to the edge of the river or the outlet and stack them on the ice. What kind of animals are these? >> Oxen. >> Oxen. They used oxen before horses. The shift to horses comes in the 1880s, to railroads in the late '90s. This, in fact, is the oldest picture we have at the Wisconsin Historical Society of lumbering in Wisconsin, and it's dated 1880. So they would to this from November to March or April. Miles and miles and miles from anywhere. 

No roads, no railroads, no way out, 30, 40, 50 guys living together in the woods all alone. And when they had cut the trees they were entitled to, or maybe more, they would get some R&R, and they would head to town in spring for sex, drugs, and rock and roll. The partying and the fighting of lumberjack culture was sort of like gun fights in western movies. It was a big part of life. And there were lots of stories of Paul Bunyan in settings like this. I don't mean to cast aspersions on these women here. It's a big part of lumberjack culture dealt with in the book. When the rivers thawed out and opened up, it was time to get those logs downstream to a lumber mill. The really talented lumberjacks would surf them, and they might ride logs like this all the way from, say, Rhinelander down river to a mill in Stevens Point. Or from Eagle River for a hundred miles south. 

They had nails coming out of the bottoms of their shoes. Untalented guys like me and probably you, we'd be wading in the frozen mud back here just pushing the stuck ones out so that they could keep them moving. Eventually, they would reach a mill, but along the way they might run into a log jam. Can you see these guys down here? How big a jam that is? The lumber company can't afford to have its money tied up like this, so they would ask for volunteers to go to the front of the jam, find the key log, which is sort of like a keystone in an arch, and blast it out or hook up a chain to pull it out. It was incredibly dangerous work. Eleven men died here on the Chippewa River in one day freeing up a log jam. And a government commission in the state of Washington in 1919 concluded that being a lumberjack was more dangerous than warfare. So, we think of jovial Paul Bunyan and his happy-go-lucky crew, but it wasn't like that in reality. Eventually, they'd get the logs to the mill. On the end of every log would have been stamped a log marked hammered in which was sort of like a brand on cattle. 

And this guy is sorting out the logs, then they're going to go up this incline, get sawed into boards, and then those boards get assembled into piles of lumber like you see at Menards or Home Depot. They're held together with these vertical pins going through. And this is a raft pilot taking a load of lumber through the Dells. So the trees that were cut up north might come down through Eau Claire or La Crosse, get turned into a raft like this, go down the Mississippi all the way to St. Louis. Now, lumbering starts in Wisconsin in the 1830s, but until the Civil War, it's not a very important industry. You can see, according to the census there's only 1500 lumberjacks in 1860. 1870, only a little more. By 1880, things are going up a little bit. There's a huge fire, the Peshtigo fire and the Chicago fire which boosts some demand, but then look what happens between 1880 and 1890. There's this explosive growth in the number of lumberjacks in the field, and all sorts of people enter the profession at that point. 

And that's when you get the very first story about Paul Bunyan, right in the middle of the 1880s.  If I can find my place here. >> What accounted for that explosive growth? >> The question is, why was there that explosive growth? The population of the country moved further west out onto the plains where there were no trees, and so when you watch a western movie and those gunslingers are walking on wooden boardwalks in Dodge City, that's Wisconsin trees they're walking on. So, the growth of cities and especially the movement of the population to the west was the market where all of those were going. >> The people who work the lumber camps, what nationalities were they? >> We're going there right now. Great. I didn't plant that question. [LAUGHTER] Well, we're going there in a second. All the camps had their storytellers and musicians and singers, one lumberjack recalled, and these would furnish all the entertainment to be obtained five nights out of seven. If we didn't have any entertainers in the camp, we usually got all the concerts we cared for from the wolves. 

Another logger recalled that each person had to help provide entertainment. He must sing a song, tell a story, or whistle. If he couldn't do any of those things, he must put a pound of tobacco in the poor box. That pound was good for a month when he must put in another. So to be able to tell Paul Bunyan stories was one way to avoid paying that tax of a pound of tobacco. [LAUGHTER] So there's this culture of providing your own entertainment, and that's one motive for telling the stories. But another has to do with who's going out there into the lumber camps. In every crew, another logger's recollection, in every crew there would be those in camp for the first time, and it was for the benefit of these tenderfeet that the wonderful tales were related. Now, that slide that had the graph, at the bottom when there were few lumberjacks, they were professionals. They had done it all their lives. 

During the 1880s, you get that huge leap, and all sorts of people start to come. Immigrants come who have come to this country but can't find work in the cities. Farm boys come to work in the winter because there's nothing to do on the farm so dad sends his 15-year-old son up north to earn a hundred bucks, come back in the spring. So there's all sorts of newcomers who enter at the time that Paul Bunyan's invented. It was for the benefit of these tenderfeet that the wonderful tales were related. A grizzled veteran would relate some astounding feat associated with logging, accompanied by the causal remark it happened the winter he worked in Paul Bunyan's camp. Some fellow campmate would recall having seen the first fellow there and generally corroborate the story. There was generally one or two good storytellers in every camp, and any young fellow just starting out sure got filled up on them. Some of the old-timers would put in a whole week thinking up a good one to spring on a kid on Sunday morning. Now, look at the people in this photo. 

Is this guy 15? How about this guy? Okay. So here's all these newcomers in the 1880s coming into the lumber camp, but who's up here? Those are the old guys. And they're the ones who are telling the stories about Paul Bunyan because this kid comes in and he says, well, it's really cold out there, wasn't it today? And that old guy with the gray mustache says, cold? This isn't cold. Why, when I worked for Paul Bunyan... And stories got invented that way. [LAUGHTER] Some of the stories were about an animal called the Hodag. How many of you have heard of the Hodag? I was driving into work this morning and I saw a car, obviously from up north, with a Hodag bumper sticker from Rhinelander where the Hodag is the mascot. The Hodag was a mythical animal. I'll let you read that. Oh, wait, we have film here. 

Seven years of continuous fire was needed to exterminate the profanity which had accumulated in the body of an ox during his life. As the fire died down, there slowly issued from the great pile of ashes a mystical animal, later to be known as the Hodag. They were very ferocious. If you were that 15-year-old kid and you hadn't upheld your end of the work that day, you might very easily be sent into the woods at night to go retrieve some tool that had been left in the woods supposedly, and you'd be afraid of the Hodags all the way because they lived by eating lumberjacks. There were other mythical animals that ate lumberjacks. The hangdown, which secreted itself in the branches and then would hang down, grab lumberjacks by the neck. One lumberjack recalled that once he and some others in camp hired an Indian to go into a swamp nearby and make the most blood curdling noises. The tenderfeet were then told this was a Hodag wandering in its native wilds. [LAUGHTER] Well, the very first story about Paul Bunyan that I could find in the archives of any of the people who collected the stories came from just north of Tomahawk. You all know Tomahawk? A bit north of Wausau in the Wisconsin Valley? And the guy who recalled it, Bert Taplin, said he first heard these songs in the winter of '85 or '86 in the Manson camp. 

Now, historians don't take statements like that at face value. They're always looking for corroboration. So, interestingly enough, there's another independently remembered corroboration of this. In the summer of 1886, Jim McKee worked on the road at Tomahawk when there was barely a building there on the Fourth of July. But when he returned in the winter, the town had built up with 17 saloons, 2 brothels, and several stores. No mention of a church for the lumberjacks. [LAUGHTER] He was a clerk in Jack Clark's double-front store and he heard Bunyan stories there. So, this is the first time that the Bunyan stories are told or that there's documentation of them. So you can tell your friends in Minnesota Paul Bunyan's a Wisconsin production, not Minnesota. >> Not true. 

>> Oh, it's true. Read the book. Read the book. [LAUGHTER] There's a whole appendix in the book on claims to Paul Bunyan's origin. So what's the first story that was told? This guy Bert Taplin remembered. When his food supply ran low, Bunyan fashioned a pair of snowshoes and went foraging through the woods. He came on a herd of moose, shot several, and captured one alive. This moose he brought back to camp and he trained it to drive, having fashioned a harness from bark. One of his men had to take a trip across an 80-mile lake in that unexplored country, so Paul build a sled and hitched up the moose. He let his companion sleep under a blanket while he guided the moose across the lake. 

As the sled struck fissures in the ice, water was splashed upon the blanket which quickly froze. On reaching the further shore, Paul was amazed to find his companion frozen beneath a coat of ice two-and-a-half-feet thick when he turned around. It took a day and a half to chop his companion loose when Paul carried him on his back over 40 miles away for a doctor's care. So that's the first Paul Bunyan story we have documentation of. This and other yarns, Bert Taplin recalled, were related within an air of authenticity, their amperage increasing with the cruiser's stay. Not until it was time to turn in on the last night did his bunkmates realize how engagingly they themselves had been taken for a sleigh ride, at which time they hurled over shoes and everything else handy at the storyteller. Now, the person who did the most to make Paul Bunyan famous was this guy, Gene Shepherd. Anybody know the name Eugene Shepard? People from up north who know Wisconsin folklore will. He was the timber cruiser. He entered the woods in 1870 as a young man, and he worked in the woods until about 1910. 

He was one of those guys that would go out an map the timber. If your lake up north has a name, chances are very good he put that name on the map because he drew the first accurate map of most of the northern counties and named all of the lakes on the maps. The later plat book manufacturers just took over Shepard's maps. He was an amazing artist, surveyor, draftsman. He could just stand and draw a perfectly straight line on the wall. But he was also an incredible practical joker. He's the one who claimed to have captured a Hodag in that previous slide where the guys are up. For the 1896 county fair in Oneida County, he said he had captured a Hodag and charged money to see it, and lots of people had thought they had really seen one. And the news went all over the country. First known Hodag. 

And then when it was exposed as a hoax, he got people to pay to come see it because it was the most famous hoax in American history. [LAUGHTER] But he was also an amazing liar, an alcoholic, and a plagiarist. And he always said, "I invented Paul Bunyan; Paul Bunyan was born 40 miles west of Rhinelander." Now, he was in the right place at the right time. He was a few miles north of Tomahawk in the winter of '84-'85, the winter before the story I just read you. And obviously he knew that story about training the moose to drive because he did it in Rhinelander. Unfortunately, there isn't any other proof beyond his word, which we know is not trustworthy. But if you go to Rhinelander, you may hear again repeated that he invented Paul Bunyan. We can know these stories from the oral tradition, never written down, because of these four people. Charles Brown was the director of the museum where you're sitting today. He was the first museum director here. 

And he had heard the Bunyan stories around 1890 when he was working for a lumber company, and he collected them and published a little pamphlet at the university around 1920. This guy, William Bartlett, was a historian of Eau Claire, and he interviewed lumberjacks to get logging history and put some of the stories in this book. And in 1915, this woman, Bernice Steward, who was an undergraduate at the university, she had grown up up north, her dad was a timber cruiser, she persuaded her English professor to let her research a paper about the Paul Bunyan stories. And they printed a bunch of them in 1917. And I went to look at their unpublished records, what was in their file cabinets, who wrote to them and sent them stories, and that's where I found stories like this one. Many of the Bunyan stories take place at a location called the Pyramid 40. At Paul Bunyan's Big Onion River camp in section 37, how many sections are there in a township? >> Thirty-six. >> Thirty-six. Somebody's leg is being pulled already. In section 37 there was a 40-acre tract of land shaped like a pyramid. 

It had a heavy growth of pine on all four sides. It was so very high that to see its peak took a week of steady looking. [LAUGHTER] It required 20 men, each looking as far as he could see to do this. Several men went blind just trying to see halfway up. Paul and his crew of 2,000 worked a whole winter clearing the Pyramid 40. From it, they cut a hundred million feet of timber. Some of the men got one short leg from working on the steep slope all winter. [LAUGHTER] They sharpened their ax blades by holding them on boulders which they rolled down hill. Now, you can see from this drawing, this is a drawing by Gene Shepard, the Pyramid 40 here is on a river called the Round River.  One winter, Paul Bunyan located a stand of huge white pines near the Round River and had only the largest ones cut. 

In the spring with the break up, he put the logs in the Round River and selected a crew of all young and active men and told them to keep driving the logs until they got to a sawmill. He then went on with his other activities and he forgot all about the log drive on the Round River. He didn't come back for 40 years. When he came to the river then, he saw a crew of old, stooped men with long, white whiskers who were driving a lot of what looked like fish poles on the Round River. They were the men and the logs he had started off 40 years before. The men didn't know that the Round River ran in a complete circle. [LAUGHTER] And had no outlet. True to Bunyan's orders, they had kept driving every year. Now, what's up next here? Okay. We'll get to this one in a second. 

Think about that. A hill that's so high it takes a week of steady looking. A river that has no outlet and goes in a circle. This is humor worthy of Mark Twain or Alice in Wonderland, but it's being made up by uneducated working-class guys who cut trees for a living. It's really sophisticated grassroots humor. Now, the logging was done in the winter, and so the cold in the environment was obviously a factor in the stories, and a lot of the humor is based around how cold it was. Let's see, one lumberjack recalled that on a particularly snapping winter day, Big Joe, the cook, set the boiling coffee pot on the stove and it froze up so quick that the ice was hot. [LAUGHTER] That winter, one of the crew was kept busy picking up ears and noses that froze and dropped off the loggers and threatened to tie up the tote road. It was so cold that words froze right in the air. All winter long the weather stayed that way. 

If you said hello, you'd see it hanging there in the air. If a teamster swore at his ox, the sound of his voice would freeze too. So that spring when the thaw came, you could see all of those swears and oaths thaw out on the same day. Never in all history since the beginning of man was a more terrible barrage of profanity thrown over than there was that spring on the Little Onion.  Well, if you've been up north, you've been troubled by mosquitoes, especially May, June. It should be the state bird some people say. Well, Paul Bunyan had trouble with the mosquitoes too. They were so big that they would stand on either side of the river in the spring and just pluck the loggers off as they went by on those logs. [LAUGHTER] So Bunyan learned of the existence of a large race of bumblebees in Texas, and he sent his camp cook to bring some back. These domesticated bumblebees were as large and powerful as he expected them to be. 

When released, they immediately attacked and worsted the mosquito tribe. Everything went well in camp for a while until some of the bees entered into friendly relations and intermarried with the mosquitoes. [LAUGHTER] The result was a cross, which was more powerful and bloodthirsty for having a stinger at both ends. [LAUGHTER] So those are some of the stories told aloud. If you like, there's more than a hundred in the book. If you enjoyed these, all sorts of stories are there. But now in the last few minutes, let me explain why you know the name Paul Bunyan at all. How did the private jokes of lumberjacks tucked away in the woods for months at a time turn into American's best known folk hero? How did that happen? The first mention of Bunyan was in the Duluth newspaper in 1904. It's in a gossip column. It ran on every Thursday, and they had to have some kind of news. 

So one spring, the person writing it says the lumberjacks are in town, because they're in town whooping it up, and he says the pet joke and the one with which the green horn is sure to be tried consists of a series of tales about Paul Bunyan. Well, who cares? The Duluth paper went to 600 people, Bunyan sank like a stone. In 1910 in Milwaukee, another writer collected some of the Bunyan stories and published them in a magazine called the Outer's Book. The Outer's Book was like a predecessor of Field & Stream. It was about people who like to hunt and fish and camp and be outdoors, and it went all over the nation. It had readership all over the country. So this guy published about 30 of the stories, including stories from the winter of blue snow, which I understand is part of the reason we have blue Kool-Aid here. [LAUGHTER] But nobody cared. Again, the stories just disappeared because in 1910, American culture was not looking at the Midwest. American culture was looking at Europe, and everybody wanted to know what was going on in Europe. 

They certainly didn't care about the jokes of lumberjacks. In 1914, a lumber company in Minneapolis called the Red River Lumber Company decided they needed a logo and a mascot. They had harvested most of the trees available in the Midwest. They'd bought trees in the Pacific Northwest. They wanted a symbol of how big they had become. And so the president of the company hired this guy, Bill Laughead, as his PR director, and Laughead had heard some of the stories. He had worked in the camps and heard some of the stories. So in their catalog, think of this as the Lands' End catalog, they introduced Bunyan, and you'd get a page with a Bunyan story and then you'd get an ad for their two by fours. And then you'd get another story, and then you'd get an ad for their shingles or whatever. It was Laughead who gave Babe the name Babe and who introduced most of the other characters that you will have seen in other stories. 

Now, in the stories that the Red River Company made up, Bunyan stops being a rugged lumberjack kind of guy. He becomes a foreman and sort of a scientific manager. He's all about how to save money and be efficient, which is not how the lumberjacks talked about him a generation earlier. During World War I, they stuck with their idea even though nobody knew who Bunyan was initially. They stamped this on every piece of wood. They stamped it on every letter and invoice. And most importantly, they didn't copyright any of the stories. This is their catalog from 1922 and one of the pictures in it. They didn't copyright the stories because they figured if anybody talked about Paul Bunyan, it was talking about their company. So they let him go. 

Here are their four catalogs as issued between the first World War and the second. Well, in 1922, the Kansas City Star got a hold of one of their catalogs. It must have been a slow news day, and they ran a whole page of Paul Bunyan stories and lauded the Red River Lumber Company for saving the folklore of lumberjacks and noted that they're not copyrighted. That led a guy named Hubert Langerock out west simply to get out a typewriter and type them all up, and he sent them to a magazine in New York, The Century magazine. The Century is like Harper's or The Atlantic is today. Every educated person in the east read it. So, he just stole the stories, claimed them as his own, presumably got paid, and sent them to The Century. And that's how Paul Bunyan made it to the awareness of editors in the east. One of whom was a guy name HL Mencken, you may have heard of, who had just started a magazine called the American Mercury in 1924. The guy here on the left, James Stevens, was a lumberjack. 

He had grown up in Iowa, I think, or Ohio? Anyway, he had been expelled from school in the ninth grade for chewing tobacco, and said hell with this, I'm not going back. And he headed west, became a lumberjack and a minor and a teamster, but he always wanted to be a writer. And when he saw this new magazine, he wrote to Mencken and said congratulations, do you need anything? Mencken wrote back and said, have you heard any of these Bunyan stories? And so, Stevens sent Bunyan stories to this magazine, and then they became a book. At the same time, a woman named Esther Shephard was a graduate student in Portland at the University of Oregon, and she lived in Minnesota and heard the stories and she wrote a master's thesis on them. And then she went out into the lumber fields in the northeast, the lumber camps, and compiled her own book. Here are later editions. Here's Stevens' book and Shephard's book. Both of them came out in 1925, and Stevens, the illiterate logger hobo guy, decided he wanted to write like a highfalutin English professor. And the English professor decided the stories really ought to be in lumberjack dialect, so she put them all in what she thought was accurate dialect. And neither one of these is really as good as the originals, but they were immensely popular. 

The most famous American book of 1925 is probably, The Great Gatsby, but it sold only 30,000 copies over the next 20 years. The Bunyan books on the previous slide? 600,000. And it seemed like every spring and fall there would be a new Paul Bunyan book. 1927, there was a double-page spread in all the Hearst newspapers. 1929, the Encyclopedia Britannica puts in a Paul Bunyan article. Children's books start coming out at the end of the '20s. This one's really pathetic. This has the preface in which the trees are speaking to one another and saying how wonderful it will be to be chopped down and sent out into the world to meet all the friends they'd never otherwise meet. [LAUGHTER] By the 1930s, Paul Bunyan has become the icon of tourism because, of course, the Stock Market crash of 1829 threw the nation into a terrible depression. Even worse up north where, by then, they had take out all the trees. 

There was no reason for anybody to live up there. But you could go up there and remember the past, and Paul Bunyan becomes the icon of the wild woods. This is a postcard from Escanaba, Michigan. I think this one's from Bemidji, Minnesota. We talked about that one. I can't remember where this one's from, 1930s though. There were organizations founded, one in northern Wisconsin called the Mystic Knights of the Blue Ox, to get lumberjacks to hold reunions. So all these old guys, 70, 80 years old, would come up and they chopped logs and have pancake breakfasts and do log rollings, and tourists would come to watch. It was a way that the local chamber of commerce could get some money into the town. And that's when Bunyan takes off as an advertiser. 

Here's a placemat map. By then, Bunyan is not confined just to here. Bunyan, as you can see, the stories take him all over the world. He's become a hero like a hero of European fables. He dug the Grand Canyon and all sorts of things, supposedly, in the later books. During World War II, there's an armed services paperback collection. After the war, a paperback version of Esther Shephard. And then especially in the '50s you get Bunyan as the advertisers icon. If you've got beer and it's really macho beer, it's Paul Bunyan beer. [LAUGHTER] If you're going to open one of these newfangled drive-in theaters and you want to emphasize how big it is, it's the Paul Bunyan drive-in theater. 

He was the inspiration for the Little Green Giant, and somebody sent me this, a friend sent me this a little while ago. You can just see it fading out. Obviously, Paul Bunyan was a great way to sell outdoor gear. It appealed especially to boys. There were Paul Bunyan hatchets and fishing lures, Paul Bunyan Boy Scout patches, and of course evil comic books. Remember how bad comic books were for us in the '50s? There was a Paul Bunyan comic book as well. This peaked in the late '50s with this cartoon, a Disney cartoon. James Earl Jones does the voice. So imagine Darth Vader in a cartoon about Paul Bunyan and Babe. And, at the end of the decade in this series of best children's books, the Bunyan stories are sort of canonized. 

He becomes polite for everyone. And so that's how you go from this, which was the hero of these guys, through the Red River Company, because they didn't copyright it, to this. And that's why you know Paul Bunyan and bothered to come here today. The latest incarnations are still in the works. This is a book, children's book, from 2009. Paul's sister discovers that, oh, my goodness, developers are cutting down the forest and she has to save the habitat of her animal friends. So the motif has come full circle, right? Because Bunyan was the great harvester, and now his sister is the great protector. And this movie has been talked about for a long time. I haven't seen it yet. John Goodman was going to do the voice of Bunyan in this movie. 

What happened to Paul Bunyan? What happened to my book? Here it is. Okay, you have to listen carefully to the very last Bunyan story because the humor is a little bit subtle. The site of Paul's last camp is plainly located, being marked in a most peculiar manner. In this place it was necessary to build the camp on a high rounding hill far from water. A well 30 feet in diameter and 200 feet deep was dug down the center of the hill. Timber piles were driven in around the well to line it. The trees in that vicinity were soon cut, and the camp was dismantled. As the timber lining the well was still sound and good, it was pulled up and sawed up into logs too. Within a few years, the wind had blown the sand from around the old well, leaving the bare hole sticking up many feet in the air and can still be seen from miles around. [LAUGHTER] So, that's what I have for you, and it's just a little before 1:00. 

I'd be happy to take questions. If you enjoyed this, pick up a copy of the book. There's a great deal more in it that will make you laugh. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]