Paul Bunyan is said to be a lumberjack of gargantuan size and titanic strength. He also enjoys pancakes. In stories about him, it is said that he and his blue ox, Babe, were so large that their footsteps created Minnesota's ten thousand lakes including Lake Bemidji, which resembles Paul's giant footprint. Babe measured 47 axe handles between his horns. He was found during the winter of the blue snow. Once, he helped Paul to straighten a river by freezing it with two blizzards that they captured in bags, then Paul hitched Babe up to the foot of the river and had him pull it straight. Like most myths, this explains a physical phenomenon.
Bunyan's birth was strange, as are the births of many mythic heroes, as it took 5 storks to carry the infant (ordinarily, one stork could carry several babies and drop them off at their parents' home). When he was old enough to clap and laugh, the vibration broke every window in the house. When he was 7 months old he sawed the legs off of his parents bed in the middle of the night. Paul and Babe dug the Grand Canyon by dragging his axe behind him, and created Mount Hood by piling rocks on top of their campfire to put it out.
He is a classic American "big man" who was popular in 19th century America. Further, the Bunyan myths sprang from lumber camp tales, sometimes bawdy ones, to put it mildly. In one such tale, extreme cold forced bears to look for food; one wandered into a lumber camp. It chased the lumberjacks up a tree on which they had a ladder. To keep the bear from climbing after them (despite the fact that bears do not need ladders to climb trees), they kicked down the ladder. This saved them from the bear, but trapped them in the tree. To escape, the lumberjacks urinated in unison and created a frozen pole, which they slid down. Such tall tales, though later watered down, were attributed to a single character, Bunyan, and became the stories known today.
The earliest published versions of the myth of Paul Bunyan can be traced back to James MacGillivray, an itinerant newspaper reporter who wrote the first Paul Bunyan article for the Oscoda Press in 1906, and an expanded version of the same article for the Detroit News. He is alleged to have collected stories from lumberjacks, combined them with his own embellishments, and began disseminating the legend with the July 24, 1910, printing of The Round River Drive which included the following, concerning Dutch Jake (another mythical lumberjack of great strength) and the narrator participating in a Bunyan-sponsored contest to cut down the biggest tree in the forest.
"Dutch Jake and me had picked out the biggest tree we could find on the forty, and we'd put three days on the cut with our big saw, what was three crosscuts brazed together, making 30 feet of teeth. We was getting along fine on the fourth day when lunchtime comes, and we thought we'd best get to the sunny side to eat. So we grabs our grub and starts around that tree.
'We hadn't gone far when we heard a noise. Blamed if there wasn't Bill Carter and Sailor Jack sawin' at the same tree. It looked like a fight at first, but we compromised, meetin' each other at the heart on the seventh day. They'd hacked her to fall to the north, and we'd hacked her to fall to the south, and there that blamed tree stood for a month or more, clean sawed through, but not knowin' which way to drop 'til a windstorm came along and throwed her over."
The popularization of the myth started with William B. Laughead's "Introducing Mr. Paul Bunyan of Westwood, California", one of a series of Bunyan advertising pamphlets for the Red River Lumber Company. Some of the pamphlet tales were based on Laughead's recollections of stories he had heard ten years earlier in a Minnesota lumber camp. Others were highly exaggerated tales of his own experiences.
Overall, Paul Bunyan was considered to be a strong brave man who feared nothing including his beloved pet, Babe, the blue ox.
Laughead, through the ad pamphlets, created much of the Bunyan "canon", including the blue ox and Johnny Inkslinger.
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