THE LEGEND OF PAUL BUNYAN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 275, 29 September 1944, Page 6

THE LEGEND OF PAUL BUNYAN

**Most Amiable Giant That Man Ever Imagined" CORRESPONDENT wrote some months ago asking us who Paul Bunyan was. At the time we didn’t know, nor could we find him in any book of reference. We did, however, get a little information about him from the American Legation. Now we have the fuil story from a recent issue of "Fortune."

OR two years Fortune has been picturing in portrait and text the deeds of American heroes. Theit record has been awe-inspiring. They have been alike in one profound respect. No hero in the folklore of the country accomplished in imagination what they accomplished in fact. CGnly_ one fictional character is entitled to stand among them; Paul Bunyan, who ruled America in the happy years between the Winter of the Blue Snow and the Spring That the Rain Came Up From China. He was a quiet man, methodical and hard-working, who brushed his beard with a pine tree and could do anything he set his mind to except make his loggers get up early in the morning. Paul Bunyan is a genuine American folk character, created by the people themselves. He is one of the few characters, among the mythical heroes of the earth, whose stories do not spring from the grey depths of antiquity. The great folk heroes of Europe and Asia were born before history. They lived in the dim universal wonderland of the earth’s beginning, breathing fire and changing their shapes, slaying their dragons and conquering their wizards in the days before learning and facts

and statistics placed their gentle curbs on man’s imagination. But Paul Bunyan was born when

almost _ everyone could read _= and write. He was created in a bunkhouse, in an ordinary logging camp., His deeds were made up by grown men. They sat around the stove, after working all day in the woods — woods that were just as dangerous, with their toppling trunks and falling widowmakers, as the Black Forests whence came European fairy tales — and told stories of spontaneous exaggeration and an odd combination of practical work and extravagant fantasy. It was the loggers, by reputation the most violent roughnecks of all industry, who made up the innocent legend of Paul Bunyan, a lumberman the size of a Douglas fir. They peopled his world with a blue ox, which measured 42 axe-handles plus a plug of* Star chewing tobacco between the eyes, with sidehill gougers (short legs on one side so they could waik level on the mountain slopes), with the dingmaul and the filmalooloo bird, the cougarfish and any other animal their imaginations could invent. His land was blessed with lemonade springs, whisky

trees, cigarette grass, meadows of purple clover and moose moss. He had pancakes mixed in concrete mixers, four-horse teams to haul the salt and pepper through a dining hall so vast it took 47 minutes for flunkies on roller skates to skate from end to end. And he had the country of the Wet Desert, Redbottom Lake, Onion River, Blister Valley, not to mention the country of Smiling River with its years of two winters and its winds that blew so hard the logs were sucked up the chimney unless carefully bolted down. : A Useful Hero The loggers dreamed up the most amiable giant that man ever imagined. They put Paul Bunyan in an odd environment, half an ordinary . hard-working logging camp, half. a burlesque of national, park travel-folders. They gave him companions: Johnny Inkslinger, his bookkeeper, Chris Crosshaulsen, Lars Larsen, Murph. Murcheson, who

talked Gaelic in his sleep, and Hels Helsen, the Big Swede, the Bull of the Woods, whose battle with Paul smashed down all the trees in what is known to-day as the Dakota Disaster, They made him a useful hero. Paul Bunyan did not go on crusades or wars. He did not rescue princesses or take vows, fulfil penances, or get cheated of his kingdom by a wicked brother. He just worked. He cleared land, straightened crooked rivers by hitching his great blue ox Babe to one end, and laboured sensibly at fantastic jobs. When he came to cut down the fine, closely grained white pine on the Upside Down Mountain his conduct was as extraordinary as the mountain, with its peak in the earth, its slopes five miles in the air, and its trees growing down. With a shotgun whose barrels were as large as sawmill smokestacks he blew the forest from the mountain and on.to the plain beneath. How He Was Revived There are two Paul Bunyan stories. One is the mass of legends themselves. The other is how they came to be revived. At a time when Dreiser was imagining his bitter capitalists, and Upton Sinclair was creating his troubled exploiters of the poor, when U.S. intellectuals were muckraking the robber barons, Jim Stevens, now of the West Coast Lumbermen’s Association, heard accounts of Paul Bunyan from Michael Quinn, lumberyard superintendent in Hoquiam, Washington, who had heard them from Len Day, a Minnesota lumberman, who ran across them in Canada in the 1840’s. Stevens wrote, for H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury, Paul Bunyan’s "Black Duck Dinner," with its feasting loggers making as much noise as 70 threshing machines, and the duck bones rattling like the limbs of falling trees, About the same time, Lee J. Smits, for years outdoor editor of the. Detroit Times, visited Seattle ‘on a tour of newspaper. hoboing." There he wrote for the Seattle Star a front-page feature story, "Paul Bunyan, the Epic Lumberjack," and called for’ readers’ contributions of stories they had heard. A year later Ben Hur Lampman in the Portland Oregonian launched a_ similar series that ran for almost two months. Paul Bunyan had stepped out of the bunkhouses and the memories of old loggers. and into the schoolrooms and (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) libraries, the editorial offices, the publicity’ offices of lumbering towns, and the literature of American nationalists. How He Died As a living, breathing hero of the woods, still spontaneously discussed, he is no more, Says Stevens: "In the woods Paul Bunyan is dead... . The old tales mean nothing to the loggers of to-day. Some of them appreciate the books and pictures. ... These are the loggers with literary and artistic interests. They are pretty numerous. . .. But all would gag at any suggestion that my stories are ever told in camp by actual loggers." Some day, when Paul Bunyan’s obituary is written, it may appear that his death came, not from overwork, but from having finished the job he set out to do, Gigantic as he seems in his own right, he was a dwarf compared with the flesh-and-blood Americans who have appeared in this series of American heroes. No one will ever say of him, as Tolstoy said of Lincoln, that of all national heroes he is "the only real giant." Paul Bunyan was no dreamer to equal Simon Bolivar, with his prophetic vision of "a permanent international order, established on mutual obligations . . . reaching beyond national boundaries to a union of states, and beyond systems to qa world order." Stubborn as he was, Paul Bunyan was not so stubborn as the hated John Peter Altgeld, who once "wandered for 100 miles through open prairie in his bare feet looking for work." He was not so audacious as Mad Anthony Wayne, who "opened the way westward for America," or the young John Paul Jones, who "defied the whole British Navy." Modest as he was, Paul Bunyan was not so modest as Thomas Jefferson, who, in composing his inscription for his tomb characteristically "said nothing of the fact that he had been Governor of Virginia, a leader in the Revolutionary War, Minister to France, Washington’s Secretary of State, Vice-President and twice President of the United States."

Paul Bunyan did not overcome so many handicaps as Alexander Hamilton, a bastard, small, vain, delicate, an islander, an immigrant, who wrote at least 51 of the 75 Federalist papers, and whose "most important victories were won over his own temptation to be cynical about democracy." The flights of Paul Bunyan’s imaginationand those of his creators-were never so practical as those of Elias Hasket Derdy, the merchant of Salem, whose ships sailed "where no other ships dared to go." Paul» Bunyan’s ingenuity was never so various as that of Peter Cooper, who made shoes, built an automatic cradle-rocker with a music-box attached, invented machines to harness tides, move canal-boats, transport ore, who originated table gelatine and made the first U.S.-built locomotive, who developed isinglass, ran a glue factory, a grocery, the Trenton Iron Works, pioneered in beams for steel-framed buildings, backed the Atlantic cable to bring the old country nearer, organised Cooper Union to help educate poor boys, and said, shortly before his death, "I still feel somewhat in debt to the world." Nor did Paul Bunyan look deeply enough into life to glimpse its spiritual essence. He did not see the inner light of William Penn nor realise "that the mutual tolerance of men of good conscience is the basis of all human dealing." The nature he knew was not the nature of Henry David Thoreau, and it did not lead him to conclude that "everything in material ambition . . . was a temptation to something other than yourself." Paul Bunyan’s task was not to create, invent, govern, or reform. It was to clear the ground so that a new America could spread itself upon it. His size is the measure of the task that the pioneers undertook. His spirit is the reflection of the vitality and exuberance with which they made their country grow. Paul Bunyan’s task is complete. But a land of machines, cities and slums needs Paul Bunyan’s overbrimming energy and spirit even more than a land of mountains, timber and plains,