PicoBlog

In the last few months, I’ve become slightly obsessed with American folklore. I’ve been telling myself it’s for a project I want to write - and maybe it is - but it’s also partly because I just enjoy reading about the subject regardless of any ulterior creative agenda.

America is a relatively young country and so much of its folklore and myths - unlike the European variety - can be clearly traced to specific origin source points. Sometimes these origins are vaguer (stories told around a campfire in a specific region of the country) and sometimes they are much more specific - an advertising campaign that took on a life of its own outside the restraints of any commercial endeavor. Regardless, American myths usually have a starting point and - like an exposed tree trunk - it’s possible to count the rings as you chart the myth’s saturation into our country’s culture.

I picked up a copy of PAUL BUNYAN by James Stevens at Kaboom Books in Houston a few weeks back. The book - first published in 1925 - sets out to be a collection of the “original” Paul Bunyan stories, tales told at logging camps about a mythical figure as large as a giant and as skilled at logging trees as any man who walked the Earth. Stevens, born in 1892, described himself as a “hobo laborer with wishful literary yearning.” The book is written with a poet’s voice, a charming swirl of Mark Twain, John Stenbeck and Roald Dahl. Turns of phrases, twists of words and “aw, shucks” woodsy sentimentality give the stories the feel of a self-educated sage spinning yarns over a smoky pipe in a fire-lit cabin. I liked the book, is what I’m saying.

What struck me most about Stevens’ version of Paul Bunyan is that it was completely not what I was expecting. Like most American school children of a certain age, I grew up learning the stories of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox. Both were said to be giants - larger-than-life outdoorsmen (and outdoorsoxen, as the case might be) who matched their feats of daring-do with only their hunger. They’d put away heaps of giant pancakes for breakfast, carve the Grand Canyon with an oversized axe for lunch and have time to fight Hidebehinds and other Fearsome Critters before the sun went down. Babe wore rose-colored glasses to cure his seasonal depression. Paul Bunyan uses a double-bladed axe to compete against steam-powered technology. It’s all sacrosanct Americana when it comes to the canonical Paul Bunyan stories I thought I knew.

Stevens’ Paul Bunyan, on the other hand, is an unabashed celebration of industralism and upper-management hero worship. So, I guess, also sacrosanct Americana.

In Stevens’ book, Paul Bunyan lived in a cave in French-Canadian territory and taught himself all the knowledge worth knowing until he was struck with a dream to move to the “Real America” and create an industrial logging empire - not before changing his and his Ox’s name to their proper American spelling (Paul Bunyon and Bébé became Paul Bunyan and Babe). Once in America, Bunyan went around assembling a team of the best loggers he could find - men, some of whose statures rivaled the giant Bunyan himself, who worshiped at the massive feet of the logger.

According to Stevens’ introduction to his book - the Paul Bunyan stories are inspired by Bon Jean, an actual French-Candian hero. Bon Jean fought in the Papineau Rebellion of 1837 before running a logging camp owned by his uncle. In collecting the original stories of Paul Bunyan, Stevens interviewed multitudes of loggers and came to the conclusion that many of their stories were exaggerated celebrations of the deeds of Bon Jean, a man many of them had either worked for or knew folks who worked for him.

Yes, Paul Bunyan is basically a real-life version of the Bill Brasky sketch from SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE.

it’s unknown how much Bon Jean actually was a real-life inspiration for Paul Bunyan. In fact, it seems that the majority of what we know about Paul Bunyan today was actually created by an advertising copywriter named William B. Laughead, who - while promoting Red River Lumber Company - co-opted the stories popular around lumber camps and embellished them for the purposes of selling wood. It was Laughead who in 1916 seemingly introduced the idea that Paul Bunyan was an actual giant (previous stories depicted Bunyan as the size of a particularly large man), as well as giving Babe his name and spinning yarns about Bunyan’s hand in creating the Grand Canyon, Mout Hood and the 10,000 lakes of Minnesota.

What I loved most about Stevens’ Paul Bunyan stories is when they veered close to Aesop’s Fables and tried to explain how things came to be. Kansas used to have cigarette trees and whiskey rivers before Paul Bunyan helped till the wickedness out of the state’s soil. Paul Bunyan inadvertently helped create cowboys when he fed his timid farmhands too much buffalo milk and turned them into rootin’ tootin’ gun-shootin’ he-men. Wild Tigermunks used to prey upon loggers before Paul Bunyan helped cause a massive flood that scared the species out of their size and turned them into chipmunks.

Stevens’ Paul Bunyan is single-minded in his quest for greatness. He sees the big picture that is his future and plans his life - and the lives of his employees - in a way that is designed to achieve maximum glory. As the book comes to a close, though, even Paul Bunyan is powerless to stand in the way of technological achievement, the way of women (“Women, the great logger had heard, were often marvelous cooks; but men had invented both can-openers and doughnuts.") and the ten-hour workday. Accepting his fate, Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox would walk off into the sunset, secure in their knowledge that they had made their impact on a world that no longer needed them.

And Paul Bunyan has seemingly been forgotten. Sure, there are statues everywhere of the giant if you spend any real time up north and the name brings a vague sense of familiarity in most Americans but Bunyan and his ilk (Pecos Bill, Tony Beaver, Joe Magarac and Cordwood Pete) seem to have been forgotten. Even if Paul Bunyan was created as a celebration of upper management, I think there’s something uniquely American about the stories. They represent America at its best and at its worst. Paul Bunyan is constantly in pursuit of fame and glory, he’s conscientious of his own self-worth and legacy even as he fails to give two fucks about the environment or his employees. He’s obsessed with work, suspicious of poetry, prone to arrogance and seemingly the only creature he really genuinely loves is his pet. He’s the quintessential American.

As a slight tangent, I’m even more disappointed that Americans don’t seem to care about the Kicklesnifters and Fearsome Critters that Paul Bunyan was said to have fought. Listen, I love Bigfoot as much as the next guy but Sasquatch isn’t nearly as interesting as the Cactus Cat or the Hugag or the Squonk or the Hoop Snake. I wish we had as many people with bumper stickers expressing their love of the Hidebehind as we have folks going nuts for Bigfoot.

Maybe I do need to write that American folklore story after all… Maybe Paul Bunyan cam make an appearance.

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