These stories find their original in a French-Canadian, Paul Bunyon, who first came into prominence during the Papineau rebellion in 1837, when, by remarkable feats of strength and daring, he won the admiration of his countrymen. Then for many years he was the outstanding logging boss in all the St. Lawrence River country. When the loggers from this region went into the Michigan woods about 1850 they took with them the stories of their great hero, which stories, naturally, lost nothing in the telling, particularly as they served admirably as a form of compensation device for their feelings of inferiority. Nor is it remarkable that the Yankee loggers should parody these stories to ridicule the French-Canadians. Another element which entered into the making of the Bunyan myth was the tendency to exaggeration which is common to all of us and which finds expression on so many occasions. The lumber camps had long been filled with extreme stories of many sorts, but these were usually only isolated tales. Many of them had been told to impress the tenderfoot, while many others had been wish projections, a sort of day-dreaming in which one was able to do that which he never could accomplish when he had to work with stern reality. After the French-Canadians brought Paul Bunyon to the camps and the practice had begun of improving on these stories, it became easy to invent a new Bunyon tale or connect up one of the other stories with the Bunyon cycle wherever the need arose for over-awing a tenderfoot or of securing a refuge from the sense of frustration, or just for simple amusement. In the process the French-Canadian Bunyon became naturalized into the Yankee Bunyan and all contact with reality was lost. Bunyan, his old Blue Ox, Babe, and their exploits grew to fantastic extremes. Size was never measured in terms of feet or pounds and so it is difficult for us to give exact dimensions, but it was agreed that the blue ox, Babe, measured forty-two axehandles and a plug of tobacco between the eyes, while Bunyan himself once had the misfortune to lose two large logging engines in his mackinaw pocket and did not find them for a month.