The most authentic group of Bunyan stories came from the Lake States where they originated. A comparison of these older stories with the newer ones from the Pacific Coast shows a marked difference. (And it is noteworthy that the Bunyan tales never had much of a vogue in the South.) According to the Lake States version, Bunyan always stayed in the logging camps or on the drives, he attended strictly to business, while according to the Western tales he branched out into all sorts of enterprises. The Lake States tales were the product of the true, the professional lumberjack, the winter recluse, who was shut in with others like minded with himself and with none but his kind as auditors. The Western logger was not so exclusive a type. There were many of the professional loggers, but there were many men in the woods whose main interest was elsewhere, and so the story teller did not have such a select audience. There were other interests in the West to divert Bunyan from his real job and naturally it suffered in consequence. It was perhaps inevitable, but none the less unfortunate, that the Bunyan stories did not reach the outside world directly from the Lake States story tellers, but first passed through the hands or mouths of the Western loggers. Of all the publications perhaps W. B. Laughead, in _Paul Bunyan and His Big Blue Ox_, published by the Red River Lumber Company of Minneapolis, has most nearly preserved the Lake States flavor of the stories. Certainly James Stevens and Esther Shepperd in their books of the same title, _Paul Bunyan_, have more nearly portrayed the Western Bunyan than the Eastern one. The same is largely true of the poems here given. They take the Western point of view, and most of them are Western stories. The first of these represents the Western conflict between the professional and the part-time logger, the second is unwarranted in bringing Noah into the picture, where he does not belong, while the others all deal directly with the West. But certainly the Western tales make better stories than do the Eastern ones. PAUL BUNYAN'S TRICK This story is one of the well-known Bunyan tales, told from Michigan to the Coast, which shows some of the professional loggers' scorn for the part-time logger. Come all you stump ranch loggers and slick shod choker men And learn how we gathered the round stuff up on the Skinney Ben. You fellers call this logging, just sixty cars a day; We kids beat that when I was young and thought that it was play. My first real throw at logging was in Big Ole's camp When he was racing Bunyan to be the skidding champ. From sun till sun he drove us, till we were nearly dead, And many times in getting up I've met myself going to bed. He bought a load of lanterns and made us earn our keep; The bed bugs even starved to death, we got so little sleep. And talk about a driver! Two men must fall and buck A quarter section every day or they were out of luck.