E-text prepared by David Edwards, Ernest Schaal, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from scanned images of public domain material generously made available by Microsoft's Live Search Books Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 32994-h.htm or 32994-h.zip: (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/32994/pg32994-images.html) or (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/32994/32994-h.zip) Images of the original pages were available through the Microsoft Search Book project, which was discontinued by Microsoft in 2008. These images, or a remarkably similar set, are now available though Internet Archive. See http://www.archive.org/details/marvelousexploit00laugiala Transcriber's note: This book has no table of contents, since it has no chapters. It has no list of illustrations, since most of the illustrations lacked captions. Instead, it is a book of short stories about Paul Bunyan, which is part advertising for a lumber company and part stories of "America's only myth." Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_). A detailed list of corrections is at the end of the e-book. [Illustration: PAUL BUNYAN AND HIS BIG BLUE OX (book cover)] _The Marvelous Exploits of_ PAUL BUNYAN AS TOLD IN THE CAMPS OF THE WHITE PINE LUMBERMEN FOR GENERATIONS DURING WHICH TIME THE LOGGERS HAVE PIONEERED THE WAY THROUGH THE NORTH WOODS FROM MAINE TO CALIFORNIA _Collected from Various Sources and Embellished for Publication_ [Illustration] Text and Illustrations By W. B. Laughead _Published for the Amusement of our Friends by_ The RED RIVER LUMBER COMPANY MINNEAPOLIS, WESTWOOD, CAL., CHICAGO, LOS ANGELES-:-SAN FRANCISCO _NINETEEN TWENTY-TWO_ PAUL Bunyan is the hero of lumbercamp whoppers that have been handed down for generations. These stories, never heard outside the haunts of the lumberjack until recent years, are now being collected by learned educators and literary authorities who declare that Paul Bunyan is "the only American myth." The best authorities never recounted Paul Bunyan's exploits in narrative form. They made their statements more impressive by dropping them casually, in an off hand way, as if in reference to actual events of common knowledge. To over awe the greenhorn in the bunkshanty, or the paper-collar stiffs and home guards in the saloons, a group of lumberjacks would remember meeting each other in the camps of Paul Bunyan. With painful accuracy they established the exact time and place, "on the Big Onion the winter of the blue snow" or "at Shot Gunderson's camp on the Tadpole the year of the sourdough drive." They elaborated on the old themes and new stories were born in lying contests where the heights of extemporaneous invention were reached.