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 PublicationLaughead, William B.
General
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
Laughead, William B.
Bunyan, Paul (Legendary character)
In spite of short rations she gave enough milk to keep six men busy
skimming the cream. If she had been kept in a barn and fed regularly she
might have made a milking record. When she fed on the evergreen trees
and her milk got so strong of White Pine and Balsam that the men used it
for cough medicine and liniment, they quit serving the milk on the table
and made butter out of it. By using this butter, to grease the logging
roads when the snow and ice thawed off, Paul was able to run big logging
sleds all summer.
The family life of Paul Bunyan, from all accounts, has been very happy.
A charming glimpse of Mrs. Bunyan is given by Mr. E. S. Shepard of
Rhinelander, Wis., who tells of working in Paul's camp on Round River in
'62, the Winter of the Black Snow. Paul put him wheeling prune pits away
from the cook camp. After he had worked at this job for three months
Paul had him haul them back again as Mrs. Bunyan, who was cooking at the
camp, wanted to use them to make the hot fires necessary to cook her
famous soft nosed pancakes.
Mrs. Bunyan, at this time used to call the men to dinner by blowing into
a woodpecker hole in an old hollow stub that stood near the door. In
this stub there was a nest of owls that had one short wing and flew in
circles. When Mr. Shepard made a sketch of Paul, Mrs. Bunyan, with
wifely solicitude for his appearance, parted Paul's hair with a handaxe
and combed it with an old cross-cut saw.
From other sources we have fragmentary glimpses of Jean, Paul's youngest
son. When Jean was three weeks old he jumped from his cradle one night
and seizing an axe, chopped the four posts out from under his father's
bed. The incident greatly tickled Paul, who used to brag about it to any
one who would listen to him. "The boy is going to be a great logger some
day," he would declare with fatherly pride.
The last we heard of Jean he was working for a lumber outfit in the
South, lifting logging trains past one another on a single track
railroad.
What is camp without a dog? Paul Bunyan loved dogs as well as the next
man but never would have one around that could not earn its keep. Paul's
dogs had to work, hunt or catch rats. It took a good dog to kill the
rats and mice in Paul's camp for the rodents picked up scraps of the
buffalo milk pancakes and grew to be as big as two year old bears.
Elmer, the moose terrier, practiced up on the rats when he was a small
pup and was soon able to catch a moose on the run and finish it with one
shake. Elmer loafed around the cook camp and if the meat supply happened
to run low the cook would put the dog out the door and say, "Bring in a
moose." Elmer would run into the timber, catch a moose and bring it in
and repeat the performance until, after a few minutes work, the cook
figured he had enough for a mess and would call the dog in.
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