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)
Their bee blood caused their downfall in the long run. Their craving for
sweets could only be satisfied by sugar and molasses in large
quantities, for what is a flower to an insect with a ten-gallon stomach?
One day the whole tribe flew across Lake Superior to attack a fleet of
ships bringing sugar to Paul's camps. They destroyed the ships but ate
so much sugar they could not fly and all were drowned.
One pair of the original bees were kept at headquarters camp and
provided honey for the pancakes for many years.
* * * * *
If Paul Bunyan did not invent Geography be created a lot of it. The
Great Lakes were first constructed to provide a water hole for Babe the
Big Blue Ox. Just what year his work was done is not known but they were
in use prior to the Year of the Two Winters.
The Winter Paul Bunyan logged off North Dakota he hauled water for his
ice roads from the Great Lakes. One day when Brimstone Bill had Babe
hitched to one of the old water tanks and was making his early morning
trip, the tank sprung a leak when they were half way across Minnesota.
Bill saved himself from drowning by climbing Babe's tail but all efforts
to patch up the tank were in vain so the old tank was abandoned and
replaced by one of the new ones. This was the beginning of the
Mississippi River and the truth of this is established by the fact that
the old Mississippi is still flowing.
The cooks in Paul's camps used a lot of water and to make things handy,
they used to dig wells near the cook shanty. At headquarters on the Big
Auger, on top of the hill near the mouth of the Little Gimlet, Paul dug
a well so deep that it took all day for the bucket to fall to the water,
and a week to haul it up. They had to run so many buckets that the well
was forty feet in diameter. It was shored up with tamarac poles and when
the camp was abandoned Paul pulled up this cribbing. Travelers who have
visited the spot say that the sand has blown away until 178 feet of the
well is sticking up into the air, forming a striking landmark.
The Winter of the Deep Snow everything was buried. Paul had to dig down
to find the tops of the tallest White Pines. He had the snow dug away
around them and lowered his sawyers down to the base of the trees. When
the tree was cut off he hauled it to the surface with a long parbuckle
chain to which Babe, mounted on snowshoes, was hitched. It was
impossible to get enough stove pipe to reach to the top of the snow, so
Paul had Big Ole make stovepipe by boring out logs with a long six-inch
auger.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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