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)
When and where did this mythical Hero get his start? Paul Bunyan is
known by his mighty works, his antecedents and personal history are lost
in doubt. You can prove that Paul logged off North Dakota and grubbed
the stumps, not only by the fact that there are no traces of pine
forests in that State, but by the testimony of oldtimers who saw it
done. On the other hand, Paul's parentage and birth date are unknown.
Like Topsy, he jes' growed.
Nobody cared to know his origin until the professors got after him. As
long as he stayed around the camps his previous history was treated with
the customary consideration and he was asked no questions, but when he
broke into college it was all off. Then he had to have ancestors, a
birthday and all sorts of vital statistics.
Now Paul is a regular myth and students of folklore make scientific
research of "The Paul Bunyan Legend".
His first appearance in print was in the booklets published by The Red
River Lumber Company in 1914 and 1916, these stories are reprinted in
the present volume, with additions. Paul has followed the wanderings of
pioneering workmen and performed new wonders in the oil fields, on big
construction jobs and in the wheat fields but the stories in this book
deal only with his work in the White Pine camps where he was born and
raised. Care has been taken to preserve the atmosphere of the old style
camps.
So now we will get on with Paul's doings and in the language of the
four-horse skinner, "Let's dangle!"
Babe, the big blue ox constituted Paul Bunyan's assets and liabilities.
History disagrees as to when, where and how Paul first acquired this
bovine locomotive but his subsequent record is reliably established.
Babe could pull anything that had two ends to it.
Babe was seven axehandles wide between the eyes according to some
authorities; others equally dependable say forty-two axehandles and a
plug of tobacco. Like other historical contradictions this comes from
using different standards. Seven of Paul's axehandles were equal to a
little more than forty-two of the ordinary kind.
When cost sheets were figured on Babe, Johnny Inkslinger found that
upkeep and overhead were expensive but the charges for operation and
depreciation were low and the efficiency was very high. How else could
Paul have hauled logs to the landing a whole section (640 acres) at a
time? He also used Babe to pull the kinks out of the crooked logging
roads and it was on a job of this kind that Babe pulled a chain of
three-inch links out into a straight bar.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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