Part 1

Produced by David Schwan. HTML version by Al Haines

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

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

Historical Note

The Red River Lumber Company takes its name from the Red River of the North, down which the Walkers drove their logs to Winnipeg before the railroads had reached their forest holdings in northern Minnesota. Later on they built a sawmill on the Red River at East Grand Forks, which was followed by the mills at Crookston and Akeley, Minnesota. Their last Minnesota log was cut at Akeley in 1915.

Editorial Note

The first edition of Paul Bunyan and His Big Blue Ox appeared in 1922, with ten thousand copies, followed in the same year with a printing of five thousand. Subsequent editions were printed in 1924, 1927 and 1931. Since the first edition, copies have been sent out only on request.

With this printing, January, 1934, the size of the book has been changed and the supplementary text has been revised. The stories are the same as in the preceding editions, and include material used in small booklets issued by The Red River Lumber Company in 1914 and 1916. So far as we know, this was the first appearance of the Paul Bunyan stories in print.

The student of folklore will easily distinguish the material derived from original sources from that written for the purposes of this book. It should be stated that the names of the supporting characters, including the animals, are inventions by the writer of this version. The oral chroniclers did not, in his hearing, which goes back to 1900, call any of the characters by name except Paul Bunyan himself.

Investigators have failed to establish the source or age of the first Paul Bunyan stories. One of our correspondents, a man of advanced years, wrote us in 1922 that he had heard some of the stories when a boy in his grandfather's logging camps in New York, and that they were supposed to be old at that time. A distinct Paul Bunyan legend has grown up in the oil fields, evidently originating with lumberjacks from the northern and eastern white pine camps who came to work with the drillers.

Paul Bunyan

Scholars Say He is the Only American Myth.

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 overawe 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.

In these conversations the lumberjack often took on the mannerisms of the French Canadian. This was apparently done without special intent and no reason for it can be given except for a similarity in the mock seriousness of their statements and the anti-climax of the bulls that were made, with the braggadocio of the habitant. Some investigators trace the origin of Paul Bunyan to Eastern Canada. Who can say?

Paul Bunyan came to Westwood, California, in 1913 at the suggestion of some of the most prominent loggers and lumbermen in the country. When the Red River Lumber Company announced their plans for opening up their forests of Sugar Pine and California White Pine, friendly advisors shook their heads and said,

"Better send for Paul Bunyan."

Apparently here was the job for a Superman,--quality-and-quantity-production on a big scale and great engineering difficulties to be overcome. Why not Paul Bunyan? This is a White Pine job and here in the High Sierras the winter snows lie deep, just like the country where Paul grew up. Here are trees that dwarf the largest "cork pine" of the Lake States and many new stunts were planned for logging, milling and manufacturing a product of supreme quality--just the job for Paul Bunyan.

The Red River people had been cutting White Pine in Minnesota for two generations; the crews that came west with them were old heads and every one knew Paul Bunyan of old. Paul had followed the White Pine from the Atlantic seaboard west to the jumping-off place in Minnesota, why not go the rest of the way?

Paul Bunyan's picture had never been published until he joined Red River and this likeness, first issued in 1914 is now the Red River trademark. It stands for the quality and service you have the right to expect from Paul Bunyan.

* * * * *

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.

They could never keep Babe more than one night at a camp for he would eat in one day all the feed one crew could tote to camp in a year. For a snack between meals he would eat fifty bales of hay, wire and all and six men with picaroons were kept busy picking the wire out of his teeth. Babe was a great pet and very docile as a general thing but he seemed to have a sense of humor and frequently got into mischief, He would sneak up behind a drive and drink all the water out of the river, leaving the logs high and dry. It was impossible to build an ox-sling big enough to hoist Babe off the ground for shoeing, but after they logged off Dakota there was room for Babe to lie down for this operation.

Once in a while Babe would run away and be gone all day roaming all over the Northwestern country. His tracks were so far apart that it was impossible to follow him and so deep that a man falling into one could only be hauled out with difficulty and a long rope. Once a settler and his wife and baby fell into one of these tracks and the son got out when he was fifty-seven years old and reported the accident. These tracks, today form the thousands of lakes in the "Land of the Sky-Blue Water."

Because he was so much younger than Babe and was brought to camp when a small calf, Benny was always called the Little Blue Ox although he was quite a chunk of an animal. Benny could not, or rather, would not haul as much as Babe nor was he as tractable but he could eat more.

Paul got Benny for nothing from a farmer near Bangor, Maine. There was not enough milk for the little fellow so he had to be weaned when three days old. The farmer only had forty acres of hay and by the time Benny was a week old he had to dispose of him for lack of food. The calf was undernourished and only weighed two tons when Paul got him. Paul drove from Bangor out to his headquarters camp near Devil's Lake, North Dakota that night and led Benny behind the sleigh. Western air agreed with the little calf and every time Paul looked back at him he was two feet taller.

When they arrived at camp Benny was given a good feed of buffalo milk and flapjacks and put into a barn by himself. Next morning the barn was gone. Later it was discovered on Benny's back as he scampered over the clearings. He had outgrown his barn in one night.

Benny was very notional and would never pull a load unless there was snow on the ground so after the spring thaws they had to white wash the logging roads to fool him.

Gluttony killed Benny. He had a mania for pancakes and one cook crew of two hundred men was kept busy making cakes for him. One night he pawed and bellowed and threshed his tail about till the wind of it blew down what pine Paul had left standing in Dakota. At breakfast time he broke loose, tore down the cook shanty and began bolting pancakes. In his greed he swallowed the red-hot stove. Indigestion set in and nothing could save him. What disposition was made of his body is a matter of dispute. One oldtimer claims that the outfit he works for bought a hind quarter of the carcass in 1857 and made corned beef of it. He thinks they have several carloads of it, left.

Another authority states that the body of Benny was dragged to a safe distance from the North Dakota camp and buried. When the earth was shoveled back it made a mound that formed the Black Hills in South Dakota.

* * * * *

The custodian and chaperon of Babe, the Big Blue Ox, was Brimstone Bill. He knew all the tricks of that frisky giant before they happened.

"I know oxen," the old bullwhacker used to say, "I've worked 'em and fed 'em and doctored 'em ever since the ox was invented. And Babe, I know that pernicious old reptyle same as if I'd abeen through him with a lantern."

Bill compiled "The Skinner's Dictionary," a hand book for teamsters, and most of the terms used in directing draft animals (except mules) originated with him. His early religious training accounts for the fact that the technical language of the teamster contains so many names of places and people spoken of in the Bible.

The buckskin harness used on Babe and Benny when the weather was rainy was made by Brimstone Bill. When this harness got wet it would stretch so much that the oxen could travel clear to the landing and the load would not move from the skidway in the woods. Brimstone would fasten the harness with an anchor Big Ole made for him and when the sun came out and the harness shrunk the load would be pulled to the landing while Bill and the oxen were busy at some other job.

The winter of the Blue Snow, the Pacific Ocean froze over and Bill kept the oxen busy hauling regular white snow over from China. M. H. Keenan can testify to the truth of this as he worked for Paul on the Big Onion that winter. It must have been about this time that Bill made the first ox yokes out of cranberry wood.

Feeding Paul Bunyan's crews was a complicated job. At no two camps were conditions the same. The winter he logged off North Dakota he had 300 cooks making pancakes for the Seven Axemen and the little Chore-boy. At headquarters on the Big Onion he had one cook and 462 cookees feeding a crew so big that Paul himself never knew within several hundred either way, how many men he had.

At Big Onion camp there was a lot of mechanical equipment and the trouble was a man who could handle the machinery cooked just like a machinist too. One cook got lost between the flour bin and the root cellar and nearly starved to death before he was found.

Cooks came and went. Some were good and others just able to get by. Paul never kept a poor one, very long. There was one jigger who seemed to have learned to do nothing but boil. He made soup out of everything and did most of his work with a dipper. When the big tote-sled broke through the ice on Bull Frog Lake with a load of split peas, he served warmed up, lake water till the crew struck. His idea of a lunch box was a jug or a rope to freeze soup onto like a candle. Some cooks used too much grease. It was said of one of these that he had to wear calked shoes to keep from sliding out of the cook-shanty and rub sand on his hands when he picked anything up.

There are two kinds of camp cooks, the Baking Powder Bums and the Sourdough Stiffs. Sourdough Sam belonged to the latter school. He made everything but coffee out of Sourdough. He had only one arm and one leg, the other members having been lost when his sourdough barrel blew up. Sam officiated at Tadpole River headquarters, the winter Shot Gunderson took charge.

After all others had failed at Big Onion camp, Paul hired his cousin Big Joe who came from three weeks below Quebec. This boy sure put a mean scald on the chuck. He was the only man who could make pancakes fast enough to feed the crew. He had Big Ole, the blacksmith, make him a griddle that was so big you couldn't see across it when the steam was thick. The batter, stirred in drums like concrete mixers was poured on with cranes and spouts. The griddle was greased by colored boys who skated over the surface with hams tied to their feet. They had to have colored boys to stand the heat.

At this camp the flunkeys wore roller skates and an idea of the size of the tables is gained from the fact that they distributed the pepper with four-horse teams.

Sending out lunch and timing the meals was rendered difficult by the size of the works which required three crews--one going to work, one on the job and one coming back. Joe had to start the bull-cook out with the lunch sled two weeks ahead of dinner time. To call the men who came in at noon was another problem. Big Ole made a dinner horn so big that no one could blow it but Big Joe or Paul himself. The first time Joe blew it be blew down ten acres of pine. The Red River people wouldn't stand for that so the next time he blew straight up but this caused severe cyclones and storms at sea so Paul had to junk the horn and ship it East where later it was made into a tin roof for a big Union Depot.

When Big Joe came to Westwood with Paul, he started something. About that time you may have read in the papers about a volcanic eruption at Mt. Lassen, heretofore extinct for many years. That was where Big Joe dug his bean-hole and when the steam worked out of the bean kettle and up through the ground, everyone thought the old hill had turned volcano. Every time Joe drops a biscuit they talk of earthquakes.

It was always thought that the quality of the food at Paul's Camps had a lot to do with the strength and endurance of the men. No doubt it did, but they were a husky lot to start with. As the feller said about fish for a brain food, "It won't do you no good unless there is a germ there to start with."

There must have been something to the food theory for the chipmunks that ate the prune pits got so big they killed all the wolves and years later the settlers shot them for tigers.

A visitor at one of Paul's camps was astonished to see a crew of men unloading four-horse logging sleds at the cook-shanty. They appeared to be rolling logs into a trap door from which poured clouds of steam.

"That's a heck of a place to land logs," he remarked.

"Them ain't logs," grinned a bull-cook, "them's sausages for the teamsters' breakfast."

At Paul's camp up where the little Gimlet empties into the Big Auger, newcomers used to kick because they were never served beans. The bosses and the men could never be interested in beans. E. E. Terrill tells us the reason:

Once when the cook quit they had to detail a substitute to the job temporarily. There was one man who was no good anywhere. He had failed at every job. Chris Crosshaul, the foreman, acting on the theory that every man is good somewhere, figured that this guy must be a cook, for it was the only job he had not tried. So he was put to work and the first thing he tackled was beans. He filled up a big kettle with beans and added some water. When the heat took hold the beans swelled up till they lifted off the roof and bulged out the walls. There was no way to get into the place to cook anything else, so the whole crew turned in to eat up the half cooked beans. By keeping at it steady they cleaned them up in a week and rescued the would-be-cook. After that no one seemed to care much for beans.

It used to be a big job to haul prune pits and coffee grounds away from Paul's camps. It required a big crew of men and either Babe or Benny to do the hauling. Finally Paul decided it was cheaper to build new camps and move every month.

The winter Paul logged off North Dakota with the Seven Axemen, the Little Chore Boy and the 300 cooks, he worked the cooks in three shifts--one for each meal. The Seven Axemen were hearty eaters; a portion of bacon was one side of a 1600-pound pig. Paul shipped a stern-wheel steamboat up Red River and they put it in the soup kettle to stir the soup.

Like other artists, cooks are temperamental and some of them are full of cussedness but the only ones who could sass Paul Bunyan and get away with it were the stars like Big Joe and Sourdough Sam. The lunch sled,--mostpopular institution in the lumber industry! Its arrival at, the noon rendezvous has been hailed with joy by hungry men on every logging job since Paul invented it. What if the warm food freezes on your tin plate, the keen cold air has sharpened your appetite to enjoy it. The crew that toted lunch for Paul Bunyan had so far to travel and so many to feed they hauled a complete kitchen on the lunch sled, cooks and all.

When Paul invented logging he had to invent all the tools and figure out all his own methods. There were no precedents. At the start his outfit consisted of Babe and his big axe.

No two logging jobs can be handled exactly the same way so Paul adapted his operations to local conditions. In the mountains he used Babe to pull the kinks out of the crooked logging roads; on the Big Onion he began the system of hauling a section of land at a time to the landings and in North Dakota he used the Seven Axemen.

At that time marking logs was not thought of, Paul had no need for identification when there were no logs but his own. About the time he started the Atlantic Ocean drive others had come into the industry and although their combined cut was insignificant compared to Paul's, there was danger of confusion, and Paul had most to lose.

At first Paul marked his logs by pinching a piece out of each log. When his cut grew so large that the marking had to be detailed to the crews, the "scalp" on each log was put on with an axe, for even in those days not every man could nip out the chunk with his fingers.

The Grindstone was invented by Paul the winter he logged off North Dakota. Before that Paul's axemen had to sharpen their axes by rolling rocks down hill and running along side of them. When they got to "Big Dick," as the lumberjacks called Dakota, hills and rocks were so hard to find that Paul rigged up the revolving rock.

This was much appreciated by the Seven Axemen as it enabled them to grind an axe in a week, but the grindstone was not much of a hit with the Little Chore Boy whose job it was to turn it. The first stone was so big that working at full speed, every time it turned around once it was payday.

The Little Chore Boy led a strenuous life. He was only a kid and like all youngsters putting in their first winter in the woods, he was put over the jumps by the oldtimers. His regular work was heavy enough, splitting all the wood for the camp, carrying water and packing lunch to the men, but his hazers sent him on all kinds of wild goose errands to all parts of the works, looking for a "left-handed peavy" or a "bundle of cross-hauls."

He had to take a lot of good natured roughneck wit about his size for he only weighed 800 pounds and a couple of surcingles made a belt for him. What he lacked in size he made up in grit and the men secretly respected his gameness. They said he might make a pretty good man if he ever got any growth, and considered it a necessary education to give him a lot of extra chores.

Often in the evening, after his day's work and long hours put in turning the grindstone and keeping up fires in the camp stoves--that required four cords of wood apiece to kindle a fire, he could be found with one of Big Ole's small 600-pound anvils in his lap pegging up shoes with railroad spikes.

It was a long time before they solved the problem of turning logging sleds around in the road. When a sled returned from the landing and put on a load they had to wait until Paul came along to pick up the four horses and the load and head them the other way. Judson M. Goss says he worked for Paul the winter he invented the round turn.

All of Paul's inventions were successful except when he decided to run three ten-hour shifts a day and installed the Aurora Borealis. After a number of trials the plan was abandoned because the lights were not dependable.

"The Seven Axemen of the Red River" they were called because they had a camp on Red River with the three-hundred cooks and the Little Chore Boy. The whole State was cut over from the one camp and the husky seven chopped from dark to dark and walked to and from work.

Their axes were so big it took a week to grind one of them. Each man had three axes and two helpers to carry the spare axes to the river when they got red hot from chopping. Even in those days they had to watch out for forest fires. The axes were hung on long rope handles. Each axeman would march through the timber whirling his axe around him till the hum of it sounded like one of Paul's for-and-aft mosquitoes, and at every step a quarter-section of timber was cut.