Wisconsin Folklore

14 Legends of Paul Bunyan, Lumberiack

14 Legends of Paul Bunyan, Lumberiack K. Bernice Stewart and Homer A. Watt Paul Bunyan is an inescapable presence in contemporary Wisconsin. One can read about his exploits in fourth-grade social studies texts, see his mighty ax at Wisconsin-Minnesota football games, gorge in his restaurants in Minocqua and Wisconsin Dells, pose alongside his statue in Eau Claire, and marvel at the immensity of his underwear in Rhinelander. Bunyan's current association with the bygone days of white pine logging, lumber camps, and river drives is undeniable. But the extent to which Wisconsin's bygone woods workers actually told stories about Paul Bunyan remains a matter of debate. Bunyan Rrst appeared in print on July 24, 1910, when James McGillivray, a former Michigan lumberjack, strung together a dozen short anecdotes in a story for the Detroit News-Tribune, "The Round River Drive." Nearly four years later, on April 25, 1914, Douglas Malloch of Chicago rendered McGillivray's stories into verse for the American Lumberman magazine. That same year, W. B. laughead, who had worked in northern Minnesota's woods from 1900 to 1908, compiled a thirty-two page pamphlet for the Minneapolis-based Red River lumber Company that intermixed Paul Bunyan stories with advertising copy. laughead, with a popular audience in mind, went on to revise and expand Bunyan's exploits and by the early 1920s Bunyan had become a national Rgure, celebrated in mass media and claimed by every logging community in North America (see Daniel G. Hoffman, Paul Bunyan: Last of the Frontier Demigods [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1952]; and Richard M. Dorson, ''Twentieth-Century Comic Demigods," in his American Folklore [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959], 214-26). There is considerable evidence, however, thatWisconsin lumberjacks knew few if any Bunyan stories before that Rgure's popularization through print in the 1920s. It was not until that decade, for example, that Paul Fournier established the Paul Bunyan Resort in Rice lake, where the former timber cruiser assumed Bunyan's persona to entertain tourists with tall tales. Subsequently the local bakery sold Paul Bunyan Bread. Nor was Bunyan's ox neglected. On December 16, 1925, the Rice Lake Chronotype reported: ''The burial place of Babe, the famous blue ox of Paul Bunyan, has been located about a mile west of Turtle lake by the county highway commissioner, who says the ground is sacred to every loyal lumberjack and can never be disturbed for road building." The Bunyan bandwagon kept rolling thanks to promoters of northwestern Wisconsin's "Indianhead Country," who touted the region's natural beauty and legendary heritage in hopes of luring freespending visitors. In a parallel instance, John Emmett Nelligan, following an extended career in logging camps from the Canadian Maritime Provinces to northeastern Wisconsin, published his reminiscences, which included a string of Bunyan stories, as The Life of a Lumberman in 1929. Yet the Bunyan material was eliminated when Nelligan's account was serialized in volume 13 of the Wisconsin Magazine of History. Why? Editor Joseph Schafer discovered that Nelligan, an accomplished raconteur and a storehouse of vivid woods anecdotes, had in fact never heard any Paul Bunyan stories while working in the woods. Undaunted, Nelligan's collaborator, Charles Sheridan of 139 Part Two. Storytelling Washburn-who had written popular articles about logrolling and would eventually playa key role in Bayfield's boosteristic "Mystic Knights of the Blue Ox"-had lifted Bunyan stories from books in hopes of attracting a wider readership. Indeed, the only legitimate claim to Bunyan's existence in the narrative repertoires of some Wisconsin lumberjacks was advanced in 1916 by K. Bernice Stewart and Homer A. Watt. A native of Madison who had clearly spent time in the logging country of northern Wisconsin, Bernice Stewart was a student at the University of Wisconsin and a reporter for the campus newspaper, The Daily Cardinal. Perhaps her "little collection" of Bunyan tales was prepared for a class offered by Homer A. Watt, a colleague of Arthur Beatty and likely an acquaintance of Charles E. Brown, who was an instructor in English at the University of Wisconsin from 1908 to 1916. Mistaken in their acceptance of the then current "communal composition" theory that folktales are created mystically by communities rather than by creative individuals, Stewart and Watt nonetheless provide evidence that a few oral tales about Paul Bunyan circulated in Wisconsin lumber camps prior to his mass-media ascension. As Bunyan scholar Daniel G. Hoffman aptly stated, Stewart and Watt's collaboration not only...