Michigan Legends: Folktales and Lore from the Great Lakes State

Paul Bunyan: Original Michigan Hero

   45 Paul Bunyan Original Michigan Hero The Au Sable River is a thing of beauty. It runs like liquid silver through the forested countryside in the Lower Peninsula’s northeast quarter. It’s some 150 feet wide just before it empties into Lake Huron at Oscoda, Michigan . This river—­ every inch of its forested, sandy banks—­ was once a familiar place to the men who made up Michigan’s old, rip-­ roarin’ logging industry.The river, the twin cities of Oscoda and AuSable, and the old saloon-­ infested logging towns of Saginaw and Bay City were all the stompin’ grounds of the men who logged Michigan’s forests and the man who was the most famous of them all, Paul Bunyan. As the fellers (literally, the men who felled trees) of the 1800s knew in their hearts, Paul Bunyan belongs to Michigan. They all knew, too, that Paul once tamed the Au Sable River.Well, in their stories, they called it the “Auger River,” but it is one and the same, 46   Paul Bunyan insist the storytellers—­ and the people who have studied the stories and the tellers.Anyhow, the Auger River, once a lashing python of writhing water until Paul Bunyan tamed it and split it in two, was based on the Au Sable, which was a fast flowing river that was the center of logging in its heyday. Now, it’s hard to believe that a man could tame and change a river, but Paul Bunyan was not just any man.That is why he is one of the most written-­ about entities in American history. Many a researcher has tracked how the once-­ oral lumbermen’s stories about Paul Bunyan wound up everywhere from children’s storybooks to cartoons, songs, plays, and even advertisements. Most of those researchers,at least those worth their timber,spent time—­ a lot of time—­ in Michigan. If you wanted to know Paul Bunyan, you had to set up camp in Michigan, the homeland of the first and best of all boss loggers, the old-­ timers say.The best logging country was Michigan’s Thumb and north, from the mighty Saginaw River to the Au Sable and beyond. Once upon a time in the 1800s, that region was full of lumbering and lumbermen, who called themselves “shanty boys,” because they all lived and shivered in shanties while they worked the forests. Shanties are flimsy, tiny houses of tar paper that men lived in at lumber camps.These men heard the Paul Bunyan stories and passed them on when they were old-­ timers to people who were born long after the old-­ growth forests were gone. As one man put it some fifty years ago, “There is romance in lumber.”There certainly was—­ and a whole lot of storytelling about the boss logger. One story was written down in a 1909 letter from lumberman Joe Muffreau (or Joe Murphy, for those who are Irish), who had a considerable reputation himself for his logging prowess. Now, Joe says a lot of the Paul Bunyan stuff people heard was nonsense and that he knew the real Paul Bunyan, way back in 1860. “It was the early part of the year . . . that I first met the very lovable but much maligned and lied-­ about character known to everyone as Paul Bunyan. “I was chief cook for old Charlie Backus of the Backus Lumber Company doing business on the Au Sable River.The camp was a big one, and the crew was equally big consisting of 180 big men. Not a Paul Bunyan   47 man of that memorable crew was under 7 feet in height, and none weighed less than 350 pounds. “To get back to my friend Paul Bunyan. It was in the month of February, 1860.The snow was twenty feet deep on the level. It was, undoubtedly, the worst winter known in the annals of history. I had just finished peeling 180 bushels of potatoes. . . . “ . . . I glanced through the window, and the sight which met my eyes made me gasp. Accustomed as I was to seeing big men, I was totally unprepared for the sight which I saw.What first appeared to be two of our pine trees began moving towards the cook camp door.Hastily grasping the long knife which I had been using to peel the spuds in one hand and a huge cleaver in the other, I opened the...