Paul Bunyan

“ 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. ”

“ The sinking sun flashed its last blaze of red over a245 camp that was deserted of all save the great heroes and the mighty blue ox. The Big Swede had returned and he slept; Johnny Inkslinger figured; and Babe mooed dolorously as the shadows clouded the silent timber. And Paul Bunyan, the supreme inventor, the noble historian, the master orator, the grand field marshal of industry, mused in sad resignation on the vanity of man’s enterprises. The logging industry, which he had invented, would go on as long as trees grew from the earth, and his name would be heard forever on the tongues of men. ”

“ From the eyes of each motionless logger the tears streamed unchecked; they formed in puddles around each man’s feet until all of them stood knee-deep in mud. When the oration was finished and they had extricated themselves and cleaned their boots, they made ready, and they left with Paul Bunyan for the North, where he had decided to dig Babe’s grave. The Big Swede stayed with the dying ox, and Johnny Inkslinger hid himself in the shadows of his office. ”

“ No one but Paul Bunyan would ever tackle a job like that. To drive logs upstream is impossible, but if you think a little thing like an impossibility could stop him, you don't know Paul Bunyan. He simply fed Babe a good big salt ration and drove him to the upper Mississippi to drink. Babe drank the river dry and sucked all the water upstream. The logs came up river faster than they went down.
*****
Big Ole was the Blacksmith at Paul's headquarters camp on the Big Onion. ”

“ NEW IOWA Paul Bunyan, a historian first, an industrialist second, an inventor third, an orator fourth, was perhaps an artist in the fifth degree of his importance. Most authorities among the loggers of to-day insist that he was a great man of only four parts; they declare there was no art in him. The authorities of the classroom, less reverent and generous in their judgments, refuse to consider him as more than an industrialist; but the professors must be doubted a little, because they are certainly jealous of the great logger’s simple eloquence and his popularity with the plain people. ”

“ The Paul Bunyan stories which form the body of the legend have not had many changes or surviving additions in fifty years. They themselves are not a narrative; they exist, rather, as a group of anecdotes which are told among a group of camp men until the story-teller of the gang is started on a narrative which he makes up as he yarns along, and which may take him an hour, or three evenings, to relate. A Paul Bunyan bunkhouse service is a glory to hear, when it is spontaneous and in a proper setting ”

“ The loggers left their cozy quarters reluctantly when they heard Paul Bunyan call, “Roll out or roll Up!” They could imagine nothing more disagreeable than its raining up their pants’ legs, rough He Men though they were. But when they saw the river rising in rushing waves they did not need Paul Bunyan’s orders to make them run for the cookhouse. Johnny Inkslinger was wiring the camp office and Babe’s stable to the mammoth building, and the Big Swede was making his fastest moves since the Dakota days as he hitched up the blue ox. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Each man would argue at length for his own inclinations, carefully respecting, however, the preferences of the others.
Paul Bunyan lost patience upon hearing such nonsense; and he gave sharp orders that there was to be no more talking in the woods. Logs were needed for the new mill; his men were to get down to business and forget their vain imaginings; for it was doubtful if such fantastic creatures as they talked about really existed.
For the first time in camp history Paul Bunyan’s loggers felt that their leader was driving them, and they worked sullenly. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Real America was covered with forests. A forest was composed of trees. A felled and trimmed tree was a log. Paul Bunyan threw aside his pine tree beard brush and jumped to his feet with a great shout.
“What greater work could be done in Real America than to make logs from trees?” he cried. “Logging! I shall invent this industry and make it the greatest one of all time! I shall become a figure as admired in history as any of the great ones I have read about.”
Paul Bunyan then delivered his first oration. The blue ox calf was his only listener ”

“ When they reached the end of the furrow Paul picked up the plow and the oxen with one arm and turned them around. Pete took one look and then wandered off down the trail muttering, "Hox an' hall! She's lift hox an' hall."
PAUL Bunyan started travelling before the steam cars were invented. He developed his own means of transportation and the railroads have never been able to catch up. Time is so valuable to Paul he has no time to fool around at sixty miles an hour.
In the early days he rode on the back of Babe, the Big Blue Ox. ”

“ Now Paul Bunyan was astonished and puzzled when he heard his loggers re-telling the stories with which they had amused themselves during the last week of the flood. Instead of working, one logger would lean231 against a tree and remark that he had always liked a little flesh on them himself; and his partner would reply that every man had his own taste, but as for him, give him the cute little kind that a burly could tuck under one arm. Then a swamper would come up and say that he didn’t care much about shape, but he did like red hair and a wide mouth. ”

“ Smits says editorially, "Only among the pioneers could Paul thrive, his deeds are inspired by such imagination as grows only in the great outdoors. For hours at a time, lumberjacks will pile up the achievements of their hero. Each story is a challenge calling for a yarn still more heroic. The story teller who succeeds in eliciting a snicker is an artist, indeed, as the Paul Bunyan legends must always be related and received with perfect seriousness. Paul Bunyan has become a part of the every day life of the loggers. ”

“ But so long as trees are felled the race of loggers will hold to a staunch faith in Paul Bunyan as the supreme historian and maker of history, the most resourceful inventor, and the most powerful orator, as well as the most enterprising industrialist of all time. ”

“ You shall be at work with your felling ax once more this afternoon.”
“I warn you that I’ll not do foul, sweaty labor again, Mr. Bunyan,” said Ford Fordsen composedly. “If you put me back in the woods I’ll preach the ten-hour day to the loggers. And I ask you to return me to the ground. I find this high altitude uncomfortable.”
“Audacity!” exclaimed Paul Bunyan, so astonished that he nearly dropped this astonishing bunkhouse genius. “The ten-hour day! Thunderation! What an unheard of thing! Is the sun shining? Do I wear whiskers? ”

“ Babe had to learn to eat pancakes like Benny. That was the time Paul used the straw hats for an emergency ration.
When Paul's drive came down, folks in the settlements were astonished to see all the river-pigs wearing huge straw hats. The reason for this was soon apparent. When the fodder ran out every man was politely requested to toss his hat into the ring. Hundreds of straw hats were used to make a lunch for Babe.
TALK about a job for Paul Bunyan! In 1913 the site of Westwood was primeval forest, sixty mountainous miles from the nearest railroad. ”

“ Muttering darkly, Hels Helsen followed at a distance.
Paul Bunyan halted the loggers before they reached the shadows of the mountain. He turned and faced them, and for a moment they stood in breathless terror, fearing that he was going to urge them to another effort on the slopes above. But no. Paul Bunyan only said, in the tones of a gentle teacher, “You see before you a logged-off plain. Only stumps remain upon its soil. I shall make you a forest. ”

“ On the way we went through a city which advertised itself as the Capital of the Paul Bunyan Playground—Paul Bunyan being what is called a mythical lumberman of the North, and was supposed to have been terribly big like a giant in the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, which is a fairy story every boy ought to know—only instead of Paul Bunyan being a bad giant, he was a good one, and was always doing kind things for people. ”

“ Wondering how the engines had come to the manger, Paul Bunyan put them in his two mackinaw pockets and tramped on over the mountain towards Nowaday Valley, knowing that there he would find his loggers.
It was late afternoon when the leader-hero reached the Big Fir timber which covered the slopes around Nowaday Valley. Through the trees he saw a blue that was bluer than the sky. Babe mooed gently as239 his master approached, but his gaze remained fixed on the border where the green valley floor met the timber. Smoke was rising there; and now Paul Bunyan saw roofs and people among the firs. ”

“ This was to build a great sled, something on the order of a lunch sled, and have Babe, the blue ox, haul the loggers to and from work each day. It was a desperate plan, and no one but Paul Bunyan would have had the courage to attempt it. It must be remembered that the blue ox measured forty-two ax handles and a plug of chewing tobacco between the horns; an ordinary man at his front had to use a telescope to see what he was doing with his hind legs, he was so long; he had so much energy and such delight in labor that no one could hold him when he started for the woods in the mornings ”

“ Paul Bunyan had his setbacks the same as every logger only his were worse. Being a pioneer he had to invent all his stuff as he went along. Many a time his plans were upset by the mistakes of some swivel-headed strawboss or incompetent foreman. The winter of the blue snow, Shot Gunderson had charge in the Big Tadpole River country. He landed all of his logs in a lake and in the spring when ready to drive he boomed the logs three times around the lake before he discovered there was no outlet to it. High hills surrounded the lake and the drivable stream was ten miles away. ”

“ Do men chew with their teeth? Is Babe a blue ox? And—do loggers work twelve hours a day? What devils do trail me! Ideas; poetry; floods; women; the ten-hour day—what next? By the holy old, roaring old, oily old——”
What would certainly have been the grandest curse of history was interrupted by the appearance of Johnny Inkslinger on the summits of the Cascades.235 Paul Bunyan’s wrath and chagrin vanished and the light shone once more into his eyes as his interested gaze followed the timekeeper’s progress. Shagline Bill’s endless freight team circled down the mountains behind Johnny Inkslinger. ”

“ Who would not be irritated by a splinter, he asks, if the irritation leads to such an inrush of divine power and grace? It is like the pain of the oyster that is healed by a pearl.
And so, with Paul as with Bunyan, the grace turns the scales. It is better to have the pain if it brings the pearl. It is better to have a thorn in the one balance if it brings such grace into the opposite balance that one is better off with the thorn than without it. Therein lies life's deepest secret--the secret that Catherine Booth and John Bunyan learned from the lips that unfolded it to Paul. ”

“ It is so easy for Bunyan to believe that the divine grace is sufficient for the wide, wide world; it is so difficult to realize that it is sufficient for him!
It is so easy for Wesley to believe in the forgiveness of sins: it is so difficult for him to believe in the forgiveness of his own!
It is so easy for Paul to believe in the grace that is sufficient to redeem a fallen race: it is so difficult for him to believe in the grace that can fortify him to endure his thorn! ”

“ He dropped the tarpaulin and98 strode over to the cookhouse. Hot Biscuit Slim, the kitchen chief, came forth to meet him. There was a knowing look in the cook’s eyes.
“It’s to be a great Sunday dinner to-morrer?” he asked, before Paul Bunyan could speak.
“The greatest Sunday dinner ever heard of,” said Paul Bunyan. “I want this to be remembered as the noblest meal ever served in a logging camp. My loggers shall feast like the victorious soldiers of old time. It is a natural privilege of heroes to revel after conquest. ”