Paul Bunyan and Babe

Real logging-camp oral folklore, later commercialised in 1916

Paul Bunyan began in the bunkhouses. For at least thirty years before he reached print, loggers in the camps of the North Woods traded scraps of tall tale about him, short fragments rather than long stories, full of absurd weather and fearsome critters, and a favourite sport was trying them on a greenhorn. The first known mention in print is a line in the Gladwin County Record of Michigan on 17 March 1893, plainly an inside joke: "Paul Bunion is getting ready while the water is high to take his drive out." A 1904 editorial in the Duluth News Tribune gave the earliest recorded story: the winter of the blue snow, a bunkhouse covering half a section, and a griddle so long the cookees strapped hams to their feet and skated up and down it to grease it. In those early tales Paul was huge but human, eight feet tall and 300 pounds in one telling.

The giant came later. In 1916 the advertising copywriter William B. Laughead put Paul into a promotional pamphlet for the Red River Lumber Company, and once his campaign caught on he took great liberties with it. Laughead drew the first picture of Bunyan, named the blue ox Babe, made Paul tower over the trees, and credited the pair with stamping out Minnesota's 10,000 lakes with their footprints. Other writers added the Grand Canyon, dug by Paul's dragging axe, and Lake Bemidji, which from above looks somewhat like a giant footprint. The commercial versions buried the folk ones so deeply that people came to doubt Paul had ever been real folklore at all, though later research has shown he was.

Bemidji gave him a body. The town built its Paul and Babe in 1937 for a winter carnival meant to bring in tourists, and they have stood in downtown Bemidji ever since, in parades, on postcards and in countless family photographs, a celebration of the region's golden age of logging, and Paul and Babe now stand all across the North Woods.

Not everyone sees the same thing in them. The Ojibwe adapted Bunyan into their own stories of Nanabozho, who fought him for three days to defend the northern forests and finally knocked him into the mud with a giant walleye; the dent he left became Red Lake. When Indigenous people look at a statue like that, the Bemidji State University professor Nicky Michael has said, they think of loss, of the loggers who took over the land and the settlers who followed. The statues stand for both stories.