Paul Bunyan’s Wisconsin Roots

A visit to the greatNorthwoods of Wisconsin is an annual summer trip for many locals, and nojourney into the state’s sprawling forests would be complete without a sightingof Paul Bunyan, the lumberjack of lore and one of America’s most-recognized folkheroes. Typically portrayed as a giant in the company of a colossal blue oxnamed Babe, Paul Bunyan is often employed to sell something, fromall-you-can-eat breakfast at Paul Bunyan’s Cook Shanty in Minocqua tolumberjack meals at Paul Bunyan’s Restaurant in the Wisconsin Dells. As anemblem of America’sstrength and ingenuity, stories of Bunyan abound, but where the phenomenonstarted has long been a topic of debate.

According to the book Out of the Northwoods: The Many Lives ofPaul Bunyan by Michael Edmonds, when thousands of novice loggers enteredthe Great Lakes wilderness to work for the burgeoning lumber industry in theearly-1880s, “Grizzled veterans in logging shanties from Saginaw, Michigan, toDuluth, Minnesota, began to tell tall tales about the old days, when thingswere really tough. Some of themclaimed to have worked for a camp foreman named Paul Bunyan, whose unusualsize, strength and cleverness helped his men escape catastrophes or solve problems.”Some of the stories were intended to intimidate the new loggers, most of whomwere teenagers fresh from home, by exaggerating the extreme winter conditionsor the danger of mythical forest beasts. Occasionally, the tales were toldsimply for fun, or to pass the time, as loggers competed with one another increative lying contests.

The earliest reliablydated reference to Paul Bunyan comes from a logging camp north of Tomahawk,Wis., during the winter of 1885-1886, when a timber cruiser (a person who estimatesthe value of standing timber) named Bill Mulhollen told a tale about the famouslumberjack. Charles Brown (1872-1946), director of the WisconsinHistorical SocietyMuseum who collected Bunyan storiesfrom 1906-1946, heard the tales from a retired camp foreman in Oshkosh, Wis.,in the early 1890s. By the beginning of the 20th century, Bunyan stories werebeing told aloud in logging camps from coast to coast, until many states laidclaim to his birth.

According to theWisconsin Historical Society, Bunyan was first mentioned in print in the Duluth Evening News on Aug. 4, 1904. Thefirst collection of Bunyan stories to reach a large audience appeared in theMilwaukee-based nature magazine The Outer’s Book in February 1910.These were reprinted in The WashingtonPost and the Wisconsin State Journalwithin the year.

Bunyan made hisadvertising debut in 5,000 promotional brochures printed by the Red RiverLumber Co. of Minneapolis in 1914. During the 1920s, two professional writerswho labored in the timber industry as young men resurrected the Bunyan storiesand reworked them into short fiction. By the 1940s, Paul Bunyan’s name andimage had been so exploited by advertisers, and there were so many stories,both sterilized and embellished, about the folk hero that Richard Dorson, the“dean of American folklorists,” coined the term "fakelore" todescribe the Bunyan tales.

University ofWisconsin-Madison undergraduate Bernice Stewart (1894-1975) and her Englishprofessor, Homer Watt (1884-1948), were the first scholars to try tosystematically gather Bunyan stories. Scholars believe their work, gatheredwhile traveling through Wisconsin lumber campsand northern towns between 1914 and 1916, contains the most authentic versionsof original Bunyan tales.