Many years ago in the lumber camps of the United States, loggers entertained themselves after a long day's work by dreaming up stories about a giant lumberjack with superhuman strength. Neither giant mosquitoes nor rains that lasted for months fazed Paul Bunyan or his companion, Babe the Blue Ox. According to the tales, Paul created the Grand Canyon and the Black Hills. After he had walked west from Maine, where some say he was born, it was his footprints that filled with water to make the Great Lakes. Loggers traditionally have big appetites; Bunyan's was enormous. His camp stove covered an acre, and his huge pancake griddle was greased by men using sides of bacon as skates. The tales of Paul and Babe first appeared in print in 1910 in the Detroit News-Tribune. In 1914 a Minnesota advertiser began a series of Paul Bunyan pamphlets to promote a lumber company. These advertisements influenced Esther Shephard, who wrote a book called Paul Bunyan in 1924. The next year James Stevens published his version of the Bunyan story under the same title. These books helped to turn Paul Bunyan into a national folk hero. Eventually the Bunyan tales filled about a dozen books. Bunyan is the subject of poems by U.S. poets Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, and Richard Wilbur. In addition, the English poet W.H. Auden and the English composer Benjamin Britten wrote an operetta about the Bunyan myth. |