Paul Bunyan

The Paul Bunyan legend had its origin in the Papineau Rebellion of 1837. This was a revolt of the French-Canadians against their young English queen. In the Two Mountains country, at St. Eustache, many loggers armed with mattocks, axes, and wooden forks which had been steamed and warped into hooks, stormed into battle. Among them was a mighty-muscled, bellicose, bearded giant named Paul Bunyon. This forest warrior, with a mattock in one hand, and H great fork in the other, powerful as Hercules, indomitable as Spartacus, bellowing like a furious Titan, raged among the Queen’s troops like Samson among the Philistines. He came out of the rebellion with great fame among his own kind. His slaughters got the grandeur of legend.

Later this Paul Bunyon operated a logging camp. In that day logging was heroic labor. In the autumn the loggers went to the woods, forcing their way in batteaux up swift rivers. On every trip there were many wearisome portages around rapids. Snow and ice then locked them in their camps for five or six months. The workday was from dawn to dusk. The loggers lived on beans, salt pork and sourdough bread. At night there were songs and tales around the shanty stove. Of course these were mainly about their own life, their own heroes. The camp boss was like the chief of a tribe; his will had to be the law, and he had to have exceptional physical power and courage to enforce it. After his part in the rebellion there was no more famous camp chief in Canada than Paul Bunyon.

Sure that the Paul Bunyan stories which have been told for generations in the American timberlands were of Canadian origin, I questioned many old time French-Canadian loggers before I found genuine proofs. At last I met Louis Letourneau in the Big Berry country, Puyallup, Washington. And Louis’ father-in-law, Z. Berneche, a snowy-maned, shining-eyed, keen-minded veteran logger of ninety years, told me about the original hero. His uncle, Collet Bellaine, fought by the side of Paul Bunyon, and later worked two seasons for him. Now, the French-Canadians have no genius for the humor of purposeful exaggeration such as the Americans have; the habitans exaggerate honestly and enthusiastically and with an illusion of truth, like Tartarin of Tarascon.

“My uncle, Collet Bellaine,” said Mr. Berneche earnestly, “know that Paul Bunyon carry five hundred pounds on portage. That is truth. He was very big, strong man, you understand; he fight like hell, he work like hell, and he pack like hell. Never was another man like Paul Bunyon. That’s right.”

It is not difficult to imagine the habitans honestly exaggerating the logging feats of the war hero as they talked about him in the New Brunswick camps, and in Maine, and in the Great Lakes pineries. And it is simple for one who has seen the two races together to imagine the Americans “improving” on the first stories about Paul Bunyon, only to ridicule his extravagant admirers; and then developing their own Paul Bunyan legend to ease their weariness when their twelve-hour day was done.