The Round River Drive: One of the Earliest Known Printings of Paul Bunyan&nbsp‪;‬

James MacGillivray wrote “The Round River Drive,” one of the earliest known printings of “Paul Bunyan,” in The Detroit News Tribune: July 24, 1910.

The first Bunyan tale to reach a wider audience started with James MacGillivray of Oscoda, Michigan. With the support of his brother, the publisher and editor of the Oscoda press, he turned the stories he had heard of Paul Bunyan as a youth working in the lumber camps into a small unfeatured anecdote with no byline, titled simply “Round River” and published in the Oscoda Press on Aug. 10, 1906. In 1910, James MacGillivray rewrote and expanded the tale of “Round River,” and published it in the Detroit News Tribune on July 24 of that year as “Round River Drive.”