~ ventior

‘stull

SOME months ago Al Parkin’s

article, “Paul Bunyan Wouldit¢
Know Things Now,’ linking’ the

Stories of Paul Bunyan to the ™.

building of the International
Woodworkers of America, drew
considerable comment from
Pacific Tribune readers,

“The men who work in the
big timber country have tradi-
tionally talked in big terms,”
Parkin wrote. “They talked big
when they spun their heroic tales
of the legendary Paul Bunyan—
the mighty logger who came out
of some unnamed fastness in
‘Canadaw’ with his famed Babe,
the Blue Ox — ‘forty-two axe
handles and a plug of isos
between the horns’—to range

timber country from Maine to \

the Pacific Northwest, perform
prodigious feats of logging and
build sawmills so huge ‘their
smokestacks had to be hinged in’
the middle to let the clouds go
by.’

“They talked big too, when on
the day of July 19, 1937, a con-
of loggers and mill-
workers at Tacoma founded the
International Woodworkers of
America (CIO). . . . But their
actual achievements in the suc-
ceeding ten years of IWA history
more than. justified what might
have been mere Idle boasting.”

Here, in this article published
by special arrangement with the
Daily People’s World, San Fran-
cisco, Eric Lucas shows the leg-
€nd of Paul Bunyan as reflecting
the finest aspirations of Canadian

and American workers. On one _

point only Canadians might take
issue, that. wherever Paul was
born he grew up in the forests
of America. For it must also

be said that wherever Paul may

have roamed ‘his stronghold is
in his native “Canadaw,” writing
new: legends of working class
Prowess in the big timbers of
British Columbia. : ;

E towers above the for-
ests, a mighty bearded

giant with a heavy ‘hook in

One fist, an axe in the other.
He is the sinew and brain,
courage and soul of America's
frontier-folk—a powerful people
who hurled their boundaries to
the far West Coast. Paul Bunyon
is not dead. His breath is lent by
the tall tales told of his eternal

youth, :

For one hundred years Paul
Bunyan has followed the lumber-
jacks of our forests ... has fol
lowed our loggers pushing ever
westward, portaging their bat-
eaux. up rapids, around swift
rivers... For half the months of /
the year Paul Bunyan was snowed
in in lumber camps, stood at the
loggers’ sides, helped them pull
the cross-saw, swing the mattock
and great wood fork, peel the

lead herse-teams through deep
mud holes .. . And with the lum-
kerjacks Paul Bunyan lived on
beans and salt pork and sour
dough bread ... And on even-

. ings he’d sit alongside the shanty

Stove, feel the forested gales
Pound the cabin timbers, smell
steaming wool from drying lines
above the stove ... Yes, and the
spirit of Paul Bunyan would lis-

ten to the tall tales told of him.

“Who is this Paul Bunyan?”
asks the tenderfoot.

An old sourdough looks through
his shaggy eyebrows. “Who?
Why, he wuz an’ all-powerful
giant, the mightiest logger that
ever lived, the inventor of the
lumber industry .. .”. He squints
one weather-beaten eye. “My
grandpop logged with him at
Bullfrog Lake near Onion River
county.” A

“Onion River county?”

4 ’ \ :
“Yep, that’s jest this side ©
Candy Mountain where it dips in-

and spin the grindstone, -

Paul
Bunyan |

THIS LEGENDARY HERO OF
-THE WORKERS LIVES FOR-
EVER IN THE STORIES OF
| THE BIG TIMBER COUNTRY

| OF THE WEST.

By ERIC LUCAS

Illustrated by FRED ELLIS.

to Garlic Crick ... My grandpop
said that one time Paul Bun-
Vans. cx R
e J
‘THERE is a ritual to telling
Paul Bunyan stories, The
speaker is in dead’ earnest and

his listeners pretend to believe his”

every word. Invariably the yarn-
spinner had an uncle or grand-
pop who worked right along with
Paul Bunyan himself.

There are those who say Paul
Bunyan hailed from Canada, that
he started the Rebellion of 1837 in
French Canada. They say he and
his loggers, armed with mattacks,
axes and wood forks steamed and
warped into hooks, stormed to
victory with Louis Papineau. But
wherever Paul was born, he grew
up in the forests of America.

Oh, we've had legends about
Buffalo Bill and Jesse James and
Kit Carson and Jim Bridger, ol’

' Andy Jackson, Dan'l Boone and

a host of others, but Paul Bun-

- yan, he’s different, he never real-

ly lived outside the virile imagin-
ation of the rank and file pion-
eer .« t

t

The “camp” of Paul Bunyan
held many incredulous figures.
There was Big Joe, “6 foot 32 in-
ches tall who, in the cold year of
the Five Winters, set the boiling
coffee pot on the stope that froze
so quick “that the ice was hot!”

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—JULY 23, 1948—PAGE 5

And there was Paul’s son Jean,
who used to lift logging trains

‘passing one another on a single
“track railroad. Then there was

Sourdough Sam, the cook, who
built a griddle so big that to
grease it took 80 men skating
around with slabs of bacon hitch-
ed to their feet.

The story goes that ‘Heaven-

Help-Us” was a good assistant
cook, even if he did mix revival

_ hymns in with the onion in the
mulligan—“it don’t cut much ice

what goes into a mulligan any-
Way.

The “camp” also held Paul's re-
nowned blue ox, ‘Babe,’ who
measured “42 axehandles and a
plug of tobacco between the eyes”.
Why, Babe could pull anything
that had two ends to it. Babe
pulled the kinks out of a crooked
road, and a chain of three-inch
links into a straight bar. One time
Babe kicked one of the bosses in
the head “so the brains all run
‘out but the cook happened to be
handy and he filled the hole up
with hotcake batter and plastered
it together again and he was just
as good as ever!”

. And Paul Bunyan's cow gave
milk ‘so strong the boys used it
for cough syrup. And there were
lusty tales of Windy and Shot
Gunderson and his saddle-bear,
Molar, and Johnny Inkslinger and

Blue-Nose Parker and Red Jack
and of Paul’s wife, too. She was
about the size of Paul, and it took
“thirteen Hudson Bay blankets to
make her a skirt and the sail of
a full rigged ship to make a
waist. She wasn’t so different
from other women, but the meas-
urements were different — that
was all—-feet 'stead of inches. . .”

And as for Paul Bunyan him-
self! “It ge a good man to pull
the saw in heavy timber when
Paul was on the other end. Paul
used to say to his fellow-sawyer:
‘I don't care if you ride the saw,
but please don’t drag your feet’.”

Why, Paul cut his teeth on a

heavy hook and drove logs down

the Kennebec in his first pair of
pants. He marked his logs by
pinching a piece out of each with
his fingers, Paul could blow out
the bunkhouse light and get into
his bunk before it was dark; yes,
and he could run around on float-
ing logs and “could spin ’em so
fast ’til the bark came off and
then run ashore on the bubbles.”

- e

()THER tales roundly ridicule

the “swivél-headed boss” and
boast of the smart loggers “stand”
up for their rights, and others
are richly obscene, and still others
sing of the poetry of these build-
ers of America. P

“I logged for Paul,” goes one
tale, “and it was fine loggin’, too,
in them ol’ times. When the trees _
used to be standin’ tall and thick
so that the on’y way you could
look was straight up, an’ all you

could see was a fittle patch of

blue right above you, an’ all you
could smell was the smell of firs
an’ balsam an’ pine, an’ all you
could hear was the squirrels an’
chickadees an’ the scrape of the
lumberjacks’ saws an’ the bite of
their axes. That was fine loggin’.”

legends of old Paul Bun-

yan have travelled to other
out-of-doors American industries
—to farming, hunting, trapping, —
even to mining in far-off Alaska
. . . But today the radio, the pulp
magazines, the phonograph in the -
bunk house, the “jazz shack” in
the village have stolen away
many of those who once sang his
praise. 5: ;

Today Paul Bunyan lives most-
ly in the hearts of the men of our
outdoors, He is the symbol of the
workers’ power. His exuberance
and virility is felt im heated talks
on politics, in stirring words like
“organize” and “union” ... Yes,
the powered footfalls of Paul
Bunyan are still felt and heard,
crashing through the wilderness,
building, in their stride, a happier
America ... 4