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he story goes that Paul

Bunyan’s father, Ivan Bunyan,
a Siberian peasant of no small
talents was an early forerunner of
what we today call a weatherman.
He would make modest. forecasts
of what was coming and since
Siberia was about as regular as
Vancouver in its weather habits,
Ivan could roll up a fairly good
Score in his forecasts.

It happened that one day when
Ivan had just begun the day’s
Chores on the old homestead, a
terrific windstorm blew up.
Always on the lookout for new
weather phenomena, Ivan climbed
a big Siberian elm to better ob-
Serve the majesty and intensity of
the storm. Just when he had almost
reached the top an extra heavy
Sust uprooted the tree, lifting it
thousands of feet in the air, with
Ivan still aboard.

After a long voyage of 48 hours or
More flying before the storm, the
big Siberian elm with Ivan aloft

an a gradual descent, coming
down in a perfect one-point landing
In the good soil of Quebec. Ivan at
once made himself a home with the
800d folks he found — or who found

M— and in no time at all became
4 model habitant. It is said that the
local priest blessed Ivan and of-
fered devout thanks to Gur Lady

Or a safe ending to such a

zardous journey. Nowhere can
we find any record of Ivan being
Screened or otherwise investigated
by the Royal Northwest Mounted
Police, a fact which speaks well for
the open-hearted Quebec people
with whom he had come to live.

In one of the beautiful valleys or
the St. Lawrence, Ivan Bunyan
Met and wooed an Ojibway Indian
Named Seraphina and in the
fullness of time, as the parsons
Say, their first son was born. They
named him Paul.

At the age of three months Paul
Weighed 80 pounds and possessed a
8argantuan appetite which
Seraphina could not satisfy at her
breast, so, after the custom of
those pioneering days, she weaned

im on Three Star Hennessy and
800d Quebec maple syrup. It is
Said that at six months Paul
Consumed a daily formula ration of
three quarts of Three Star and 12
quarts of maple syrup. Be that as it
May, there is\no question that even
4S a baby Paul Bunyan was no
Ordinary mortal. Ivan and

Taphina Bunyan would watch
their remarkable son with wide-
€yed wonder and adoration for

urs on end. In their simple
Peasant hearts they knew in-
Stinctively that Fate had blessed
them with genius and that the
Opening up a a new continent would
be his oyster.

At nine months, when Paul would
Tock himself to sleep in his cradle,
& thing about the size of three
boxcars, the very earth would
Shaké. Once (the story goes), when

€y had anchored his cradle out in
8 bayou in the St. Lawrence to keep

from shaking up the neigh-
thood and knocking down a lot of
aE

This story, by former Tribune
editor Tom McEwen, appeared 25
ae ago, in the Spring, 1952 issue
f New Frontiers, a quarterly
. arxist cultural journal published
sli 9ronto, It is reprinted here
Bhtly abridged. The line puts,
‘ "uch were also printed with the
"ginal, are by Aba Bayeysky.

standing timber; the authorities
had to call out the British navy for
rescue work. Paul had set in
motion a whole series of tidal
waves which threatened the safety
of innumerable river communities
from Montreal to the Island of
Anacosti.

As everyone knows, fond parents
are inclined at times to exaggerate
the daily progress of their off-
spring. With a baby of Paul’s
proportions and dynamic energy,
Ivan and Seraphina Bunyan could
hardly pose as the exception.

Almost overnight, one might say,
Paul jumped from babyhood to
vigorous young manhood. From
his earliest childhood Paul had
inherited the sterling quality of
love of work. His was the pride of
the artisan, the ability to savor the
joy of a job well and speedily done.
The size of a job never fazed Paul
Bunyan. The bigger they came the
better Paul liked it. When his
mother Seraphina, asked her six-
year-old son to bring in an armful
of wood for the stove Paul would
head for the woodpile on the
double, gather up at least two
cords and a half in one armful and
make the house rock as he dumped
it down ready for use.

yes, even the blue snow, all spelled
out freedom to’ Paul and to the
rebel army to which he gave his
loyalty and his mighty prowess.

The word democracy may have
meant very little to Paul Bunyan
but its essence, expressed in the
desire to live and work in peace
and quiet, to log, fish, hunt or play
as and when his community so
desired — that to Paul was
democracy. Ruthlessly challenged
by a grasping clique of colonial
exploiters, men of Paul Bunyan’s
mould had only one course left
open; so “avant mes enfants — to
run our own affairs in our own
way!”’

Paul Bunyan was not to savor the
full fruits of the achievements won
by William Lyon Mackenzie and
Louis-Joseph Papineau, but as a
soldier on the line he had struck a
valiant blow for self-government.
And it may be added by way of a
postscript that had Paul Bunyan
possessed the blunderbuss he
owned years later, and with which
he blew all the skunks and bobcats
out of the Tahquemenin. River
region of Upper Michigan with one
thundering shot, things may have
gone very badly for the British

- rulers!

the ring of Paul Bunyan’s double-
bitted axe was heard. In fact, there
were two double-bitted axes, since
Paul was in the habit, when in top
fettle, of chopping down two trees
at once. Loggers who worked with
Paul on the Big Union relate that it
was something to see chips the size
of barn doors flying from his two
swinging axes. When the boys
really get warmed up in their
reminiscences of Paul’s prowess,
they will recall that it took almost a
week for a man to saw the tops of
some of the standing timber of
those days, trees which were just
so many toothpicks to Paul.

Very early in his logging career
Paul Bunyan realized that he
needed some assistance to carry on
logging on the scale he set himself.
This: is where Babe the blue ox
came into the picture. There are
varied accounts of how Paul came
to acquire this remarkable animal,
but the most authentic, it appears
to us, is told by some old loggers
who swear that Paul came back to
Canada and bought Babe (as a
calf) somewhere on the north shore
of Lake Superior, put him in a sack
and toted him back to Michigan, so
that he wouldn’t have to pay any
duty.

The story of a loggers’ legend

By Tom McEwen

Reared in and romping through

‘the length and bredth of his

French-Canadian habitat, Paul,
enriched the qualities inherited
from his Indian mother and his
Siberian father in the environment
of his Quebec. His warm impulsive
temperament, boundless energy,
love of freedom and simple
““bonhomie”, marked him as a true
son of French Canada. Only there
could the bucherons do a hot-stove
dance and fry the flapjacks at one
and the same time, a feat in which
Paul excelled.

As a very young man Paul
Bunyan was already renowned as
one of the greatest legendary
fighters in the rebel army of Louis-
Joseph Papineau in 1837. From the
merest acquaintance with aman of
Paul Bunyan’s mould, it would
become immediately obvious that
the oppressive colonial rule of a
hidebound Family Compact just
wouldn’t fit with the Bunyan way of
life. The vastness of the forests, the
mighty rivers and the great snows,

- Following defeat of the Rebellion

of 1837, many of the rebels had to
flee Canada for a time to escape
Family Compact reprisals. Paul
Bunyan headed down into the tall
timber area of Northern Michigan.
It is probably this hurried and
somewhat unofficial emigration
that prompted the notion in the
minds of some people that Paul
Bunyan is (or was) a Yankee!
There, in that great state of tall
timber and big winds, Paul Bunyan
began a legendary career as a
super logger that remained un-
surpassed even by -the big Swede
topnotchers in the industry. Even
with the modern advantage of
wer saws, they still could not top
Paul’s daily log scale or drive the
fabled booms that made Paul
Bunyan and-his. blue ox, Babe, a
household-word from Maine to the
Queen Charlotte Islands.
Through Michigan, Maine,
Minnesota, California and up
through the Northwest to Oregon,
Washington and British Columbia,

Babe was blue in color, a soft,

inky blue, caused when his original:

owner left him outside for a week
in the winter of the blue snow. He
became known far -and wide as
Babe, the blue ox. Some idea of his
size. may be gathered from in-
formation attested to by loggers
who ought to know. Between the
horns Babe is alleged to have
measured 17 axe handles, three
tins of tomato soup and one box of
snoose. Allowing for some
variation, since the narrators, like
the axe-handles, could hardly be
uniform, the fact remains that
Babe was no ordinary ox. When
leading him with a boom of logs in
tow, Paul used to require a pair of

_field glasses to see what his hind-

quarters were doing.

In the logging camps of the
Northwest,. the interested
wayfarer can gather enough
material on the logging, ditching,
irrigation and construction jobs
accomplished by Paul and his blue

ox, Babe, to fill ten volumes. One

winter down in Washington Paul

and Babe rolled up a tremendous
boom of logs, some 240 million feet
or thereabouts, enough timber to
build a low-cost modern home for
every worker in B.C.

But there was no way to get them
to the mill. At least that’s what
some of the old-time loggers
thought. But not Paul; to him there
was no such thing as an in-
surmountable problem. He just
hitched Babe up to a crudely-built
sort of scoop and dug out a huge
canal, a canal which is listed today
in our geography books as the
Columbia River!

Jobs like that were everyday
routine to the creativeness of Paul
Bunyan. When he wanted a big
lake somewhere to facilitate
logging, he and Babe just headed
up the mountains and pushed the
snow down, millions of tons of it, so
that in the spring there would be no
worries about water supply.

And so on and so forth. To this
day loggers in Washington, Oregon
and British Columbia still relate
tales about the great feats of Paul
Bunyan. And jin the retelling of
these tall tales a new richness is
continually added because, in the
pride and daring of his job, the
story teller often casts himself in
the image of his great logger hero,
Paul Bunyan.

It was as natural as rolling off a
log that in Paul Bunyan’s progress
across a great continent, he should
surround himself with a goodly
crew of men, possessed of almost
equal prowess as himself. First
there was Ole, the camp
blacksmith who hired out to Paul
as a cook but who tempered the
morning flapjacks so hard that
Paul put him to blacksmithing
instead and used the flapjacks to
skid logs on the iced roads. The
only time Ole’s services were
required in the cookhouse was
when there were doughnuts on the
menu. Ole got the job punching out
the holes. :

Then there was Slim Mullins the
camp cook, who turned out hot-
cakes so big that a permanent gang
had to be maintained to butter
them. The gang use to throw
several kegs of butter on a flapjack
and then level it out with a
specially-designed set of skis.
Mullins is said never to have
changed his shirt, which in time
became so greasy that at night he
had to sleep between sheets of
sandpaper to keep from sliding out
of his bunk!

There was also Shotgun An-
derson, who was not only a master
logger but a crack shot to boot,
whether with a gun or a mouthful
of snoose-juice. On one occasion
Shotgun took aim at a bobcat
perched on top of a five-hundred
foot bull pine and knocked it kown
with a well-placed squirt of snoose-
juice. Then there was Batiste Joe
from Trois Rivieres who served as
Paul’s personal log scaler. When
the government agents came
around to see what was what,
Batiste Joe had it all fixed. All the
logs with or without bark belonged
to Paul Bunyan. The government
could take ‘‘what logs she is left”’
and if they didn’t like it — sacre!

There was no end to these great
men of the northwest woods:
Charley Nordstrom and Sourdough
Sam, the latter noted for his ability
to mix soda biscuits and cold-deck
logs; and Sour-Face Murphy who
had such a sour influence on
everything that he looked at that it
immediately fermented. Noting
this special quality, Paul
frequently took him off the loading
gang to make him camp distiller.

No story of Paul Bunyan would
be complete without brief mention
of his wife Carrie. The cir-
cumstances under which Paul met
her were unique. One day when
Paul and the boys were pulling the
hairpin kinks out of a logging road,
they heard an awful screeching
back in the woods. “‘That’s too loud

Continued on page 12

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—DECEMBER 16, 1977—Page 7