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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