The earliest published versions of the myth of Paul Bunyan can be traced back to James MacGillivray, an itinerant newspaper reporter who wrote the first Paul Bunyan article for the Oscoda Press in 1906, and an expanded version of the same article for the Detroit News. Such tall tales, though later watered down, were attributed to a single character, Bunyan, and became the stories known today. To escape, the lumberjacks urinated in unison and created a frozen pole, which they slid down. This saved them from the bear, but trapped them in the tree. To keep the bear from climbing after them (despite the fact that bears do not need ladders to climb trees), they kicked down the ladder. It chased the lumberjacks up a tree on which they had a ladder. In one such tale, extreme cold forced bears to look for food one wandered into a lumber camp. Further, the Bunyan myths sprang from lumber camp tales, sometimes bawdy ones, to put it mildly. He is a classic American "big man" who was popular in 19th century America. Paul and Babe dug the Grand Canyon by dragging his axe behind him, and created Mount Hood by piling rocks on top of their campfire to put it out. When he was 7 months old he sawed the legs off of his parents bed in the middle of the night. When he was old enough to clap and laugh, the vibration broke every window in the house. Like most myths, this explains a physical phenomenon.īunyan's birth was strange, as are the births of many mythic heroes, as it took 5 storks to carry the infant (ordinarily, one stork could carry several babies and drop them off at their parents' home). Once, he helped Paul to straighten a river by freezing it with two blizzards that they captured in bags, then Paul hitched Babe up to the foot of the river and had him pull it straight. He was found during the winter of the blue snow. Babe measured 47 axe handles between his horns. In stories about him, it is said that he and his blue ox, Babe, were so large that their footsteps created Minnesota's ten thousand lakes including Lake Bemidji, which resembles Paul's giant footprint. Paul Bunyan is said to be a lumberjack of gargantuan size and titanic strength.
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