I’ve known about Paul Bunyan since I was a kid, but where did he actually orginate? My research gave a couple of different ideas. One article asserted that Paul Bunyan was “fake lore” instead of “folklore” — suggesting that writers made up stories and they fed on each other as opposed to something that had actual origins from oral tales told in lumber camps. Other articles suggested that the tales did originate in lumber camps, but they didn’t have much research to back them. The most helpful book I found is Out of the Northwoods The Many Lives of Paul Bunyan by Michael Edmonds. This book, published in 2009, is well researched and debunks the fake lore theory, which made me silently cheer! The book names Bernice Stewartt and Homer Watt as the first serious collectors of Paul Bunyan stories. Bernice Stewart was a student, Watt a professor at the University of Wisconsin – and she wrote a freshman paper on Paul Bunyan tales. She had grown up in sawmill towns in Wisconsin and Michigan, daughter of a “timber cruiser” who traveled extensively through the logging region, sometimes taking his daughter with him to the woods. It was there that she heard her first Paul Bunyan stories and wrote her paper on them. Watt encouraged her to research them in greater depth and by 1914 both Stuart and Watt were systematically collecting the stories.
I try to imagine myself as a Freshman in college, feeling motivated to collect original Paul Bunyan stories to capture their beginnings and preserve them so the real me could enjoy them 100 years later. I don’t have an imagination quite so good to imagine ME doing the research, but I’m glad she did. It lends some truth to the stories, and feels satisfying to me.
Truth to Paul Bunyan stories? You don’t say! Well, I actually DO say. The one thing that you have to keep in mind when telling Paul Bunyan stories is that they are true stories. It wouldn’t be any fun to tell them if it was a bunch of made up stuff would it?
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