Paul Bunyan in Michigan: Yooper Logging, Lore & Legends

By Jon C. Stott

“Gathers the oral traditions of the loggers who settled Michigan’s Upper Peninsula . . . Stott preserves the tall tales for generations to come.” —Grandpa Shorter’s, “Seven Michigan Authors to Put in Your Beach Bag This Summer”

The loggers who settled Michigan’s Upper Peninsula whiled away winter evenings with tales of extreme weather, strange geography, legendary beasts and improbable feats. One mythic figure strode confidently from one story to the next, his legend growing with each retelling. Soon, Paul Bunyan began to appear in newspapers, magazines, books and even a Walt Disney cartoon. In this first collection since 1946 set exclusively in the UP, author Jon C. Stott recaptures the oral tradition that cast Bunyan’s shadow across the national imagination. Relive the winter of the blue snow and cross paths with familiar companions like Babe and Johnny Inskslinger, as well as odd creatures like the hodag and the agropelter.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781625852052

Jon C. Stott

Jon C. Stott has been studying beer in a very non-academic, non-scientific way for over half a century and is the author of "Beer Quest West: The Craft Brewers of Alberta and British Columbia." His blog www.beerquestwest.com includes essays about breweries and brewers and tasting notes. After wintering in Albuquerque, avoiding the cold Canadian weather, he moved there permanently in 2013. He is the author of more than a dozen books.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

During the later nineteenth century, in logging camps in northern Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, the shanty men would often spend evenings telling anecdotes about unusual weather conditions, incredible logging feats and strange creatures inhabiting the forests. Their narratives drew on logging stories they had heard in other camps and, in many cases, on folklore that they brought with them from their native lands. At some point during this period, the stories coalesced around a fictional logger called Paul Bunyan. He was a kind of super-logger, very large and strong, skilled at all aspects of the trade and a superb leader of men. The events narrated about him were humorous, exaggerated and frequently preposterous and indirectly embodied the men’s attitudes toward their dangerous occupation and the frequently inhospitable environments in which they pursued it.

The Paul Bunyan stories did not appear in print until the first decade of the twentieth century, by which time the great white pine logging era had virtually ended and logging operations had moved westward. At first, the stories appeared in newspapers, magazines and professional journals, intended for either local audiences or people in the industry. Then, in 1925, two major publishers put out book-length collections of the tales, beginning a more than three-decade boom of collections of tales, children’s books and even a Walt Disney cartoon about the mythical hero. Although the publications frequently included the same stories, the treatment of these were influenced by the backgrounds of the retellers, their attitudes toward both the stories and the times in which they originated and the times in which their retellings were published.

I first became aware of Paul Bunyan in the late 1960s when I was teaching courses in American studies at Western Michigan University and when my young family and I began to spend summer vacations in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Over the years, I collected versions of the stories and studied the way different storytellers treated well-known episodes. As an English professor working at a time when what became known as the ecological movement was just starting, I was interested in how the stories looked at a type of logging that clear-cut the land, destroying ecosystems and leaving the ground littered with slash that fed the forest fires that completed the devastation the logging companies had begun. I was also interested in how many of the retellers used first-person narrators, a reflection of the fact that storytelling was a major part of loggers’ leisure time.

When I set about to retell the Paul Bunyan stories myself, I wanted to create a Paul Bunyan who was more realistic, more believable as a human being than the enormous character who walked through trees that were only waist high and who could single-handedly level a forest in a few hours. The Paul Bunyan in my version is a big man, perhaps seven and a half feet tall; he is strong, skilled, intelligent and gifted at storytelling. He enjoys spinning yarns with loggers about the highly improbable events that are frequently told about him.

I also wanted to create a sense of the storytelling culture that existed in the logging camps. So the well-known incidents are set within a framework in which someone tells a story in response to some observation or event that has just occurred. Sometimes, the stories are told by shanty men who seek to frighten a gullible greenhorn. Other times, they are told by Paul himself, either to the men in the shanties or to an individual he is mentoring.

In three of the stories, there are references to actual events and historical personages. I wanted to connect the Paul Bunyan stories to the real world of nineteenth-century logging in the North Country. That is why Paul talks about his mentor Isaac (Ike) Stephenson, one of the most important people in the logging operations along the Wisconsin-Michigan border, and why he visits Peshtigo and Ontonagon after these two towns were destroyed by forest fires. Stephenson is portrayed as a mentor to the young Bunyan, who in later years becomes a mentor himself. While forest fires were a regular occurrence in logging regions and often started as a result of careless logging practices, they are seldom, if ever, mentioned in the retellings. Now that we live in a more ecologically conscious age, it seemed important to consider the causes and consequences of forest fires.

Finally, I wanted to set the stories specifically in an Upper Peninsula locale, making frequent references to familiar towns, rivers and other landmarks. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first collection of Paul Bunyan tales to focus on the UP since Stanley Newton published Paul Bunyan of the Great Lakes in 1946.

In reading over my retellings, I realize that, as most adaptors of the Bunyan legend have done, I have included much of my own background, directly or implicitly, in the stories. First are memories of the summers I spent while a high school and university student working for the British Columbia Forest Service—as a laborer being trained in the safe use of a double-bitted axe, as a surveyor’s assistant learning to identify the types of trees in the areas where we were working and as a cook’s helper discovering how to fry eggs that weren’t black around the edges and runny in the middle. Second are my years as a teacher of American studies, narratology and children’s literature, gaining a growing appreciation for how traditional legends and folktales reflected cultures in which they originated and those in which they were retold. Third are my growing knowledge of and appreciation for the people, wildlife and landscape of the Upper Peninsula, particularly Schoolcraft and Alger Counties.

This collection is just the most recent of a series of published retellings that began early in the twentieth century. If it encourages readers familiar with earlier versions to reconsider their meanings and implications, if it helps readers encountering the stories for the first time to better understand the nineteenth-century logging culture and if it brings all readers to a greater appreciation of the wonderful land through which the mythic Paul Bunyan wandered well over a century ago, I will feel well rewarded.

Part I

NINETEENTH-CENTURY LOGGING AND LOGGING CULTURE IN THE UPPER PENINSULA

The Upper Peninsula of Michigan, bounded by Lake Superior and the St. Mary’s River on the north, Lake Huron and Lake Michigan on the south and the northeastern boundary of Wisconsin on the west, is over 320 miles long and, at its widest, nearly 125 miles across. The western half is rocky and hilly while the eastern half is flat, with many very swampy areas. Before the middle of the nineteenth century, the UP, as it is frequently called, was heavily treed, with white pines and mixed hardwoods dominating. Beneath the rocky surfaces of the western regions were rich deposits of iron and copper. Many large river systems—including the Tahquamenon, Ontonagon, Menominee, Escanaba and Manistique—laced the area. Summers were temperate and winters extremely cold and very snowy. Wildlife was abundant, especially during the summer months, when hibernating animals emerged from their lairs; mothers bore their young; migratory birds returned; and black flies, deerflies and mosquitoes (which some people consider the most dreaded and ferocious of all the UP’s wildlife) appeared, seemingly out of nowhere.

Until the coming of Europeans in the seventeenth century, the Ojibway people (or, as they called themselves, the Anishnabaeg) lived in a harmonious relationship with the natural environment around them. They harvested maple syrup in the spring and wild rice in the fall, hunted game animals and fished the abundant rivers, streams and lakes. In the winter, they told stories, many of them about Nanabozho, a larger-than-life human being who possessed magical powers. All the Ojibway stories helped the people better understand the nature of their relationships with their human, natural and supernatural environments.

The Murphy Pines area of Schoolcraft County is one of the few remaining stands of first-growth white pine in the Upper Peninsula. Author collection.

Beginning in the early seventeenth century and lasting late into the nineteenth, waves of Europeans arrived in the Upper Peninsula, each group seeking to gain something from the land or the people. The French—explorers, Jesuit missionaries and fur traders—came first. The explorers, seeking territory to claim for their homelands, were also looking for a way to the Orient, reputedly the source of great wealth. The missionaries came to harvest souls, converting to Christianity people they considered benighted savages. The fur traders’ quest was for beaver pelts, which were used to make the hats that were very popular in the eighteenth century, after which time American companies controlled the trade. The business slowed drastically midway through the nineteenth century, when beaver hats went out of fashion and the supply of pelts dropped because of the overtrapping of animals.

Whatever their goals in the Upper Peninsula, French questers shared two things in common. And they did not come to settle but to harvest—souls and furs—and then to move on. They told stories. For the Jesuits, these included the sacred biblical narratives that embodied the faith they wished to impose on the native people. The fur traders recounted French Canadian folktales about such things as le loup garou, the werewolf, or le chasse-galerie, a flying canoe paddled by voyageurs who had made a pact with the devil.

These early arrivals had relatively little impact on the human and natural environments. But in the three decades after 1837, the year Michigan achieved statehood, outsiders discovered two things that made the land above the Mackinac Straits a place where potentially large fortunes could be made. In the 1840s, great iron and copper deposits were uncovered in the central and western part of the Upper Peninsula. As Americans and immigrants recently arrived in the United States moved into the Midwest and the demand for lumber to build houses increased, entrepreneurs discovered that this wilderness that many considered uninhabitable for civilized human beings was a source of seemingly limitless timber. Instead of souls and beaver pelts, ore and timber could be harvested and at a considerable profit. The harvesters optimistically, but erroneously, thought that neither ore nor wood would ever run out.

From the time Europeans first arrived in the New World, there had been some form of logging. Colonists required lumber for the building of houses, churches and other structures and for the building and repair of ships. Early in the nineteenth century, northern Maine, with an abundance of harvestable timber, an extensive river system and many mills, experienced a boom in lumbering. As the country expanded, more and more stands of timber were felled, delivered to the mills and then, as processed lumber, shipped to consumers. However, by the middle of the nineteenth century, most stands of first-grade timber had been depleted in New England, and as the Midwest experienced rapid population growth and demand rose for building materials produced closer than New England, the logging industry began a westward movement. First Upstate New York and Pennsylvania were logged over, and then operations moved to Michigan’s Saginaw Bay area in the Lower Peninsula. In the 1830s and 1840s, vast amounts of virgin timber were harvested from lands adjacent to the Saginaw and Au Sable Rivers.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, people in the industry had begun to realize that the stands of timber in the Saginaw and Muskegon areas of the Lower Peninsula would not last forever and were, in fact, rapidly disappearing. The next logical place to log was the area above the Mackinac Straits.

Michigan’s Upper Peninsula had the three Ws essential for efficient and profitable lumber operations: white pine, winter and water. White pine, Pinus strobes, was the most widely harvested tree of the New England, Upstate New York, Pennsylvania and upper Midwest regions. Often reaching over 150 feet in height, the trees had straight trunks, and the milled lumber was virtually knot free. Unlike hardwood, it could be easily felled, bucked into shorter lengths and transported to the rivers, where it floated easily on the water. At the mills, it could be quickly transformed into finished lumber, which, when it reached the intended markets, could be easily worked with in the construction of buildings.

Until the introduction of small, easily built narrow-gauge railroads that could later be broken down and moved, logging was a winter operation. When the temperature began to drop consistently below freezing, the land became hard enough to transport heavy loads of felled timber to the nearest river, where, after the spring thaw, they could be floated to mills. The nights had to be cold enough so that when the crude roads were daily showered with water, it froze and formed a slick surface that, in effect, provided grease over which sleighs loaded with logs could be pulled. When the spring thaw arrived, the snow, even if it had come down in blizzards and reached a depth that made working in the woods awkward, would provide the water that raised river levels