Paul Bunyan

The Paul Bunyan legend had its origin in the Papineau Rebellion of 1837. This was a revolt of the French-Canadians against their young English queen. In the Two Mountains country, at St. Eustache, many loggers armed with mattocks, axes, and wooden forks which had been steamed and warped into hooks, stormed into battle. Among them was a mighty-muscled, bellicose, bearded giant named Paul Bunyon. This forest warrior, with a mattock in one hand, and a great fork in the other, powerful as Hercules, indomitable as Spartacus, bellowing like a furious Titan, raged among the Queen's troops like Samson among the Philistines. He came out of the rebellion with great fame among his own kind. His slaughters got the grandeur of legend. It was the American loggers below the Border who made of Paul Bunyon a true hero of camp nights' entertainment. They gave him Babe, the blue ox, who measured forty-two ax handles and a plug of chewing tobacco between the horns. They created the marvelous mythical logging camp, with its cook-house of mountainous size and history of Olympian feats; and they peopled this camp with astounding minor heroes. They made their Paul Bunyan an inventor and orator, and an industrialist whose labors surpassed those of Hercules. They devised a chronology for him; he ruled American life in the period between the Winter of the Blue Snow and the Spring That the Rain Came Up From China. By 1860 Paul Bunyan had become a genuine American legendary hero.