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When and where did this mythical Hero get his start?  Paul Bunyan is known by his mighty works, his antecedents and personal history are lost in doubt.  You can prove that Paul logged off North Dakota and grubbed the stumps, not only by the fact that there are no traces of pine forests in that State, but by the testimony of oldtimers who saw it done.  On the other hand, Paul’s parentage and birth date are unknown.  Like Topsy, he jes’ growed.

Nobody cared to know his origin until the professors got after him.  As long as he stayed around the camps his previous history was treated with the customary consideration and he was asked no questions, but when he broke into college it was all off.  Then he had to have ancestors, a birthday and all sorts of vital statistics.

Now Paul is a regular myth and students of folklore make scientific research of “The Paul Bunyan Legend”.

His first appearance in print was in the booklets published by The Red River Lumber Company in 1914 and 1916, these stories are reprinted in the present volume, with additions.  Paul has followed the wanderings of pioneering workmen and performed new wonders in the oil fields, on big construction jobs and in the wheat fields but the stories in this book deal only with his work in the White Pine camps where he was born and raised.  Care has been taken to preserve the atmosphere of the old style camps.

So now we will get on with Paul’s doings and in the language of the four-horse skinner, “Let’s dangle!”

Babe, the big blue ox constituted Paul Bunyan’s assets and liabilities.  History disagrees as to when, where and how Paul first acquired this bovine locomotive but his subsequent record is reliably established.  Babe could pull anything that had two ends to it.

Babe was seven axehandles wide between the eyes according to some authorities; others equally dependable say forty-two axehandles and a plug of tobacco.  Like other historical contradictions this comes from using different standards.  Seven of Paul’s axehandles were equal to a little more than forty-two of the ordinary kind.

When cost sheets were figured on Babe, Johnny Inkslinger found that upkeep and overhead were expensive but the charges for operation and depreciation were low and the efficiency was very high.  How else could Paul have hauled logs to the landing a whole section (640 acres) at a time?  He also used Babe to pull the kinks out of the crooked logging roads and it was on a job of this kind that Babe pulled a chain of three-inch links out into a straight bar.

They could never keep Babe more than one night at a camp for he would eat in one day all the feed one crew could tote to camp in a year.  For a snack between meals he would eat fifty bales of hay, wire and all and six men with picaroons were kept busy picking the wire out of his teeth.  Babe was a great pet and very docile as a general thing but he seemed to have a sense of humor and frequently got into mischief, He would sneak up behind a drive and drink all the water out of the river, leaving the logs high and dry.  It was impossible to build an ox-sling big enough to hoist Babe off the ground for shoeing, but after they logged off Dakota there was room for Babe to lie down for this operation.