Term: Bunyan, Paul
protagonist in folktales created in northwoods logging camps; said to be 7 feet tall and with a 7 foot stride, Bunyan is credited with creating Lake Superior, the St. Lawrence River, and the Black Hills of South Dakota. During the 20th c., he became a ubiquitous symbol of American ingenuity and power. The Bunyan stories spread throughout the woods of Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and points west betwen 1880 and 1920, until many states laid claim to his birth. Tales about his exploits were passed orally in lumber camps to test the credulity of new recruits and while away winter evenings, starting about 1880.
The first appearance of Bunyan in print occured in 1904 in Duluth, Minn.; other stories followed in 1906 in Oscoda, Mich., and in 1910 in the Milwaukee nature magazine Outer's Book (reprinted in the Washington Post and Wisconsin State Journal the same year). In Minnesota, Red River Lumber Co. advertising manager William Laughead drew caricatures and rewrote stories he'd heard in lumber camps for the company's promotional literature. His first pamphlets appeared in 1914 and 1916, and his 1922 collection was reprinted many times. Laughead is generally credited with popularizing the Bunyan stories, though in ways that scholars generally believe are not faithful to the oral tradition. Commercial books, advertisements, tourist attractions, and Disney cartoons followed in profusion, which led some academics to call the Bunyan stories "fakelore" rather than folklore.
In Wisconsin, the earliest evidence of the tales dates from the winter of 1885-1886 in a logging camp located north of Tomahawk. They were first collected by University of Wisconsin student K. Berenice Stewart (1895-1975) who interviewed loggers between 1914 and 1916, transcribed their stories, and published them in 1916 with the help of her English professor, Homer A. Watt. Rhinelander timber curiser and promoter Eugene S. Shepard (q.v.) told the stories often between 1880 and 1923, and even claimed to have invented the Bunyan character; he also plagiarized the Oscoda, Mich., tales about 1915, issuing them over his own name. Wisconsin Historical Society museum director Charles E. Brown (q.v.) collected original stories from elderly lumberjacks throughout the 1930s, publishing them in pamphlets alongside ones excerpted from previous collections. View more information at Turning Points in Wisconsin History, where you'll find digitized copies of the most important early printings of the tales, and elsewhere at wisconsinhistory.org.
View pictures relating to logging at Wisconsin Historical Images.
[Source: Turning Points in Wisconsin History]