Paul Bunyan

by James Stevens

SHANTY BOY

In Paul Bunyan’s time, camp entertainment was of, by and for the woodsmen. In Paul Bunyan’s camp there were hypnotic story-tellers, singers who could make you laugh and cry in the same moment, and steppers who could do a breakdown fit to shatter the frame of a bunkhouse. “Ol’ Paul” knew the importance of social pleasures for his loggers, and he made natural provision for them. A good bunkhouse bard was marked by the great logger’s especial favor; many a man who toiled poorly was saved from the lowly life of a farm hand by his ability to dance, whistle and sing. Consequently Paul Bunyan’s Bunkhouse Nights are as famous in history as his great feasts and labors.

Every night but Sunday, when the twelve hours of toil in the woods were ended and supper was over, the tired loggers would be cheered and consoled by the bunkhouse bards. There was one for each shanty, and each one had his own particular virtues. There was Beeg An’tole, for example, who made his mates in Bunkhouse 999 hilarious as he told quaint tales about logging in “dat ver’ fines’ countree, which she’s t’ree weeks below Quebec.” Angus MacIlroy of Bunkhouse 1313 was made to sing “The Island Boys” a dozen times a night by his song-loving comrades. And Tinty Hoolan of Bunkhouse 6000 jigged with such violence and speed that a modern jazz band would have gone crazy trying to make music fast enough for him. The rattle of his jigging feet sounded like the buzz of a big bee. His bunkhouse cronies boasted that he could imitate any known sound with his feet except a tired logger’s snore. And this, anyone admitted, defied imitation or description. Tinty Hoolan was a swamper, and a poor one; his feet, however, saved him from life among the scissor-bills on Paul Bunyan’s farm.

Now these were three of the greatest of Paul Bunyan’s bards, and no one has ever found words to describe them or to give them fitting praise. And if words fail with them, how can they reveal the brightest star of all Paul Bunyan’s performers? Indeed, Shanty Boy, of Bunkhouse 1, was more than a star; he was a constellation, for he was an entertainer with a thousand talents. What old logger does not feel his own soul dance as he hears, in the Bunyan histories, the soft, vibrant patter of Shanty Boy’s right foot, the thunderous stamp of his left foot, the sharp rattle of his heel-cracking in a great breakdown? He not only danced with his feet, but with his hands and eyes; he had a dancing grin, too, which would shine now on the right side of his face, now on the left. Shanty Boy put his whole soul into his dancing. And so he did with his stories. When he told a Swede story he was a Swede, and when he told a dirty story he was dirty. He was never content with mere pretending. He made entertainment of everything, and he did it naturally. A log would roll over his leg when he was at work. That night he would hobble down the bunkhouse aisle like an ailing old man, talking in the mournfullest way. “Oh, lawdy, boys! I ’low I ain’t long fer this life. Thet new medicine I’m usin’ don’t ’pear to be doin’ my rheumatiz no good, no good a-tall. I spect I’ll be havin’ to change to ’nuther kind agin.” Then he’d hobble back again, drawing his sore leg up like a string-halted horse, and groaning, “M-m-m-! M-m-m! I ’low I feel worse’n anyone thet ever lived in this here world—an’ lived.” If somebody asked him what time it was, he would take out his old watch, hold it at arm’s length, throw back his head and squint at the watch like he was looking at it through glasses. He claimed that “grandpap carried thet watch fer nigh on forty year, an’ it won’t tell the time onless I look at it jest like he did.” Sometimes he would sit down by the stove and eat an apple or a raw turnip. Then he would pull his hat down over his eyes, and while he chewed away, looking as solemn as a politician, he would make the hat bob up and down to keep time with his jaws. No one else could have done this without seeming foolish, but Shanty Boy always kept a kind of dignity when he was performing that made men respect him even when they were laughing at him.

But it was his songs and stories which truly endeared him to the loggers. His renditions of “John Ross,” “Jack Haggerty,” “The Island Boys,” and “Bung Yer Eye,” were so affecting and inspiring that the loggers, what with laughing, crying, stamping, clapping and cheering, often made so much sympathetic noise that the song itself could not be heard. Shanty Boy only sang two nights a week and then for no longer than four hours at a time. The other nights he danced, and told true but thrilling stories of life in the woods. The bards from other bunkhouses would come to hear him and then give imitations of his performances. His supremacy was unquestioned, yet he remained unspoiled.

For he was more than a mere entertainer. The mightiest of Paul Bunyan’s loggers lived in Bunkhouse 1, and as a logger Shanty Boy was the peer of any of them. He could notch a tree or work in white water with the best of the fallers and rivermen. He held his own with even Mark Beaucoup in the rough bunkhouse frolics. He was Paul Bunyan’s favorite faller, and the great logger often carried him to the woods on his shoulder. He had an equal rank with Hot Biscuit Slim, the chief cook, Shagline Bill, the freighter, and Big Ole, the blacksmith. He was a true hero. And a time came when he reached the greatest height of glory ever attained by a plain logger. Here is how it came about.

The Year of the Two Winters had been disastrous for Paul Bunyan. Winter had come again in the summertime that year, and the cold increased in the succeeding months. At Christmas time there was fifty feet of ice on Lake Michigan, and by the last of February the lake was frozen to the bottom. Paul Bunyan was then engaged in logging off the Peninsula country, and of course his operations were halted. He cut the ice into blocks and hauled them out on the lake shore with Babe, his big blue ox, who could pull anything that had two ends on it. This was done so that the ice would melt more quickly when normal summer weather returned. Then he moved his outfit to the old home camp in the Smiling River country, where severe weather was never experienced.

Paul Bunyan had done no logging around his old home camp for seven years. The remaining timber was so far from the river and on such steep hills that profitable logging seemed impossible. However, it was the best to be had, for elsewhere it would be weeks, even months, before the snow drifts would melt away from the tree tops. Paul Bunyan tackled the tough logging problems before him with characteristic courage. He was sure that his inventiveness and resourcefulness would, as always, triumph over every obstacle.

His most stubborn and difficult problem was that of getting the loggers to the woods in the morning in time to do any work and getting them home at night in time to do any sleep. One plan after another was tried and dropped, failures all. Paul Bunyan began with an attempt to work one day shift, but the loggers could not get to the woods before lunch time; lunch finished, they had to start at once for the camp. Two shifts were then put on, but little work could be done at night, except when the moon was full. Paul Bunyan then sent the great Johnny Inkslinger, his timekeeper and man of science, to investigate the Aurora Borealis as a means of artificial lighting. Johnny reported that it was pretty but unreliable, and he doubted if even the blue ox could move it down from the North in less than six months. The learned Inkslinger then sat down and figured desperately for a week, trying to devise a method of working three twelve-hour shifts a day. With such a routine one shift could be doing a day’s work, while a second shift was coming to work, and a third was going to camp. Johnny Inkslinger was, beyond a doubt, the greatest man with figures that ever lived, but here his mathematics failed him. Paul Bunyan then thought of making a campsite in the timber, and he dug for water in the high hills. He succeeded in reaching a mighty vein, but it was so deep that it took a week to draw a bucket of water out of the well. It was out of the question as a water supply for the camp.