Paul Bunyan

by James Stevens

Now the whisper became an insistent cry: “Work! Work! Work!” Paul Bunyan looked up, and he seemed to see the word shining among the clouds; he looked down then into the vast valley, and he seemed to see—by the holy old mackinaw! he did see—the forest of his second dream! And now he knew it: his Life Work was to begin here.

For many days and nights Paul Bunyan pondered on the hillside before the Great Idea came to him. Like all Great Ideas, it was simple enough, once he had thought of it. Real America was covered with forests. A forest was composed of trees. A felled and trimmed tree was a log. Paul Bunyan threw aside his pine tree beard brush and jumped to his feet with a great shout.

“What greater work could be done in Real America than to make logs from trees?” he cried. “Logging! I shall invent this industry and make it the greatest one of all time! I shall become a figure as admired in history as any of the great ones I have read about.”

Paul Bunyan then delivered his first oration. The blue ox calf was his only listener; and this was a pity, for Paul Bunyan’s first oratorical effort, inspired as it was, surely was one of his noblest ones. But we know the outline of this oration, if not the words. It dealt mainly with the logging method which he had devised in the moment, the one which he used in his first work. So he told of his plan to uproot the trees by hand, and to transport the logs overland, binding a bundle of them on one side of Babe, and hanging a sack of rocks from the other side for ballast. It was months after this that he made his first improvement, the using of a second bundle of logs, instead of rocks, for ballast. And at this moment Paul Bunyan, for all his foresight and imagination, could not have dreamed of the superb tools and marvelous logging methods that he was to originate, or of the countless crews of little loggers that he was to import from France, Ireland, Scotland and Scandinavia, or of the tremendous river drives and the mammoth camp life he was to create. He would have been bewildered then by the fact that he would some day need a foreman as grand as himself for his Life Work; and the notion that he would some day need help in his figuring would have seemed like a far-fetched jest.

No; in this first oration, imaginative and eloquent as it must have been, Paul Bunyan only spoke of simple work for himself and Babe. But he only tells us that the oration was not a long one, for the call to Work came more insistently as he ended each period. At last he had to answer this powerful call. He commanded, “Yay, Babe!” and the baby blue ox and Paul Bunyan descended into the valley to begin the first logging in the Real American woods.

THE BULL OF THE WOODS

“The straw boss is the backbone of industry,” was a favorite saying of Paul Bunyan’s. This sage observation is constantly repeated to-day by industrialists who are so overwhelmed by salesmen, efficiency experts, welfare workers and the like that they are forced to leave production in the hands of the powerful race of foremen.

Paul Bunyan had become a true man of the woods, and paperwork troubled him. He was fortunate in discovering the greatest man with figures that ever lived to do his office work for him, and this man, Johnny Inkslinger, did all the figuring alone after he came to camp. But before the renowned timekeeper was found the keeping of his accounts and records was Paul Bunyan’s largest difficulty. He figured wearily and the smell of ink often made him sick. His logging operations grew more extensive as time went on. He brought crews of great little men from overseas and organized his first logging camp. He cleared off seven hundred townships in the Smiling River country for a big farm, and John Shears, his earnest boss farmer, managed it so efficiently that new companies of loggers had to be added to the camp each season to use up the produce; consequently, more and more timber was being felled as each season ran its course.

At last it got so that figuring occupied all of Paul Bunyan’s time between supper and breakfast, and then he had to take time away from work in the woods for the keeping of his accounts. In vain he tried to increase his speed as a figurer. He learned to write with both hands at once; but this was no use, for the two sets of figures would mix up in his head and result in confusion. He invented the multiplication table, cube root and algebra, but production increased so fast that these short cuts gave him no more time than before for the woods. Then he gave in to necessity and looked about for help. No figurers were anywhere to be discovered, so Paul Bunyan invented bossmen to carry on the work in the woods while he held forth in the office.