He saw that the bird had perched in one of the windows of the tower, and with a tired wing was knocking on a windowpane. The window opened. A head looked out of the window—a large head, belonging to the daughter of giants, whom his body had pursued from across the desert. He revealed himself, putting himself into a beam of light, so that she could see who was coming. And the sea was quiet, and the giant also saw, by the coast at the very start of the road, the camel from before, still carrying the large, waxen candles on his humps, candles that still had never been lit.
And the giant entered the tower. How he and the daughter of giants met, how they greeted one another and what they did with one another, no one has seen, for no one was there who can say. For she had a chamber within a chamber, and no one was allowed to enter that chamber ever, and it was always locked, only opened when she was ready. There were a table and lamp, and the lamp was never lit, not until this first meeting.
They were in that room together. For an hour, maybe, silence. And then another hour, and all that could be heard was a humming….Night had fallen, and stars could be seen in the sky—and the tower and its lamp were illuminated with a festive light….Then late night came, and the sea woke from its sleep, speaking, and the camel was still standing on the shore, listening to what the sea had to say. The camel stepped into the sea, and turned toward the tower, waiting upon the lamp. Finally, the lamp was extinguished….And all was again quiet there where the tower stood, old and decaying, but the darkness had been renewed, so that it was if it had never before been quite so dark before….The sea sighed, and then breathed out heavily. The camel remained standing, silently, looking out for signs of night’s end. This is how it spent the entire night. When the morning star appeared, it looked down again at the sea and the desert. It took them both in, in one glance, and said a blessing on each….Then the tower’s sea-facing window opened, and from the window a voice could be heard:
“The night is over and a fortunate night for us, and the time has come for the candles on the humps of the camel.”
This meant the candles that still leaned upon one another on the camel’s humps. When the morning star cast its light upon them, it lit both the wicks. Their flames united into a single fire, and the camel, startled, raced from the water onto the shore and passed the beach, and in this way, with a burning fire on its back in the silence of the dawn, it turned his face toward the desert. But it wanted to get out of the desert, to the town, to carry the light and the message, and set off on the road toward us.
And that is what I am waiting for, for that camel; I am looking for that camel at the border, and soon enough, when it has crossed the desert, the time will come.
* * *
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So says the beast.
W. B. Laughead (1882–1958) was an American logger and the manager of advertising at the Red River Lumber Company. One day in 1914, as he was working on a promotional pamphlet, he decided to use an old logger folktale, the tale of Paul Bunyan. The folk hero originally appeared in print in 1906 but was an obscure character known only by loggers and their families. It was Laughead’s ingenuity that brought Bunyan out of obscurity and into the role of folk hero. Laughead defined the appearance and characteristics of the character and added characters such as Babe the Blue Ox and her caretaker Brimstone Bill. The Marvelous Exploits of Paul Bunyan (1922) was an edited version of Laughead’s first work and reached a larger audience than its predecessor. Although the tales are entertaining, it is worth noting that they were meant to promote new logging technology and thus were also basically advertisements that promoted a very conservative agenda.
The Marvelous Exploits of Paul Bunyan
AS TOLD IN THE CAMPS OF THE WHITE PINE LUMBERMEN FOR GENERATIONS DURING WHICH TIME THE LOGGERS HAVE PIONEERED THE WAY THROUGH THE NORTH WOODS FROM MAINE TO CALIFORNIA COLLECTED FROM VARIOUS SOURCES AND EMBELLISHED FOR PUBLICATION
W. B. Laughead
PUBLISHED FOR THE AMUSEMENT OF OUR FRIENDS BY THE RED RIVER LUMBER COMPANY MINNEAPOLIS, WESTWOOD, CAL., CHICAGO, LOS ANGELES, SAN FRANCISCO
SCHOLARS SAY He is the Only American Myth.
* * *
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Paul Bunyan is the hero of lumbercamp whoppers that have been handed down for generations. These stories, never heard outside the haunts of the lumberjack until recent years, are now being collected by learned educators and literary authorities who declare that Paul Bunyan is “the only American myth.”
The best authorities never recounted Paul Bunyan’s exploits in narrative form. They made their statements more impressive by dropping them casually, in an offhand way, as if in reference to actual events of common knowledge. To overawe the greenhorn in the bunk shanty, or the paper-collar stiffs and home guards in the saloons, a group of lumberjacks would remember meeting each other in the camps of Paul Bunyan. With painful accuracy they established the exact time and place, “on the Big Onion the winter of the blue snow” or “at Shot Gunderson’s camp on the Tadpole the year of the sourdough drive.” They elaborated on the old themes and new stories were born in lying contests where the heights of extemporaneous invention were reached.
In these conversations the lumberjack often took on the mannerisms of the French Canadian. This was apparently done without special intent and no reason for it can be given except for a similarity in the mock seriousness of their statements and the anti-climax of the bulls that were made, with the braggadocio of the habitant. Some investigators trace the origin of Paul Bunyan to Eastern Canada. Who can say?
Paul Bunyan came to Westwood, California, in 1913 at the suggestion of some of the most prominent loggers and lumbermen in the country. When the Red River Lumber Company announced their plans for opening up their forests of Sugar Pine and California White Pine, friendly advisors shook their heads and said,
“Better send for Paul Bunyan.”
Apparently here was the job for a Superman,—quality-and-quantity-production on a big scale and great engineering difficulties to be overcome. Why not Paul Bunyan? This is a White Pine job and here in the High Sierras the winter snows lie deep, just like the country where Paul grew up. Here are trees that dwarf the largest “cork pine” of the Lake States and many new stunts were planned for logging, milling and manufacturing a product of supreme quality—just the job for Paul Bunyan.
The Red River people had been cutting White Pine in Minnesota for two generations; the crews that came west with them were old heads and every one knew Paul Bunyan of old. Paul had followed the White Pine from the Atlantic seaboard west to the jumping-off place in Minnesota, why not go the rest of the way?
Paul Bunyan’s picture had never been published until he joined Red River and this likeness, first issued in 1914 is now the Red River trademark. It stands for the quality and service you have the right to expect from Paul Bunyan.
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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.
Once in a while Babe would run away and be gone all day roaming all over the Northwestern country. His tracks were so far apart that it was impossible to follow him and so deep that a man falling into one could only be hauled out with difficulty and a long rope. Once a settler and his wife and baby fell into one of these tracks and the son got out when he was fifty-seven years old and reported the accident. These tracks, today form the thousands of lakes in the “Land of the Sky-Blue Water.”
Because he was so much younger than Babe and was brought to camp when a small calf, Benny was always called the Little Blue Ox although he was quite a chunk of an animal. Benny could not, or rather, would not haul as much as Babe nor was he as tractable but he could eat more.
Paul got Benny for nothing from a farmer near Bangor, Maine. There was not enough milk for the little fellow so he had to be weaned when three days old. The farmer only had forty acres of hay and by the time Benny was a week old he had to dispose of him for lack of food. The calf was undernourished and only weighed two tons when Paul got him. Paul drove from Bangor out to his headquarters camp near Devil’s Lake, North Dakota, that night and led Benny behind the sleigh. Western air agreed with the little calf and every time Paul looked back at him he was two feet taller.
When they arrived at camp Benny was given a good feed of buffalo milk and flapjacks and put into a barn by himself. Next morning the barn was gone. Later it was discovered on Benny’s back as he scampered over the clearings. He had outgrown his barn in one night.
Benny was very notional and would never pull a load unless there was snow on the ground so after the spring thaws they had to white wash the logging roads to fool him.
Gluttony killed Benny. He had a mania for pancakes and one cook crew of two hundred men was kept busy making cakes for him. One night he pawed and bellowed and threshed his tail about till the wind of it blew down what pine Paul had left standing in Dakota. At breakfast time he broke loose, tore down the cook shanty and began bolting pancakes. In his greed he swallowed the red-hot stove. Indigestion set in and nothing could save him. What disposition was made of his body is a matter of dispute. One oldtimer claims that the outfit he works for bought a hind quarter of the carcass in 1857 and made corned beef of it. He thinks they have several carloads of it left.
Another authority states that the body of Benny was dragged to a safe distance from the North Dakota camp and buried. When the earth was shoveled back it made a mound that formed the Black Hills in South Dakota.
* * *
—
The custodian and chaperon of Babe, the Big Blue Ox, was Brimstone Bill. He knew all the tricks of that frisky giant before they happened.
“I know oxen,” the old bullwhacker used to say, “I’ve worked ’em and fed ’em and doctored ’em ever since the ox was invented. And Babe, I know that pernicious old reptyle same as if I’d abeen through him with a lantern.”
Bill compiled “The Skinner’s Dictionary,” a handbook for teamsters, and most of the terms used in directing draft animals (except mules) originated with him. His early religious training accounts for the fact that the technical language of the teamster contains so many names of places and people spoken of in the Bible.
The buckskin harness used on Babe and Benny when the weather was rainy was made by Brimstone Bill. When this harness got wet it would stretch so much that the oxen could travel clear to the landing and the load would not move from the skidway in the woods. Brimstone would fasten the harness with an anchor Big Ole made for him and when the sun came out and the harness shrunk the load would be pulled to the landing while Bill and the oxen were busy at some other job.
The winter of the Blue Snow, the Pacific Ocean froze over and Bill kept the oxen busy hauling regular white snow over from China. M. H. Keenan can testify to the truth of this as he worked for Paul on the Big Onion that winter. It must have been about this time that Bill made the first ox yokes out of cranberry wood.
Feeding Paul Bunyan’s crews was a complicated job. At no two camps were conditions the same. The winter he logged off North Dakota he had 300 cooks making pancakes for the Seven Axemen and the little Chore-boy. At headquarters on the Big Onion he had one cook and 462 cookees feeding a crew so big that Paul himself never knew within several hundred either way, how many men he had.
At Big Onion camp there was a lot of mechanical equipment and the trouble was a man who could handle the machinery cooked just like a machinist too. One cook got lost between the flour bin and the root cellar and nearly starved to death before he was found.
Cooks came and went. Some were good and others just able to get by. Paul never kept a poor one very long. There was one jigger who seemed to have learned to do nothing but boil. He made soup out of everything and did most of his work with a dipper. When the big tote-sled broke through the ice on Bull Frog Lake with a load of split peas, he served warmed up, lake water till the crew struck. His idea of a lunch box was a jug or a rope to freeze soup onto like a candle. Some cooks used too much grease. It was said of one of these that he had to wear calked shoes to keep from sliding out of the cook-shanty and rub sand on his hands when he picked anything up.
There are two kinds of camp cooks, the Baking Powder Bums and the Sourdough Stiffs. Sourdough Sam belonged to the latter school. He made everything but coffee out of Sourdough. He had only one arm and one leg, the other members having been lost when his sourdough barrel blew up. Sam officiated at Tadpole River headquarters, the winter Shot Gunderson took charge.
After all others had failed at Big Onion camp, Paul hired his cousin Big Joe who came from three weeks below Quebec. This boy sure put a mean scald on the chuck. He was the only man who could make pancakes fast enough to feed the crew. He had Big Ole, the blacksmith, make him a griddle that was so big you couldn’t see across it when the steam was thick. The batter, stirred in drums like concrete mixers was poure
d on with cranes and spouts. The griddle was greased by boys who skated over the surface with hams tied to their feet. They had to have boys to stand the heat.
At this camp the flunkeys wore roller skates and an idea of the size of the tables is gained from the fact that they distributed the pepper with four-horse teams.
Sending out lunch and timing the meals was rendered difficult by the size of the works which required three crews—one going to work, one on the job and one coming back. Joe had to start the bull-cook out with the lunch sled two weeks ahead of dinner time. To call the men who came in at noon was another problem. Big Ole made a dinner horn so big that no one could blow it but Big Joe or Paul himself. The first time Joe blew it he blew down ten acres of pine. The Red River people wouldn’t stand for that so the next time he blew straight up but this caused severe cyclones and storms at sea so Paul had to junk the horn and ship it East where later it was made into a tin roof for a big Union Depot.
When Big Joe came to Westwood with Paul, he started something. About that time, you may have read in the papers about a volcanic eruption at Mt. Lassen, heretofore extinct for many years. That was where Big Joe dug his bean-hole and when the steam worked out of the bean kettle and up through the ground, everyone thought the old hill had turned volcano. Every time Joe drops a biscuit they talk of earthquakes.
It was always thought that the quality of the food at Paul’s camps had a lot to do with the strength and endurance of the men. No doubt it did, but they were a husky lot to start with. As the feller said about fish for a brain food, “It won’t do you no good unless there is a germ there to start with.”
The Big Book of Classic Fantasy Page 127