Legends and Tales of the American West

by Richard Erdoes

  In winter Paul hitched Babe to a huge sled instead of a wagon. Beside his regular load of logs, Babe also had to haul the water tank Bunyan used to ice over the road for the sled’s runners. One time the tank burst and that’s what started the mighty Mississippi River and keeps it flowing. Whenever the Little Blue Ox had to be shoed, it took a whole iron mine to make the shoes.

  One year there was a big logjam, the biggest anybody could remember. The logs were piled up three hundred feet high and were backing up the river for thirty miles. Paul led old Babe right into the river at the point where the logs backed up the farthest. The Little Blue Ox stood in the water up to his belly. That was about fifty feet high. Paul put him in there with his hind end against the logjam. Then he took his big buffalo gun and shot Babe a dozen times in the rump. Babe thought the bullets were flies. His tail was just about thirty feet long. Babe switched it back and forth to drive the pesky flies away. The tail switching caused such a wind storm that it broke up the logjam.

  Paul Bunyan tried to find a cow big enough to keep old Babe company. It took him a long time, but he finally found one. Her name was Betsy, but some say it was Bossy. That cow was so big that when it was wintertime around her head it was summertime at her tail end. When Betsy got mad and pawed the ground, she brought up an acre of dirt every time. Paul took good care of Betsy, feeding her corn, rye, and sour mash. Paul did the milking himself because no one else was big and strong enough to do it. Betsy gave a hundred gallons of milk every day. But there was a problem. The milk was too strong to use at the table. It had turned into pure 100-proof rye whiskey.

  In winter the camp was so cold, more than a hundred degrees below freezing, that it turned the flames of the loggers’ fires into icicles. They couldn’t do anything with them. So they bundled them up and piled them somewhere near the camp. Came spring and the icicles turned into flames again, threatening to set the whole camp on fire. Paul and his lumberjacks managed to chuck them into the river. They set the waters boiling and that evening the loggers feasted on a great mess of well-cooked crawfish.

  Paul Bunyan had a cook who was so ugly that, when he peeked into the pot of bean soup to see how it was doing, at the sight of him the soup began to sizzle, curdle, and ferment, and after it was strained, it was found to have turned into strong moonshine, the kind that, when a drop gets onto a boot, will at once burn a hole through the leather. Paul took the man off his cooking job and put him in charge of the camp’s distillery.

  And what became of Babe, the Little Blue Ox of the Woods? That ox lived entirely on flapjacks. Twelve cooks were busy night and day making flapjacks for him. One day the cooks were all sick with the flu and old Babe got so hungry waiting for them to recover that he gulped down the red-hot stove, and that was the end of him.

  Paul Bunyan Helps to Build a Railroad

  Paul Bunyan was weaned on corn whiskey. He grew three feet every morning. He was so tall you could see his head only on clear days. When he laughed, it caused an earthquake, so people asked him never to listen to a joke. Thereafter, he took to grinning silently. Paul Bunyan could cross the whole Indian Territory in three steps. Everything about him was big. Even the crumbs falling from his table were so large that the mice who gobbled them grew as big as timber wolves and chased all the grizzlies plumb out of the country. Paul’s ax was so heavy it took seven of the brawniest loggers to lift it, and it took twelve men all day to sharpen the blade. His great blue ox, Babe, ate up ten acres of prime corn every morning for breakfast. Paul could log off a whole county every day.

  When General Dodge ran into problems building the Union Pacific Railroad, he called upon Paul for help. That was after Paul dug out Puget Sound to sluice the water of the Pacific Ocean into a huge ditch he had scooped out in a day to float his logs. He later named this ditch the Columbia River.

  As far as the railroad was concerned, Paul got together ten thousand live and frisky beavers to build the fence along the track. The obliging critters gnawed off the trees along the right of way, chewing them into six-foot-long fence poles. Then he got himself fifty thousand prairie dogs to dig out the post holes. For railroad ties he took only the tallest trees with trunks so thick that it took a whole crew of shanty boys three days merely to chop through the bark. Aided by his best lumberjacks—Sourdough Sam, Caleb Kanuck, and Sven the Swede, he sawed them down to the right size. Falling, the big trees raised such colossal clouds of snow that daylight could penetrate them only on Sundays, when Paul and his men stopped working. Babe, the blue ox, dragged the iron rails into place—three miles of them at a time. As for railroad engines, Paul fetched them from the shop and, with a locomotive under each arm, hauled them from Chicago to Omaha with seven mighty steps. Once, when Paul and his shantyboys got thirsty doing all this work, they swallowed up Lake Huron in three gulps.

  When General Dodge could not find a place to get through the Rockies, which barred his way like a solid wall, Paul just kicked the biggest peaks to the side with his iron-soled boots and thus made a pass for the Union Pacific. When Dodge ran out of wood in the Great American Desert, Paul just roped himself ten square miles of forest somewhere in Canada and had Babe drag it all the way to Utah. He and his loggers finished their job in record time, ahead of schedule, and got a big bonus.

  Paul Bunyan celebrated the event by putting together a barrel as high as Pike’s Peak and as wide as all of Texas. He filled it to the brim with all the whiskey in the United States, paying for it with the bonus money. Then he and his shantyboys went on a big drunk, though it took them an uncommonly long time, three days in fact, to lap up all that liquor. As a result, for a full three months all America was on the wagon. In gratitude, Carry Nation proposed to Paul Bunyan, but he wouldn’t have her.

  Almost a hundred years later the government remembered how Paul Bunyan had helped to build the transcontinental railroad. Now the United States was at war with Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the Japanese Empire. A very smart man by the name of Einstein proposed to make an atom bomb, just in case Hitler’s scientists had the same idea. Nobody knew whether it could be done and, if so, how long it might take. Then somebody remembered Paul Bunyan.

  At the time Paul was only some 150 years old—just reaching middle age, because longevity was his middle name—and as peppy as ever. The government started looking for Paul. They had quite a hassle finding him, but finally they did. When somebody discovered twelve-foot-long human boot prints in the snows of the Canadian north woods, they figured, correctly, that they had to belong to Paul. They followed the tracks to a round log cabin, the biggest ever seen, covering about a square mile, and sure enough, inside they found Paul soaking up his twists of chewing tobacco in potent corn whiskey to give them a kick.

  “Can we talk to you about a matter of some importance, Mr. Bunyan?” the government men said to Paul.

  “Sure, soon as I done my shavin’,” Paul told them. He took his ax and hammered down his stubbles through his cheeks into the inside of his mouth, where he bit them off. That’s how he shaved himself. He proceeded to comb his curly beard with a pine tree, then he put on his mackinaw and said, “What kin I do fur you, strangers?”

  “Well,” they explained, “as you know, there’s a war on—”

  “A war, by thunder! Let me git my licks in agin the cussed redcoats!”

  “No, not with the British, Mr. Bunyan, but with—”

  “With them danged Rebs, then, by Ned! Jest let me git my hands on ’em!”

  “No, no, Mr. Bunyan, we are at war with the Germans and the Japs. Very dangerous chaps. They have us against the ropes. They might be building an atom bomb and will beat us to it. If they do, that’s the end for us. They’d rule the world.”

  “You don’t say. What’s this atom bomb like?”

  “It has the power of the sun, Mr. Bunyan. It can make a hole ten miles wide and ten miles deep in a second. It is the most powerful thing in the world. With it we could win this war.”

  “I kalkilate I kin make one fer you
,” Paul told them. “Loggin’s kinda slow anyway this time of the year.”

  He jumped a wee bit up into the air, only just about a hundred feet, clicking his heels seven times before coming down. He did this three times. “That’s for warmin’ up,” he explained.

  Then he gathered himself up into a ball and then uncoiled for his real big jump, taking off like a cannon shot, leaping right out of the atmosphere and disappearing into space. The government men stood open-mouthed. They didn’t know what to do. After a while they heard a great roaring and thundering as from a thousand express trains or jet planes. It was Paul Bunyan coming back. He carried something glittering in his hands, a lump about the size of Mount Shasta. It glowed red-hot, emitting a light so bright that the government men would have gone blind had they not worn dark glasses.

  Paul landed with such force that he sank into the earth up to his armpits. He flung the white-hot shining thing about a mile away from him. The strange object hit the ground with a force greater than a volcanic eruption, causing an earthquake measuring eight on the Richter scale, gouging out of the earth a hole twenty miles wide.

  “W-a-a-l, thar she is,” said Paul Bunyan, digging himself out, blowing on his scorched and blistering fingers. “Hot she war, so hot she burned plumb through my gloves!”

  “What in heavens is it, the thing you brought?” inquired the stunned and trembling government men.

  “I jumped purty high, I reckon,” said Paul, “high ’nuff to break off this here piece outa the sun. Seems to be what you fellers want. I better cool her off.”

  Ole Paul went over to the river and swallowed up about ten miles of it, holding most of the water in his puffed-out cheeks. He went to the crater that had the chunk of sun in it and squirted the water all over it, enough to turn the crater into a huge lake. The heat of the piece of the sun was so great it made the lake boil.

  “Isn’t she sumpthin’?” said Paul. “Didje ever see a thing like that? I reckon I’ll name this pond here Lake Winnipeg.”

  In three big jumps Paul moseyed over to the storage shack next to his cabin, and from it fetched a sack of coffee weighing ten tons. He dumped it into the hissing, bubbling lake. He then put two of his fingers in his mouth and whistled, so loud that it shook the leaves from the branches of all the trees within three miles. That brought all his shantyboys running. They were rolling before them what looked like big rubber wheels but turned out to be oversized doughnuts. Each of them also brought along a large metal bucket that he filled by dipping into the lake, which had turned into strong coffee. Then Paul and his lumberjacks sat down to breakfast, filling up on hot java and doughnuts.

  The boss logger asked, “What now?”

  “Mr. Bunyan, what you brought us is an enormous lump of split atoms,” said the government men. “We have to get it down to White Sands, our testing range in the Southwest. We got to anlayze it.”

  “Reckon me and Babe’ll get her down thar,” said Paul. He hitched the chunk of the sun to the blue ox with a ten-mile-long steel chain. As it melted from the chunk’s heat, the chain had to be replaced two or three times on the way. Paul put a saddle on Babe’s back, vaulted onto it, cracked his whip, and off they went, quick as lightning. The government men took a plane, but old Babe was so fast that he and Paul arrived at White Sands long before them. The piece of the sun was still so hot it turned the dessert sand into molten glass. A nearby mountain also was changed into glass and was made transparent. You couldn’t see it because you could see right through it. The pilot of the government plane was about to crash into this invisible mountain, but Paul snatched it out of the air and put it safely on the ground. When the government men descended from their plane, they naturally stepped on a surface of sheer glass and slid and slithered around as if they had been on ice skates, and all fell on their behinds.

  “What now?” asked Paul.

  “Now we study the thing you have brought.”

  All the world’s greatest scientists put on their lead suits and their darkest glasses and examined the sun chunk. “It is indeed a gigantic atom bomb,” they told Paul.

  “What do we do with it?” the boss logger wanted to know.

  “Well, Mr. Bunyan,” they said, “we will give you this exploder and then you fasten it to your sun rock, like so, and then you and your blue ox amble over to Japan.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then you push this button here, and turn this dial on that timer, and plunge down this plunger, and then you and your ox run like hell.”

  “What happens next?”

  “The bomb explodes.”

  “And then?”

  “Then there is a blinding flash and all of Japan goes up in flames, turns into ashes, crumbles into little pieces, and disappears into the sea.”

  “With all the people?”

  “With every living thing.”

  Paul Bunyan got to thinking. When Paul thinks, he runs round and round in circles. So he started. He ran round in circles for seven long hours. He ran so fast and with such tremendous force that he gouged out a hip-deep circular ditch. Hip-deep, for Paul, means about fifty feet or so. When he was done thinking, he told the government men, “Sorry, folks, but I ain’t a-goin’ to do it.”

  “Why not?” they asked.

  “I brung this thing down to earth to do some good, to heat up the homes of folks too poor to pay for coal, not to kill.”

  “But Bunyan, those Japs are our enemies. And the Krauts too. Their turn comes later.”

  “Sorry ag’in, but you got the wrong man for this job. You fellers are ’bout three hundred years short of bein’ smart ’nuff to handle this thing. I better bring her back to whar she belongs.”

  With that ol’ Paul clicked his heels and jumped into space once again, where he glued the sun rock back to where he had taken it from. Then he jumped back to earth, figuring his path so exactly that he landed right at his doorstep where Babe and the shantyboys were waiting for him.

  The government men looked very glum. “I guess,” one of them said, “we’ll have to make an atom bomb by ourselves.”

  They did.

  Kidnapped by a Flea

  An old Indian tale tells of the Great Spirit looking down from the sky upon the strange doings of the white men. One day his eyes chanced to fix upon Paul Bunyan’s lumber camp. It was raining, and with nothing to do the axemen were bored stiff. There were, as usual, no women in the camp, and the nearest place where a fellow could make the acquaintance of a lady—that is, a pair of faded, horse-faced painted cats—was more than a hundred miles away. Those sorry bachelor-loggers had grown as ornery as badgers. There was just nothing going on in camp, nothing to occupy one’s mind. It got to the point that, when the only fiddler in camp struck up a tune, the fellows had to waltz around with each other, and that game had grown mighty stale.

  Well, the Great Spirit felt more than a mite sorry for that sad bunch of hermits. He tried to think up something to amuse them and to keep them occupied. He talked it over with the double-faced Moon Lady and the Great White-haired Wizard of the North, and they agreed that something ought to be done. Those loggers were white folks, mostly, but not the kind to bother their red brothers—not soldiers, or prospectors, or land speculators. Besides, Paul had more than just a smidgin of Cherokee in him. So the Great Spirit got out his big possible bag and rummaged around in all the foofaraw in it, and took out a bushel of wallpaper flounders, and a bushel of seam squirrels, and mixed it all together with a half-dozen handfuls of fleas, and sprinkled a mess of these active citizens over the loggers’ campsite. The little mattress lizards and bosom chums got busy right away and soon the old timber wolves were bored no longer, occupied with scratching and cussing, having a high old time, hunting the wee crimson ramblers.

  From that day on, logging camps were never without their generous quota of cooties and chinch bugs. The little fellows became regular pets, following the loggers like hound dogs, learning all kinds of tricks. There was laughter and merriment as
the loggers raced their favorite graybacks and bedbugs against each other, having jumping contests among their favorite fleas, even setting up a flea circus with the little beasties jumping through rings or doing tightrope acts on threads of yarn. The six-legged inhabitants were real smart too. Whenever the lumberjacks were moving to a new camp, sending their gear and bedrolls ahead with the tote teams, the little bedcats made sure not to be left behind, and when the loggers arrived at the new place they found their pets waiting for them, waving their innumerable legs in greeting, jumping and hollering, making a dad-blasted racket.

  Things went on like this harmoniously until one day some old bull whipper blew into camp, straight from Virginia City, making a great to-do about the great gold and silver strikes, telling of fist-sized nuggets lying on the ground like so many pebbles waiting to be picked up, of prospectors turning into millionaires overnight, of former beggars building themselves palaces with crystal chandeliers, Turkey carpets, and ample stocks of blue ruin and aged-in-the-barrel Kentucky bourbon. Hearing this, all the loggers skedaddled, leaving in a body to make their millions in the goldfields. They were in such a hurry that they left their belongings, including bedrolls, behind, together with their little six-legged friends. Why bother with raggedy, moth-eaten blankets when everybody was already dreaming of sleeping in four-poster beds with silken sheets and eiderdown pillows. At first the little cooties and hoppers were not at all worried. They thought the loggers had gone to work as usual and would be home in the evening, as always, but the men never returned. When the wee varmints realized that they had been abandoned, left to fend for themselves, there was such a weeping and wailing as would have broken a wolverine’s heart. Paul Bunyan did not go. He told Old Babe that the loggers were plumb locoed and that he, for his part, would take a long vacation until the fellows had come to their senses. So he and Babe leit out for their old home in the Canadian northwoods. There, in Paul’s old cabin, they made themselves comfortable, sitting by the fireplace, sipping whiskey and playing pinochle.