American Tall Tales

by Mary Pope Osborne

  “That’s impossible,” the salesman said. “But if you can prove your hand driller is faster than my steam driller, I’ll give you this machine for free.”

  The boss called to John Henry, “This fellow doubts which of you can drill faster. How about a big contest?”

  As John Henry stared at the steam drill, he saw a picture of the future. He saw machines taking over the jobs of the country’s finest workers. He saw himself and his friends out of work and begging beside the road. He saw men robbed of their dignity and robbed of their families.

  “I’d rather die with my hammer in my hand than let that steam drill run me down,” he yelled back. And his boss and friends all cheered.

  “That contest will be the death of you, John Henry,” Lucy said later. “You got a wife and a child, and if anything happens to you, we won’t ever smile again.”

  John Henry just lifted Johnny into the air and said, “Honey, a man ain’t nothing but a man. But a man’s always got to do his best. And tomorrow I’m going to take my hammer and drive that steel faster than any machine!”

  Lucy put on her best blue dress, and folks came from all over Ohio, Virginia, and Kentucky. They came from the countryside, and they came from the cities.

  At half past six in the morning, John Henry and the salesman with the steam-powered drill stood side by side. Early as it was, the sun was burning hot. There was no breeze. Sweat poured down people’s faces like water down a hill.

  As the onlookers gathered around the contestants, Little Bill, the worker who loved John Henry the best, said, “There ain’t a steam drill anywheres that can beat that man!”

  But the city folks, who had staked their hopes on the future of machines, said, “He won’t beat that drill unless the rocks in the mountain turn to gold!”

  “No, sirree!” said Jimmy, John Henry’s oldest friend. “Before that drill wins, he’ll make the mountain fall!”

  Bang!—the race was on! As the steam-drill salesman turned on the steam, John Henry kissed the smooth handle of his hammer.

  At first the steam drill drove the steel twice as fast as John Henry did. But then he grabbed another hammer and started working with a hammer in each hand. He went faster and faster, striking blow after blow as he tunneled into the mountain.

  “That man’s a mighty man,” a city man shouted, “but he’ll weaken when the hardest rock is found.”

  “Not John Henry! Just listen to that steel ring!” Little Bill said.

  “I believe these mountains are caving in!” said the city man.

  “No, they’re not. That’s his hammers you hear in the wind,” Jimmy cried.

  Inside the dark tunnel, where the yellow dust and heat were so thick that most men would have smothered, John Henry hammered faster and faster. As clouds of stone dust billowed from the mouth of the tunnel, the crowd shouted and screamed. John Henry’s hammers sounded like ten thousand hammers.

  Lucy, Little Bill, and Jimmy cheered when the steam drill was dragged out of the tunnel. Sputtering and spewing, it had broken down.

  “Come back now, John Henry!” Lucy shouted.

  But John Henry kept hammering, hammering faster than any man had ever hammered before, hammering against all the machines of the future. As his hammer glowed white-hot, he tunneled deeper into the darkness, driving the steel so hard that the mighty ribs of his body began to crack, and his insides broke in two, and his great heart burst.

  When John Henry fell, it sounded like an earthquake.

  There was a terrible silence inside the mountain. Lucy stood still as stone, for she knew what had happened.

  When Jimmy and Little Bill brought him out of the tunnel, John Henry’s blood ran red over the ground. But his hands still clutched one of his mighty hammers. “I’ve beat them,” he gasped. “Now I’m dying.”

  “Don’t go, John Henry!” Lucy begged.

  “Bring me a cool drink of water, honey,” he said. Then he took his last breath.

  Lucy fell down on her knees and sobbed. “Lord, this was a good man,” she said.

  They carried John Henry down from the mountain. They carried him to the river and buried him in the sand near the cabin where he was born.

  Folks stood in the rain and flagged the westbound train headed for John Henry’s grave. And word spread quickly across the land: “John Henry’s never coming back.”

  Soon the steam drill and other new machines took over the work of the steel-driving men. Little Bill, Jimmy, and others like them left their families and wandered north and west, looking for work. As they walked the hot, dusty roads, they took the only jobs they could find. They picked cotton and dug ditches. But often while they worked, they sang about John Henry:

  John Henry told his friends,

  “A man ain’t nothing but a man.

  Before I’ll be beat by that big steam drill,

  I’ll die with my hammer in my hand,

  I’ll die with my hammer in my hand.”

  NOTES ON THE STORY

  BETWEEN 1870 AND 1900, billions of trees crashed to the ground in New England, the Pacific Northwest, and the woods near the Great Lakes. Sadly, the lumber industry was not concerned then with the conservation of forestland, as it is today. The old-time loggers who claimed to “let daylight into the swamp” had little entertainment at night other than the tales and anecdotes told around the campfires and potbellied stoves. Popular opinion holds that Paul Bunyan was the folk hero of many of the lumberjack tales, though this has been disputed by some old-time lumbermen.

  The general public first heard about Paul Bunyan in 1910, when the mythical giant was mentioned in a Detroit newspaper story by James MacGillivray. In 1916, a scholarly paper by K. Bernice Stewart and Professor Homer A. Watt included a collection of Paul Bunyan tales taken directly from loggers of the northern lakes and the Pacific Northwest. Also in 1916, a lumberman named W. B. Laughead wrote a pamphlet for the Red River Lumber Company of Minneapolis. Inserted within advertising copy for the company was a collection of Paul Bunyan stories. Babe the Blue Ox was christened in this pamphlet.

  Laughead’s Bunyan yarns did not catch on until he rewrote them for a wider audience in the 1920s. At that time Paul Bunyan became very popular, and for the next two decades tall tales about him were frequently published in pamphlets, magazines, and books. This retelling gathers together elements from Laughead’s pamphlet as well as from at least a dozen other popularizations of the Paul Bunyan stories.

  It seems an amazing baby was once born in the state of Maine. When he was only two weeks old, he weighed more than a hundred pounds, and for breakfast every morning he ate five dozen eggs, ten sacks of potatoes, and a half barrel of mush made from a whole sack of cornmeal. But the baby’s strangest feature was his big curly black beard. It was so big and bushy that every morning his poor mother had to comb it with a pine tree.

  Except for that beard, the big baby wasn’t much trouble to anybody until he was about nine months old. That was when he first started to crawl, and since he weighed over five hundred pounds, he caused an earthquake that shook the whole town.

  When the neighbors complained, the baby’s parents tried putting him in a giant floating cradle off the coast of Maine. But soon a delegation of citizens went to the baby’s parents and said, “We’re sorry, folks, but you have to take your son somewhere else. Every time he rolls over in his cradle, huge waves drown all the villages along the coast.”

  So his parents hauled the giant toddler to a cave in the Maine woods far away from civilization and said good-bye. “We’ll think of you often, honey,” his mother said, weeping. “But you can’t come back home—you’re just too big.”

  “Here, son,” his father said. “I’m giving you my ax, my knife, my fishing pole, and some flint rocks. Good-bye and good luck.”

  After his parents left, the poor bearded baby cried for thirty days and thirty nights. He was so lonely, he cried a whole river of tears. He might have cried himself to death if one day he hadn’t heard flop,
flop, flop.

  When the baby looked around, he saw fish jumping in his river of tears. He reached for his father’s fishing pole, and soon he was catching trout. He used his father’s knife to clean and scale what he had caught and his father’s ax to cut wood for a fire. He started the fire with his flint rocks and cooked his catch over the flames. Then he ate a big fish dinner and smiled for the first time in a month.

  That’s the story of how Paul Bunyan came to take care of himself in the Maine woods. And even though he lived alone for the next twenty years, he got along quite well. He hunted and fished. He cut down trees and made fires. He battled winter storms, spring floods, summer flies, and autumn gales.

  Nothing, however, prepared Paul Bunyan for the wild weather that occurred on the morning of his twenty-first birthday. It was a cold December day, and when Paul woke up, he noticed gusts of snow blowing past the mouth of his cave. That was natural enough. What was unnatural was that the snow was blue.

  “Why, that’s beautiful!” Paul said. And he pulled on his red-and-black mackinaw coat, his corn-yellow scarf, and his snow boots. Then, grinning from ear to ear, he set out across the blue hills.

  The snow fell until the woods were covered with a thick blanket of blue. As Paul walked over huge drifts, bitter winds whistled through the trees and thunder rolled in the sky. But he soon began to hear another sound in the wind—“Maa-maa.”

  “Who’s there?” Paul called.

  “Maa-maa.”

  “Who’s there?” said Paul again. His heart was starting to break, for the cries sounded as if they were coming from a baby crying for its mother and father.

  “Maa-maa.”

  “Where are you, baby?” Suddenly Paul saw a tail sticking right up out of a blue snowdrift. When he pulled on the tail, out came the biggest baby ox on earth. Except for its white horns, the creature was frozen deep blue, the same color as the snow.

  “He-ey, babe!” Paul shouted.

  “Maa-maa-maa.”

  “Hush, hush, hush, babe,” Paul whispered as he carried the frozen ox back home.

  “There now,” he said, setting the blue creature gently down in front of his fire. “We’ll get you warmed up all right.”

  Paul fell asleep with his arm around the giant baby ox. He didn’t know if the frozen babe would live or not. But when the morning sun began shining on the blue snow outside the cave, Paul felt a soft, wet nose nuzzling his neck. As the rough tongue licked his cheeks and nose and eyelids, Paul’s joyous laughter shook the earth. He had found a friend.

  Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox were inseparable after that. Babe grew so fast that Paul liked to close his eyes for a minute, count to ten, then look to see how much Babe had grown. Sometimes the ox would be a whole foot taller. It’s a known fact that Babe’s full-grown height was finally measured to be forty-two ax handles, and he weighed more than the combined weight of all the fish that ever got away. Babe was so big that when he and Paul trekked through the forests, Paul had to look through a telescope just to see what Babe’s hind legs were doing.

  In those times, huge sections of America were filled with dark green forests. And the forests were filled with trees—oceans of trees—trees as far as the eye could see—trees so tall you had to look straight up to see if it was morning, and maybe if you were lucky, you’d catch a glimpse of blue sky.

  It would be nice if those trees could have stayed tall and thick forever. But the pioneers needed them to build houses, churches, ships, wagons, bridges, and barns. So one day Paul Bunyan took a good look at all those trees and said, “Babe, stand back. I’m about to invent logging.

  “Tim-ber!” he yelled, and he swung his bright steel ax in a wide circle. There was a terrible crash, and when Paul looked around, he saw he’d felled ten white pines with a single swing.

  Paul bundled up the trees and loaded them onto the ox’s back. “All right, Babe,” he said. “Let’s haul ’em to the Big Onion and send ’em down to a sawmill.”

  Since both Babe and Paul could cover a whole mile in a single step, it took them only about a week to travel from Maine to the Big Onion River in Minnesota.

  “She’s too crooked. Our logs will get jammed at her curves,” Paul said to Babe as he peered through his telescope at the long, winding river. “Let’s see what we can do about that.” He tied one end of the rope to Babe’s harness and the other around the end of the river. Then he shouted, “Pull! Pull!”

  And Babe huffed and puffed until he pulled all the kinks out of that winding water.

  “There! She’s as straight as a gun barrel now,” Paul said. “Let’s send down these logs.”

  After that Paul and Babe traveled plenty fast through the untamed North Woods. They cut pine, spruce, and red willow in Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin. They cleared cotton-woods out of Kansas so farmers could plant wheat. They cleared oaks out of Iowa so farmers could plant corn. It seems that the summer after the corn was planted in Iowa, there was a heat wave. It got so hot the corn started to pop. It popped until the whole state was covered with ten feet of popcorn. The wind blew the popcorn over to Kansas, where it fell like a blizzard. Unfortunately, the Kansas cows thought it was a blizzard and immediately froze to death.

  When next heard of, Paul and Babe were headed to Arizona. Paul dragged his pickax behind him on that trip, not realizing he was leaving a big ditch in his tracks. Today that ditch is called the Grand Canyon.

  When they got back from out west, Paul and Babe settled down on the Big Onion River. One night, after the two had spent the day rolling thousands of logs down the river, Paul was so tired he couldn’t even see straight. As he lay under the stars, his giant body aching, he said, “Babe, it’s time I started me a logging camp. I’m gonna hire a bunch of fellers to help me.”

  You might say this was a turning point for Paul Bunyan. Not for thirty years, since the day his parents had left him crying all alone in that Maine cave, had he asked a single human being for help. But the next day Paul and Babe hiked all over the northern timberlands, posting signs that said:

  LOGGERS NEEDED TO WORK FOR PAUL BUNYAN.

  IF INTERESTED,

  COME TO BIG ONION, MINNESOTA, TO APPLY.

  Word spread fast. Since all the woodsmen had heard of Paul Bunyan, hundreds of thousands of them hurried to Big Onion, eager to be part of his crew.

  Paul wanted the biggest and brawniest men for his camp, so he made an announcement to all the men who’d gathered to apply for the job. “There’s only two requirements,” he said. “All my loggers have to be over ten feet tall and able to pop six buttons off their shirts with one breath.”

  Well, about a thousand of the lumberjacks met those requirements, and Paul hired them all. Then he built a gigantic logging camp with bunkhouses a mile long and bunks ten beds high. The camp’s chow table was so long that it took a week to pass the salt and pepper from one end to the other. Paul and Babe dug a few ponds to provide drinking water for everyone. Today we call those ponds the Great Lakes.

  But feeding that crew of giants was a bigger problem. One day Paul’s cook, Sourdough Sam, said to Paul, “Boss, there’s no way I can make enough flapjacks for these hungry fellers. Every morning the ones who don’t get seconds threaten to kill me.”

  The next day Paul built Sam a flapjack griddle the size of an ice-skating rink. Then he lit a forest fire underneath that burned night and day.

  “But how’m I supposed to grease this thing?” Sam asked.

  “Every morning before dawn we’ll get a hundred men to strap bacon fat to the bottoms of their shoes and skate around the griddle till you’re ready to cook,” Paul said.

  Well, after Paul got the flapjack griddle all squared away, he figured he needed a bookkeeper to keep track of all the food bills. So he hired a man named Johnny Inkslinger. Johnny kept the payroll, and he took care of Babe’s hay and grain bills, and about ten thousand and two other things. He used a fountain pen that was twenty feet long and connected by a giant hose to a lake filled w
ith ink. It’s said that Johnny figured out he could save over four hundred and twenty gallons of ink a year just by not crossing his t’s and dotting his i’s.

  Everything at the Big Onion Lumber Company ran pretty smoothly until the year of the Hard Winter. That winter it was so cold that one day Shot Gunderson, Paul’s foreman, rode up to Paul’s shanty on his saddled bear with a whole list of problems.

  “Boss, we’ve got trouble!” he said. “When the fellers go out to work, their feet are getting so frostbitten, they’re starting to fall off.”

  “That’s bad,” Paul said, scratching his beard. “Well, tell the fellers to let their whiskers grow. Then when their beards get down to their feet, they can knit them into socks.”

  “Good thinkin’,” said Shot.

  “What else?” said Paul.

  “The flames for all the lanterns are freezing!”

  “Well, just take the frozen flames outside and store them somewhere,” Paul said. “Then wait for them to melt in the spring.”

  “Great idea,” said Shot.

  “What else?” said Paul.

  “Just one more thing—when I give orders to the woods crew, all my words freeze in the air and hang there stiff as icicles.”

  “Oh, well, get Babe to haul your frozen words away and store them next to the lantern flames. They’ll thaw out in the spring too,” Paul said.

  Sure enough, the beard socks kept the men’s feet from freezing and falling off, and the lantern flames and Shot’s words all thawed out in the spring. The only problem was that when the lantern flames melted, they caused some mean little brushfires. And when Shot’s frozen words thawed, old cries of “Timber!” and “Chow time!” started to echo throughout the woods, causing all sorts of confusion. But other than that, things ran pretty smoothly at the Big Onion Lumber Company until the spring of the China Rains.