The Project Gutenberg EBook of Paul Bunyan and His Loggers, by
Otis T. Howd and Cloice R. Howd

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Title: Paul Bunyan and His Loggers

Author: Otis T. Howd
Cloice R. Howd

Release Date: May 8, 2010 [EBook #32291]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Paul Bunyan and His Loggers

By OTIS T. AND CLOICE R. HOWD

Paul Bunyan and His Loggers

_By_ CLOICE R. HOWD AND OTIS T. HOWD

Paul Bunyan was the logging industry; not, to be sure, as it is found in
_Forest Service Reports_ or in profit and loss statements, but rather as
it burned in the bones of the true North Woods lumberjack. To understand
the significance of the Bunyan stories one must know something of the men
who first told them.

While the lumber industry has found a place in every section of the
country except the treeless plains, it was the pineries of the Lake States
which furnished most of its romance. Logging had begun on the Atlantic
Coast even before the first permanent English settlement, but it never
reached a size sufficient to challenge the imagination until it came to
the Lake States. While the industry had begun on Lake Erie about 1800, its
development in the West was slow until after the Civil War. By that time
saw mill machinery was ready to make lumber rapidly and cheaply, and the
fast growing population of the Mississippi Valley brought the market
within reach of the forests. After 1865 the lumbermen swept across
Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota like a whirlwind, laying waste with ax
and saw that mighty pine forest, until by 1900 all that remained were
small fragments of the original forest and hundreds of miles of stumps.
Then they passed on to the Gulf States or the Pacific Coast.

"Down East" logging had been largely a side line to agriculture or other
occupations, although there were some men who were full-time loggers, but
with the opening up of