the Lake States, logging became a distinct
profession, with a professional pride in work and a devotion to it which
kept the logger from straying off into other industries. The logger went
into the woods early in the fall, spent the entire winter snow-bound in a
lonely camp with other men like-minded with himself, a dozen to a hundred
or more of them. With the spring thaw they brought the logs down the river
in a great drive, and then spent their winter stake in a blaze of glory
among the bright lights of a sawdust town. Then they went into the saw
mills till it was time to return to the woods in the fall. It was during
the long winter evenings in the bunk houses, with the loggers gathered
about the red-hot stove and the air full of the smell of drying clothes
and tobacco smoke, that the Paul Bunyan tales were born and grew.

These stories find their original in a French-Canadian, Paul Bunyon, who
first came into prominence during the Papineau rebellion in 1837, when, by
remarkable feats of strength and daring, he won the admiration of his
countrymen. Then for many years he was the outstanding logging boss in all
the St. Lawrence River country. When the loggers from this region went
into the Michigan woods about 1850 they took with them the stories of
their great hero, which stories, naturally, lost nothing in the telling,
particularly as they served admirably as a form of compensation device for
their feelings of inferiority. Nor is it remarkable that the Yankee
loggers should parody these stories to ridicule the French-Canadians.

Another element which entered into the making of the Bunyan myth was the
tendency to exaggeration which is common to all of us and which finds
expression on so many occasions. The lumber camps had long been filled
with extreme stories of many sorts, but these were usually only isolated
tales. Many of them had been told to impress the tenderfoot, while many
others had been wish projections, a sort of day-dreaming in which one was
able to do that which he never could accomplish when he had to work with
stern reality. After the French-Canadians brought Paul Bunyon to the camps
and the practice had begun of improving on these stories, it became easy
to invent a new Bunyon tale or connect up one of the other stories with
the Bunyon cycle wherever the need arose for over-awing a tenderfoot or of
securing a refuge from the sense of frustration, or just for simple
amusement. In the process the French