Paul Bunyan

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Paul Bunyan
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Imagine, if you can, the excitement that was
caused by the birth of Paul Bunyan! It took five
giant storks, working overtime, to deliver him to
his parents. He cut his teeth on a peavy pole and
grew so fast the after one week he had to wear
his father's clothes. His lungs were so strong
that he could empty a whole pond of frogs with
one "holler".
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As a child, Paul played with an axe and crosscut
saw like other children played with toys. On his
first birthday his father gave him a pet blue ox
named Babe. Babe grew to be seven axe handles
and a plug of tobacco wide between the eyes and
as a snack would eat thirty bales of hay...wire
and all. Paul and Babe were so large, the tracks
they made gallivanting around Minnesota filled up
and made the 10,000 lakes.
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Paul liked to work with big men. The most famous
were his seven axe men. They were all named
Elmer, so when he called they all came running.
No grindstone was large enough to grind the axes
so they sharpened them by holding them against
large stones rolling down hill. Each of these
men was over six feet tall sitting down and
weighed over 300 pounds.
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The year of the two winters it got so cold the
axe man let their beards grow full length. They
wrapped the beards around them for warmth. In the
spring Paul cut all the beards with a large
scythe. The whiskers were stacked like hay and
later sold for making mattresses.
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The year of the two winters the snow was so deep
Paul had to dig down to the trees to continue
logging operations. It got so cold that the
boiling coffee froze so fast it was still hot
when frozen. When the men spoke, their words
froze in mid-air and when it thawed in the spring
there was a terrible chatter for weeks.
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During the slack season, Paul's men made him a
pipe. This wasn't easy. They had to select a
special giant hickory tree and haul it in on two
flatcars so they could work on it.
                      In the early days Paul's
smoking never bothered anyone, but in later years
he started blowing his smoke west to keep his
forest air fresh. This is what caused the smog on
the west coast.
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One time Paul's men started the logs down a new
river which they had never seen before. They
began to notice that they were seeing familiar
places over and over again and then finally
realized that they were on the Round River which
went round and round and had no end. Paul knew
that this was a bad thing so he shoveled out the
center of the river and made it into a big lake
which is now known as Round Lake.
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Mosquitoes were a problem. The men fought them
off with pike poles and axes. Paul brought in big
bees to destroy them, but they intermarried and
became worse. Their craving for sweets caused
them to swarm a fleet of ships bringing sugar to
Paul's camp. They ate so much they couldn't fly,
and drowned. Paul saved two of the mosquitoes
which he used for drilling holes in maple trees.
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When Paul was short of help, he trained some
enormous ants to do all kinds of logging work.
They weighed over 2,000 pounds and ate nothing
but the best imported Swedish snuff. The ants did
the work of 50 ordinary men. In the winter, Paul
had them fitted with warm mackinaws to keep them
from hibernating
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Lucy, the Purple Cow, was a champion producer and
furnished Paul's dairy products. She was
contented so long as the grass was green, so in
the winter Paul fitted her with green glasses to
make the snow look like grass. The year of the
two winters it got so cold her milk turned to ice
cream before it hit the pail. That was the winter
Paul invented the double-deck ice cream cone.
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Ole, the blacksmith, was the only man who could
shoe Babe, the Blue Ox. Every time he made shoes
for Babe they had to open a new iron mine. One
time he carried a pair of Babe's shoes and their
weight made him sink knee deep into the hard
earth with every step. In his spare time Ole
punched the holes in the donuts for the cook
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Sourdough Sam, the cook, fed Paul's logging
crews. He made everything except coffee from
sourdough. He lost one leg and one arm when a
sourdough barrel blew up. A load of pork and
beans with the ox team pulling it went through
the ice on a nearby lake. Sam had large fires
built along the shore and boiled the lake making
bean soup. All winter he fed the men bean soup
with an ox-tail flavor.
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Paul's axe men ate so many flap-jacks they
couldn't supply the demand. Ole, the Blacksmith,
made a griddle so large you couldn't see across
it when the smoke was thick. Sourdough Sam had
fifty men with pork rinds tied to their feet
skating around the griddle to grease it. The
batter was mixed in large barrels and it took a
strong cook just to turn the flapjacks, let alone
get them to the table.
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Sport, the Reversible Dog, was the camp pet and
the best hunter. One of the axe men accidentally
cut Sport in two with an axe. In his haste to
mend the dog, he had him sewed up before he
realized it was wrong. This didn't bother Sport.
He ran on his front legs until they were tired,
then flopped over and ran on his hind legs. The
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