Books: Big Boy

PAUL BUNYAN—James Stevens — Knopf ($2.50). Among the French Canadian loggers that swung axes, mattocks and murderous steam-warped wooden pitchforks upon the troops of Queen Victoria in the Papineau Rebellion of 1837, there roared a thick-thewed, bellicose, hairy giant named Paul Bunyon. At his skull-crushing feats in that episode, and his later accomplishments as a boss logger, lumber camp historians have marveled ever since.

At first, the life of the Bunyon legends was slightly endangered by a meagreness of French Canadian imagination. But then they were taken in hand by the bunkhouses of Maine, Michigan, Washington; Bunyon was corrected to Bunyan; and Bunyaniana were soon nursed up by true American veracity to their natural proportions.

Mr. Stevens who, in real life, is known as Appanoose Jim to his fellow bullies of Idaho hard-rock camps and Oregon loggeries, has been at pains to set down these important American chronicles in their pristine vernacular and without any improvements of his own. When he states that Babe, Paul Bunyan’s blue-eyed ox, measured 42 axe-handles and a plug of chewing tobacco between the horns, no patriotic American will doubt the measurement for a second. When it is told how the great logger fought with Hels Helson, his foreman, on top of The Mountain That Stood On Its Head in the Dakota Country, until they trampled the mountain flat, leaving only the heaps of blood-darkened dust now called the Black Hills, none but a foreign reader will be reminded of Miinchausen, Swift, or Rabelais. That Paul Bunyan stood about 400 feet high in his orange and lavender checked wool socks; that he invented the logging industry and combed his beard with a young fir or redwood when thinking of other ways in which he might make history; that the salt, pepper and sugar in his camp’s cookhouses were drawn down between the tables by four-horse teams while tens of thousands of ravenous lumberjacks bounced on their benches for joy at the smell of the great Black Duck dinner cooked by Hot Biscuit Slim; that Johnny Inkslinger, Bunyan’s scribe, slept only three hours each week and had 25 barrels of ink hooked up by hoses to his fountain pen; that Great Salt Lake came to be when Paul Bunyan hewed down the stone-tree forests of Utah—these and similar facts are a valuable increment to the Nation’s stories of its past, and better reading than any given dozen of psychological novels.