Out of the Northwoods

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The Many Lives of Paul Bunyan

Michael Edmonds

Part bibliographic mystery, part social history, this book reveals the origins of the Paul Bunyan myth and explores how the legends moved out of the forest and into the popular consciousness.

288 pages, 6 x 9, 35 b&w photos
Hardcover: $24.95 | ISBN: 978-0-87020-437-1
Ebook: $16.99 | ISBN: 978-0-87020-471-5
Publication Date: 10/15/2009

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Description

Every American has heard of the lumberjack hero Paul Bunyan and his big blue ox, Babe. For more than a century, his exploits filled cartoons, magazines, short stories, and children’s books, and his name advertised everything from pancake breakfasts to construction supplies. By 1950, Bunyan was a ubiquitous icon of America’s strength and ingenuity. Yet, while everyone knew who he was, no one knew where he came from, until now—thanks to this deep dive into the Bunyan legacy by historian Michael Edmonds.

Out of the Northwoods presents the culture of nineteenth-century lumberjacks in their own words. It includes eyewitness accounts of how the first Bunyan stories were shared on frigid winter nights, around logging camp stoves, in the Wisconsin pinery. It describes where the tales began, how they moved out of the forest and into print, and why publication changed them forever.

By sifting through the unpublished manuscripts of early editors of the tales, Michael Edmonds unearths dozens of authentic Bunyan stories told by lumberjacks between 1885 and 1915. Edmonds recounts a saga of lies, hoaxes, thefts, and greed that transformed the private jokes of working-class loggers into mass-market picture books for kids. Part bibliographic mystery and part social history, Out of the Northwoods explains for the first time why we all know and love Paul Bunyan. An appendix includes more than 100 original tales about Bunyan, his camps, his crew, and his adventures taken directly from loggers early in the last century.

Author Bios

Michael Edmonds

Michael Edmonds is a writer and historian based in Madison, Wisconsin. His writings on history, nature, and folklore explore the ways that ideas have moved through time and space. He has always been fascinated by eccentric and atypical people or events that mainstream culture has overlooked. For more than a decade he wrote the syndicated weekly newspaper column, “Odd Wisconsin,” which highlighted bizarre and little-known stories from the state’s past. His other books include Taking Flight, Risking Everything, The Wisconsin State Capitol, and others.

The real Paul Bunyan of lumber camp storytelling lives through Michael Edmonds’s superbly researched, richly illustrated, and engagingly written study. The last and best word on Bunyan!

James P. Leary

Folklorist and co-founder of the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures at the University of Wisconsin–Madison

“Through exhaustive research and sound reasoning Michael Edmonds makes a convincing case to move Bunyan's birthplace from New England or Canada to the logging camps of northern Wisconsin. In the process, he introduces readers to a largely unfamiliar, unsanitized, pre-print Bunyan known only to woodsmen of a bygone era. This is an important contribution to the study of folklore and, at the same time, something new and fun for the Bunyan fan in all of us.”

—Professor Kurt Kortenhof, Saint Paul College