Folktales and Legends of the Middle West

by Edward McClelland

  “Jump on,” he ordered Mattie, hoisting her on to the horse’s rump. Henry sat on its back, took hold of the bridle, and slapped its neck. The horse cantered forward, along a trail that paralleled the Tennessee. For three nights Mattie and Henry rode that horse, watering it in the river and allowing it to graze in meadows. More than once during that ride, they saw a dead tree on which was carved Peg Leg Joe’s footprint, telling them they were on the right course.

  On the fourth night, the horse refused to move. Mattie tore a switch off a tree and beat the horse’s withers, but it only took a few steps before collapsing to its knees, throwing its passengers into the dirt.

  “We done wore it out,” Henry said. “We just gonna have to leave it here and move on.”

  The horse had carried them far. The Tennessee had widened and strengthened, leading Henry and Mattie to believe they were nearing its mouth, where the boat would be waiting. The bag of food was empty, but the growing season had advanced, so they could filch green corn and tomatoes from gardens. Bitter as those vegetables were, they were still nourishing.

  Finally, Mattie and Henry climbed to the top of a hill, and saw the Ohio River beneath them. It was the largest body of water either had ever laid eyes on. A moonglade glittered on the surface, as though illuminating the path to freedom. But, of course, they couldn’t walk it, and neither knew how to swim. They had to find the boat Peg Leg Joe had told them about. But this being the meeting place of two great rivers, it was also the site of the biggest town either had ever laid eyes on. And they were still in slave territory.

  “We just gonna have to go down there late at night, hope nobody sees us, and hope there’s a boat there,” Mattie said.

  Mattie and Henry made their way to the riverfront. Fortunately, a levee shielded them from the view of the townspeople, and no one stirred inside the steamboats tied up along its length. At the point where the little river met the great big river, they saw a rowboat bobbing near the rocky bank. As they drew closer, they could see a white man holding the oars. As they drew closer still, they could see it was Peg Leg Joe. The man who had mysteriously appeared on their plantation and taught them a song that contained the map to freedom had also, mysteriously, beaten them to Ohio River. Splashing through the water up to their knees, they climbed into his boat.

  “This is the first night I came down here,” Joe said. “You’re sooner than I expected.”

  “We stole a horse,” Henry admitted.

  “That was good thinking.”

  As Joe pulled them closer and closer to the Illinois shore, Mattie and Henry both had one thought in mind: as soon as they stepped off this boat, they would be out of the reach of Mr. Harris forever. It wasn’t quite so. Once they disembarked, Joe led them to a wagon, instructing them to conceal themselves beneath its load of straw. Then he drove them to a house, where the owner pulled up a rug and opened a trapdoor to a lightless crawlspace. Were they being kidnapped? Was Peg Leg Joe a slave catcher who had posed as abolitionist so he could see them for his own profit?

  “This is Mr. Benmark,” Joe said, introducing the householder, a bald, bewhiskered man wearing tiny oval spectacles. “He’s the first of your conductors on what we call the Underground Railroad. You’re not much safer in Illinois than you were in Alabama. At least not in this part of Illinois. President Fillmore signed a law allowing the slave catchers to chase you into the free states, so we’re going to get you someplace where his laws don’t apply.”

  From house to house they traveled, sometimes by wagon, sometimes on foot, always in the direction of the North Star, until they arrived in Detroit. There, they hid in the basement of a church run by free blacks who had escaped slavery when the North was still safe for refugees. A steamboat carried them across the Detroit River to a fort owned by the British, who had abolished slavery in all their territories. A thousand miles from Mr. Harris’s farm, they were finally free.

  Their child was born free, of course. A boy, they named him Joseph. Mattie and Henry settled in Owen Sound, Ontario, the Lake Huron port that was the last stop on the Underground Railroad. Henry found a job on the docks, and Mattie sang in the choir at the British Methodist Episcopal Church. Her favorite hymn was one she had learned back in Alabama, because it expressed the hope that all the congregants had carried with them on their flights to Canada:

  Steal away to Jesus

  Steal away, steal away home

  I ain’t got long to stay here

  My lord calls me

  He calls me by the thunder

  The trumpet sound in my soul

  I ain’t got long to stay here

  My lord calls me

  He calls me by the lightning

  The trumpet sound is in my soul

  I ain’t got long to stay here

  Steal away! Steal away!

  PAUL BUNYAN’S TALLEST TALES

  hot Gunderson was the foreman of a lumber camp in the woods of central Minnesota, outside Brainerd. The old Swede’s real name was Torvald, but he was nicknamed Shot because of his skill as a hunter: he had once killed enough deer in one hour to feed a camp of hungry loggers for an entire winter. His hand was no longer as steady as it had once been, but his eyes and his judgment were, and nobody could find better pine in the dwindling North Woods than ol’ Shot.

  One November evening, after his crew of shanty boys had stacked hundreds and hundreds of logs on the ox-drawn sledges that would be hauled to the narrow headwaters of the Mississippi River, they sat down to a supper of salt pork and beans in the bunkhouse. It was so cold that even the boys sitting closest to the woodstove buttoned their mackinaws to the neck.

  “That was one exhausting day,” complained a young shanty boy. “I don’t think Paul Bunyan himself could have cut down as many trees as we did.”

  At the mention of Paul Bunyan, Shot perked up.

  “You don’t think so, eh, Mr. Numminen?” Shot challenged the young man. “Did you ever see Paul Bunyan work?”

  “He was before my time,” Numminen said. “But everyone knows the stories.”

  “Everyone thinks they know the stories,” said Shot. “But I worked with Paul. Yassir, I did. So Charley Dobey, over here. And Batiste Joe.”

  Shot motioned at two gray-haired loggers who had been deferentially granted seats near the stove.

  “Well, then let’s hear ’em,” Numminen said. “In fact, I have an idea. Me and all the boys will put up a jug of whiskey for the best Paul Bunyan story among the three of you. Does that sound good, boys?”

  The shanty boys nodded eagerly, not because they wanted to hear Paul Bunyan stories, but because they hoped the winner would share his whiskey with the entire camp.

  Storytelling was a popular pastime in the logging camps. Books were expensive, and hard to read by kerosene lantern. Also, many shanty boys had never learned their letters, at least not in English. So every logger became a book of his own, passing down the lore of the camps. Every season, the stories grew bigger and wilder, until they had as much relationship to actual history as the legends of Hercules or Samson. The logger telling a tale was given a place of honor on the Deacon’s Seat, a split log bench running in front of the bunks. There, Shot Gunderson placed himself and addressed his crew.

  “Vell, since I’m the first, I’ll start at the beginning, and tell you where Paul came from, and how he met his Babe, his trusty ox,” Shot said.

  “Paul, he wasn’t born in Minnesota, although people here like to claim him. He was born in Maine, near the site of the first lumber mill in this country. He was a big, big baby. It took five storks to deliver him to his parents. When he was a week old, he was wearing his father’s clothes. When he was three weeks old, he rolled over and destroyed four square miles of timber. So his parents built him a floating cradle and anchored it off Eastport. Every time Paul rocked, the tides rose seventy-five feet in the Bay of Fundy. After the waves from Paul’s cradle wiped out a few fishing villages in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, the British Navy sailed into t
he bay and fired its cannons for seven hours until Paul woke up. When he finally did, he stepped out of his cradle and swamped seven warships. So the British seized his cradle and used the wood to build seven more ships. That prevented Nova Scotia from becoming an island, but the tides on the Bay of Fundy still rise and fall more than any place in the world.

  “Paul drove a load of logs to the Kennebec River when he was old enough to wear his first woolen trousers. But the Maine woods had been pretty well worked over by the time he grew up. He needed a bigger challenge. He was looking for huge stands of virgin timber that would take a lifetime to cut down, so he came to Minnesota, which was still covered in red pine and Norway pine.

  “Paul came here during the Winter of the Blue Snow. The snow was two hundred feet deep, and as blue as the sky. You couldn’t tell one from another. Some fellas tried to lay a logging road around a hill that turned out to be a cloud. The snow was so deep that only the tops of the tallest trees poked through. To cut them down, we had to dig holes in the snow, lower the boys down on ropes, then pull the trees out. And oh, you betcha it was cold. It was so cold I slept under forty-two blankets. One morning, I got lost trying to find my way out of bed. By the time they found me three days later, I had just about starved to death. To keep warm, I grew a beard so long I could wrap it around my body and still tuck it into the tops of my boots. When the cook tried to pour coffee, it froze so fast the ice was still hot.

  “Anyway, one day Paul put on his snowshoes and went out to fetch firewood. He noticed a pair of ears sticking out of a snowdrift. He yanked on them, and out came Babe. That ox calf was as blue as the snow he’d been trapped in and stayed that way for the rest of his life. Paul bedded Babe down in a barn for the night, but when he returned the next morning, the barn was gone. He found Babe a few hundred yards away, rooting through the snow for a patch of grass, with the barn balanced on his back. He had outgrown it in just one night.

  “Babe was so big that when Paul rode him, he had to carry a telescope to see his hindquarters. That ox could pull so much weight that when Paul hitched him to an eighteen-mile-long logging road, with a dozen switchbacks and S-curves, he straightened it out completely, and Paul sold the excess road to Chicago to build Michigan Avenue.

  “That ox ate and drank and worked so much that Paul hired a fellow named Brimstone Bill to keep him in food and shoes. Babe ate fifty bales of hay for a snack, and it took six shanty boys to pick the wire from his teeth. Babe got so thirsty hauling logs that Brimstone Bill finally decided to hitch him to a water tank, so he could have a drink whenever he wanted. But as Paul’s crew was working its way through Minnesota, the tank sprung a leak up north of Grand Rapids, and the water that flowed out turned into the Mississippi River.

  “Whenever Babe lost a shoe, Bill had to open an iron mine so Ole the Blacksmith could forge him a new one. And the shoes were so heavy that when Bill carried one, he’d sink up to his knees in even the rockiest ground. And that, boys, is where Minnesota’s Ten Thousand Lakes come from: they’re Babe’s footprints as he walked across the state.”

  The shanty boys cheered as Shot stood up from the Deacon’s Seat. “Give him the whiskey!” someone cried, but he was shushed by a crowd that wanted more stories.

  Charley Dobey took the Deacon’s Seat next. Charley had been Paul’s right-hand man, left in charge of the camp whenever the great lumberjack went to town. He was a renowned fiddler as well.

  “Now I don’t need to tell you boys that lumberjacks love to eat,” Charley began. The bunkhouse broke into laughter. “We need a big breakfast to get us ready for a big day of chopping, sawing, and hauling logs, and we need an even bigger supper because we’re so hungry at the end of it. Well, no team of lumberjacks ever ate more than Paul Bunyan and his boys; not even this one. Paul’s cook was named Sourdough Sam, because he made everything out of sourdough except the coffee. He lost a leg and an arm when his sourdough barrel exploded. Paul carved him new limbs out of tree stumps, so he was able to hobble around the kitchen that way.

  “The boys loved Sam’s flapjacks, but he could never make enough on the bunkhouse stove, so he asked Ole the Blacksmith to build him a bigger griddle. Ole made a griddle so big it was impossible to see across when the steam rose from whatever was cookin’. He hired fifty chore-boys to grease it by skating across with slabs of bacon tied to their feet. Then he mixed the batter in drums and poured it out with a crane. Ole also made a dinner horn so heavy only Paul could lift it and blow into it. The first time Paul called the boys in to eat, he blew down ten acres of pine trees. That was a waste of good timber, so the next time, Paul blew the horn straight into the air, which caused a cyclone that lifted up the latrine and carried it into the next county. The boys had to walk all the way there and back every time nature called, until the carpenters could build a new one. After that, Paul sold the horn to the state of Iowa, which used the metal to gild the dome of its capitol building in Des Moines.

  “Now, one winter, we were working up northeast of Ely, by the Canadian border. We dumped all our logs onto a frozen lake, figuring we’d float them out in the spring. Well, when the snow and ice melted, it turned out this lake was landlocked. There was no outlet. The nearest stream was ten miles away. But Sam, he had an idea, which, like most of his ideas, involved sourdough. He asked Paul to fill Babe’s water tank with sourdough. Paul did, and Babe hauled the tank to the shore, where they dumped all the sourdough in the lake. When the sourdough rose, it flowed over the hill surrounding the lake, carrying the logs with it, all the way to that stream ten miles away. And that’s why that particular body of water is known as Sourdough Lake. You can look it up on a map.”

  Charley Dobey picked up his fiddle. He played it in the bunkhouse every night, to entertain himself and anyone else who cared to listen. Those who didn’t care to listen could go stand outside in the snow, because a graybeard who’d logged with Paul Bunyan had earned the right to play his fiddle wherever and whenever he pleased.

  “I may not have as many stories as Shot Gunderson,” Charley said, “but I can play the fiddle, and I can also sing better than ol’ Shot. This is an old ballad about one of Paul’s greatest misadventures, the Round River Drive, which happened back in ’63 or ’64:

  At last, a hundred million in,

  ’Twas time for drivin’ to begin

  We broke the rollways in a rush,

  And started through the rain and slush

  To drive that hundred million down

  Until we reached some sawmill town.

  We didn’t know the river’s name,

  Nor where to someone’s mill it came,

  But figured this, without a doubt,

  To some good town ’twould bring ’em out,

  If we observed the usual plan

  And drive the way the river ran

  Well, after we had driven for

  A week or so or maybe more

  We came across a pyramid

  That looked just like our forty did

  Two weeks again; another, too

  That looked like our camp came in view

  Then Bunyan called us all ashore

  And called a council like of war.

  Says Paul, “With all this lumbering

  Our logs won’t bring us a damned thing

  And we realized at last

  That every camp that we had passed

  Was ours. Yes, ’twas then we found

  The river was on the round

  And though we’d driven many a mile

  We’d drive a circle all the while.

  “So you see,” Charley concluded, “we never did get them logs to a sawmill. They just kept floatin’ round and round that river ’til they all rotted away.”

  Charley Dobey bowed deeply to the shanty boys and yielded the Deacon’s Seat to Batiste Joe. Batiste Joe had been born in Quebec, the fourteenth of eighteen children; like many poor French-Canadians, he sought better opportunities in Maine. There, he met Paul Bunyan, and followed him to Minne
sota, lured also by tales of taller trees. Joe’s black mustache had turned white, and he was now a picturesque little figure in a checked flannel shirt, neckerchief, leather boots, wool socks pulled up to his knees, and a trilby dented in all the wrong places. After so many years in the North Woods, he spoke English as well as French, but his accent left no doubt he was Quebecois.

  “This is the story of Paul Bunyan’s last big job here in the Nort’ Country,” Batiste Joe began. “One day, Paul got a letter from the King of Sweden, offerin’ him one million dollars to cut down all de trees in Nort’ Dakota, so Swedes could farm there. When he was a boy, Paul had been too busy cutting down trees to go to school, so he asked his bookkeeper, Johnny Inkslinger, to read the king’s letter to him. Johnny, you know, was such a fast writer that he had a pen connected to an ink barrel by a hose. He wrote back to the king right away, and gave the letter to a stork, who delivered it to Stockholm the very next day.

  “Well, that was the biggest job Paul ever had, so he built the biggest camp anyone had ever seen. The bunks was stacked eighteen high: the boys on top used balloons to get to bed at night, and parachutes to get to work in the morning. The dining room was so big that the chore boy who drove the salt-‘n’-pepper wagon could only make it to half the tables during dinner, so he spent the night at the other end, and came back the next morning.

  “Paul hired the best lumberjacks he could find: the Seven Axemen of the Red River. They was all named Elmer, so Paul could remember to call them, and they each had three axes, and two boys to carry their axes to the river when they got too hot from chopping, so they wouldn’t start forest fires. They chopped so fast they didn’t have time to come back to the bunkhouse to sharpen their axes, so they done it on stones rolling downhill.