- Few figures loom as large in Northwest lore as Paul Bunyan and his big blue ox named Babe.

There are children's books, campfire stories, cartoons, murals, giant Paul Bunyan statues, festivals, poems.

There is even a Paul Bunyan opera.

Some people say he's a legend, others that he's a fake.

So, who was Paul Bunyan?

Is he folklore or fake lore?

(bluegrass music) (music becomes lighter) For several generations of Northwesterner, Paul Bunyan was a fixture.

A giant, ax-wielding logger about whom tall tales were told, as he turned forests into timber with his ox, Babe, and reshaped America.

Babe's footprints were said to have created Minnesota's 10,000 lakes.

He was said to have dug the Grand Canyon.

In Washington, the tale was told that he dug Elliott Bay, and with the dirt, he built Mount Rainier.

That he dragged his ax and carved Hood Canal.

In his plaid shirt and wool hat, Paul personified the taming of the wilderness.

A big land that needed big Paul and Babe to transform it.

The origins of his stories are roughly this, in the 19th century, tales of Bunyan are said to have originated in Maine and Canada.

He might've been partly based on tales of a rebellious French-Canadian lumberjack, whose name, Bon Jean, morphed into Bunyan in English.

As the timber industry moved west, so did Paul.

If his stories were told in logging camps, at first, he tended to be a minor figure in humorous tales.

Real lumberjack bunkhouse stories tended to be much rougher and bawdier, but also focused on physical prowess.

Paul embodied a kind of working class hero.

Folks who took on big jobs and got them done.

Paul loved the woods, but he loved chopping them down even more.

In the early 20th century, Paul Bunyan became a celebrity.

A timber company wrote up some stories about him in a marketing pamphlet.

In the early 1920s, two Seattle authors, James Stevens and Esther Shephard, published books of Bunyan tales.

And Stevens's book became a national bestseller.

Stevens and Shephard popularized Bunyan's stories as true American literature, and soon, writers and poets like Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg and many others seized on him.

Thus, Bunyan entered American popular culture.

Paul's emergence seemed to feed a Euro-American appetite for epic history.

An article in the Seattle PI called Bunyan, "America's only folklore character", saying that while Scandinavians had dwarves, Germans had gnomes, the British had elves, that Americans now had Paul.

Someone further comparing him to Zeus, Thor, Odysseus and King Arthur.

Others were more skeptical.

An editorial in The Oregonian in 1924 said that Paul wasn't a true legend, but "whimsical fiction, roughly hewn by versatile liars".

In other words, just another bogus character in tall tales.

Scholars of folklore weighed in, contending that folk never really talked about Paul.

It was advertising people, marketers, the timber industry, trying to sell an image.

Could it be that Paul was no more mythological than the Michelin tire man or the Jolly Green Giant?

One professor, who studied actual tales of loggers, said Bunyan was fake lore, not folklore.

An academic debate raged, but the public didn't care.

Paul could be a messenger of America, embodying different ideologies.

The artist of the New Deal era put him in murals.

Socialists claimed him as a representative of the proletariat.

Timber barons used him to push back against Wobblies in the logging camps.

Paul Bunyan didn't need a union to overcome problems.

Bunyan was exploited as a hero of free enterprise.

While Disney did a cartoon of Paul, he had his own radio series, more books poured forth.

His name was attached to logger rodeos, Timbertown events.

His image was used to promote good forest management, even if Paul in most tales never spared a tree.

For the last hundred years, the Bunyan story has been unstoppable, but things have changed.

The timber business is mechanized and industrial.

Paul isn't around to deal with climate change and vanishing forests that were big enough to challenge him.

He and Babe tromping on nature is hardly fashionable now.

At least one recent story suggests that Paul got tired of cutting trees and retired to Alaska.

But he's not done yet.

Popular culture is fluid, things morph from one era to the next.

While our environmental consciousness has evolved from Paul's heyday, he is still around in chainsaw art, or even popping up to meet Captain America as an avatar of national character in a Marvel comic book.

In many respects, Bunyan is like the superheroes who followed him, more akin to Superman, Wonder Woman or Spider-Man, who sprang from the minds of artists and writers to capture the public's imagination.

Who decides today what is folk and what is not when we're playing computer games and fantasy realms, obsessed with J. R. R. Tolkien and superhero movies, reading graphic novels, surfing from pop culture meme to meme?

We're creating our own alternate facts and realities on social media.

I suspect Paul and Babe will have a home somewhere in the 21st century.

Paul and his beard and flannel and suspenders might be old-fashioned.

(bluegrass music) But he wanders a cultural landscape that is increasingly populated by imaginary beings and events.

Someday, he just might be the basis of some kind of cult that worships a bearded, plaid-shirted being on your screen.

It's just possible, you know?

(bluegrass music) - [Narrator] Mossback's Northwest is made possible by the generous support of Bedrooms & More.