640 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences , Arts , and Letters . 
in 77ze American Lumberman for April 25, 1914, to the Red 
River Lumber Company of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and to 
lumbermen and others who have sent us material from the 
lumber districts. 
The most significant of recent developments in the study 
of folk-lore and the popular ballad began with the discovery 
that the making of folk-tales and communal poetry did not 
cease entirely with the coming of the printing-press, but 
that in certain isolated communities unreached by the 
paralyzing contact of the printed sheet the process of com¬ 
munal composition has gone on, roughly, fragmentarily, 
perhaps, but none the less genuinely. Here in America 
there is a complete cycle of ballads celebrating the exploits 
of the outlaw Jesse James; Professor John Lomax has made 
an extensive collection of cow-boy songs; and the isolated 
mountaineers of Kentucky and Tennessee have many songs 
and tales, some curiously distorted fragments of old-world 
ballads, others quite local in subject-matter and tone. The 
student of folk-lore has come, in fact, to expect that wherever 
there is more or less permanent isolation from the outside 
world of large groups of people engaged in the same occupa¬ 
tion or at least having a community of interests, there is 
almost certain to spring up in time tales peculiar to that 
community. It is not, accordingly, surprising that such 
legends exist among the lumbermen of the Great North, 
among a community shut off from the world for months at 
a time and bound together by peculiar bonds. It is among 
these toilers of the forests that the legends of Paul Bunyan 
have originated, Paul Bunyan, the greatest lumberjack who 
ever skidded a log, who with the aid of his wonderful blue 
ox and his crew of hardy lumbermen cleared one hundred 
million feet of pine from a single forty and performed other 
feats related about the roaring fires of the lumber shanties. 
The legends of Paul Bunyan are widely distributed 
throughout the lumber districts of the North. The tales in 
our little collection have come from lumber-camps in the 
Northern Peninsula of Michigan and from the Saginaw 
Valley in the Southern Peninsula, from Langlade County 
and from camps along the Flambeau and Wisconsin rivers 
in Wisconsin, from northern Minnesota and from camps as 
far west as Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. 
