642 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences , Arts, and Letters. 
about whose exploits grew a series of stories; after his death 
his fame probably spread from camp to camp, more tales 
were added to those told about him, and. thus, gradually, 
he became in time an exaggerated type of the lumberjack, 
and the hero of more exploits than he could possibly have 
carried out in his life-time. 
The Bunyan stories are usually told in the evening around 
the fires in the bunk-houses. The older narrators speak in 
the French-Canadian dialect, and the stories are often full 
of the technical jargon of the woods. Usually the stories 
are told to arouse the wonder of the tenderfoot or simply 
as contributions in a contest in yarning. They are always 
of a grotesque and fabulous type, and they are all more or 
less closely related to the exploits of Bunyan and his lum¬ 
bering crew. “That happened,” says the narrator, “the 
year I went up for Paul Bunyan. Of course you have all 
heard of Paul.” And so the tale begins. It is matched by a 
bigger yarn, and the series grows. Often the scene of the 
exploits narrated is quite fictitious, like the Round River, 
which is in section thirty-seven, or the Big Onion River, 
three weeks this side of Quebec. Often, too, the lumber¬ 
jacks will tell of events that they say occurred on another 
lumbering stream than the one they are working on; thus 
the men of the Flambeau camps will tell of the deeds of 
Paul Bunyan on the Wisconsin River or on the Chippewa 
River. Sometimes the story-tellers will take Bunyan 
abroad and will tell of his doings, for example, among the 
big trees of Oregon, or they will tell of what happened when 
Paul was a boy on his father’s farm. Usually, however, the 
tales are supposed to have occurred in the “good” days of 
lumbering, some forty or fifty years back when the country 
was new, and in localities not far from the camps in which 
the yarns are told. 
But to our tales. Bunyan was a powerful giant, seven 
feet tall and with a stride of seven feet. He was famous 
throughout the lumbering districts for his physical strength 
and for the ingenuity with which he met difficult situations. 
He was so powerful that no man could successfully oppose 
him, and his ability to get drunk was proverbial. So great 
was his lung capacity that he called his men to dinner by 
blowing through a hollow tree a blast so strong that it blew 
