648 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences , Arts , and Letters. 
suddenly rushed into camp shouting that they had been 
cutting government pine and were all to be arrested. Each 
man thereupon seized what camp property lay nearest his 
hand and made off, no two men taking the same direction. 
Thus Bunyan cleared his camp without paying his men a 
cent for their labor. 
Not all of the Bunyan stories are concerned with Bun- 
yan’s life in the Round River or the Big Onion camps. 
There are several accounts of his exploits far from the forests 
of the north-central states. It is said that when he was once 
dredging out the Columbia River, he broke the dredge, and, 
sticking it into his pocket, walked to the nearest blacksmith 
shop in South Dakota, had it repaired, and returned to the 
Oregon camp before dark. Besides his blue ox Bunyan had, 
according to some versions, so many oxen that their yokes, 
piled up, made twenty cords of wood. One day he drove 
all of these animals through a hollow tree which had fallen 
across a great ravine. When he reached the other side, he 
found that several of the oxen had disappeared, and, re¬ 
turning, he discovered that they had strayed into a hollow 
limb. Occasionally one hears some account of Paul Bun- 
yan’s boyhood exploits on his father’s farm. It is said that 
on one occasion he and his father went out to gather a huge 
water-melon which was growing on a side-hill above a rail¬ 
road track. They carelessly forgot to prop the melon up 
before they severed the stem with a cross-cut saw, and as a 
result it broke loose, rolled down hill, burst open on striking 
the rails, and washed out two hundred feet of track. This 
tale and similar ones do not seem to belong strictly to the 
Bunyan cycle, but to be, rather, like the animal fables, 
mere appendages. 
What is there in these exaggerated tales of interest to the 
student of literature? We believe, first, that, crude as they 
are, they reveal unmistakable indications of having grown 
up under the same principles of literary development which 
produced by a slow process legend-cycles much more ro¬ 
mantic and famous. The tendency to group the tales about 
one hero is universal in legend, as is illustrated by the 
Arthurian and Robin Hood cycles, and less completely by 
the folk tales of Riibezahl, the spirit of the Riesengebirge of 
Germany, Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, and the strong man. 
