Searching for Paul Bunyan—and the truth behind the legend

14.11.2023 - 21:33 / nationalgeographic.com

In Bangor, Maine, a framed birth certificate of Paul Bunyan hangs in the city clerk’s office.

Born February 18, 1834—the same day as Bangor’s founding—the fictional lumberjack and his blue ox, Babe, have starred in books, films, and roadside tourist traps that have captivated Americans for over a century.

In a way, Bunyan has become synonymous with the communities from Maine to California that once fueled the country’s logging industry. Tracking the legend to picturesque lakes and old-growth forests offers travelers the opportunity to explore the beauty of America’s last wild places. Here’s what to know. 

The Paul Bunyan figure essentially stands in for Maine and its timber economy, says Jason Newton, author of a forthcoming book on logging’s labor history. “Bunyan is an anthropomorphized depiction of the industry.”

The American logging industry started in the early 1600s after the British depleted their timber resources. Looking to their American colonies for raw material, the English began to cut down Maine’s towering white pines to help build ships and masts for the British Navy. The first trees chopped were on Maine’s Monhegan Island, where artists now capture the coastal scenery with paint and canvas.

By the mid-1800s, hundreds of sawmills sat on the banks of Penobscot River in Bangor. Skilled foresters would drive cut logs down the river to the mills, wrangling and dismantling pileups, often with dynamite. It required skill, balance, and a bit of bravery. This history led Maine to claim the world’s most famous lumberjack and erect a 31-foot-tall Paul Bunyan statue in downtown Bangor, a popular photo op.

(Here’s what timber tourism and lumberjack shows can teach kids about trees.)

For more insight into the state’s logging legacy, the Maine Forest and Logging Museum outside of Bangor reconstructed a 1790s milling community where visitors can see demos of steam-engine log haulers and a water-powered mill. Travelers can also visit a Maine Boomhouse, where workers once gathered thousands of logs into “booms,” or barriers, often made of chains, that could be towed across a lake to a river. At Ambajejus Lake, the Ambajejus Boomhouse shows how these barriers were made and used via a small museum and 19th-century artifacts.

Despite Paul Bunyan’s “birth certificate” and the many children’s books that place his birthplace in Maine, evidence suggests that Bunyan was invented sometime after logging operations moved west and began clearing almost all of the old-growth forests in places like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, says Michael Edmonds, a historian and author of Out of the Northwoods: The Many Lives of Paul Bunyan.

The earliest Bunyan tales were circulating simultaneously as the number of