True Stories Behind American Tall Tales

December 2021 · 2 minute read

Decades before Ant-Man got big, the biggest guy on American shores was Paul Bunyan, a lumberjack who pulled up trees like blades of grass. When Bunyan wasn't creating the Grand Canyon with one swipe of his ax, he was chilling with his equally enormous pet ox, Babe, who for some reason had blue skin.

Was he a real guy? Nah, but History says he might've been inspired by an 1800s French-Canadian lumberjack named Fabian "Saginaw Joe" Fornier. Saginaw Joe didn't have a blue ox, but he did stand at 6 feet tall, which was pretty huge back then. Saginaw Joe was a rowdy fella who loved a good fight, a dangerous hobby which eventually got him killed during an 1875 brawl in Michigan. Over the years, folktales about big Joe seem to have merged with stories about another French-Canadian lumberjack, Bon Jean, and that's probably where the name "Bunyan" came from.

However, the composite character of Paul Bunyan was never something people actually believed in. During the early 1900s, Bunyan was probably just an inside joke that loggers casually referenced sometimes, like Mother Nature — "Look at that mountain that big ol' Bunyan made with his bare hands!" Everything changed in 1914, according to Minnesota History Magazine, when the Red River Lumber Company started using Bunyan as their mascot. The general public thought the giant lumberjack myth was fun, and he's been an icon ever since.

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