And now for a read aloud of Paul Bunyan
Even as a baby, Paul Bunyan was mighty big.
How big?
Well, he was so big that his parents had to use a covered wagon for his cradle.
As you might imagine, young Paul Bunyan had a big appetite.
He gobbled up five barrels of porridge a day, and his parents had to milk four dozen cows
every morning and evening just to keep his baby bottle filled.
Paul was so big it caused some problems in the little town in Maine where he grew up.
When he sneezed, he blew the birds from Maine to California.
When he snored, the neighbors ran out of their houses hollering, “Earthquake!
Earthquake!”
After that, Paul’s father thought it might be better if Paul didn’t sleep in town.
He built a cot on a large raft for Paul and floated it off the coast.
Paul slept on the raft for a few nights, but the floating cot didn’t work out.
When Paul turned over in his sleep, he created gigantic waves that knocked down houses along
the coast.
Eventually, Paul’s father decided that the East Coast was just too small for Paul Bunyan.
The only sensible thing to do was to move out West.
So the Bunyan family moved to Minnesota.
In those days Minnesota was full of logging camps, sawmills, and lumberjacks.
Americans were moving west and “building the country.”
They had to cut down a lot of trees to make their homes, not to mention their schools,
churches, boats, and furniture.
When he grew up, Paul Bunyan went to work as a lumberjack, and what a lumberjack he
proved to be!
He made himself a giant ax, with a handle carved out of a full-grown hickory tree.
He could bring down a giant tree with a single swing
of his ax.
As the tree tipped over, he would yell, “Timber!” so the other lumberjacks had time to get out
of the way.
Everyone looked up to Paul Bunyan—way up!
The other lumberjacks were full of admiration for him.
The bosses were grateful for the amazing amount of work he could do in a day.
Paul had a big heart, too, but one thing he always wished for was a true friend.
There simply wasn’t anybody else his size who could be his friend.
That all changed during the winter of the Big Blue Snow.
It was called the winter of the Big Blue Snow because it was so cold that everyone shivered
and turned blue.
Even the snow shivered and turned blue.
One day, as Paul made his way through the blue snowdrifts, he heard a muffled whimper.
He followed the noise until he saw two big, blue, furry things sticking up out of the
snow.
He reached down and gave a pull.
It turned out that the two big, blue, furry things were two big, blue ears.
And connected to the big, blue ears was a giant, blue, baby ox!
Paul exclaimed, “The poor little fellow is half frozen.”
Paul carried the blue ox home, wrapped him in blankets, and fed him.
The baby ox was so content that he took a long nap in Paul’s big, strong arms.
When he woke up, he looked up at Paul and do you know what he said?
“Mama!
Mama!”
Then he gave Paul a big, slobbery lick on the face.
Paul laughed and said, “Babe, we’re gonna be great friends!”
And they were.
In fact, Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox were soon inseparable.
Everywhere Paul went, Babe went, too.
The two of them worked together in the lumber camps.
Paul chopped down the trees.
Then Babe hauled them to the river and dropped them in so they could float downstream to
a sawmill.
Together, Paul and Babe did the work of a hundred men.
The lumber company figured the best way to keep Paul Bunyan happy was through his stomach,
so they hired a special cook to feed Paul and Babe.
The cook’s name was Sourdough Sam.
Sourdough Sam was known for the giant flapjacks he cooked
in the world’s biggest frying pan.
The colossal pan sat on an enormous cast iron frame.
Every morning Sourdough Sam would build a raging forest fire underneath the pan.
Then he would call for his two helpers, Lars Larson and Pete Peterson.
Lars and Pete would grease up the pan by tying slabs of bacon to their
feet and skating back and forth across the sizzling pan.
Then Sourdough Sam would make a giant stack of pancakes for Paul and an even larger stack
for Babe.
Thanks to Sourdough Sam and his overgrown flapjacks, Babe eventually grew to be even
bigger than Paul.
He was so big that, if you were standing at his front legs, you had to use a telescope
to see all the way to his back legs.
In fact, he was so heavy that his footprints filled up with water and turned into lakes.
In fact, there are more than ten thousand lakes in Minnesota today, and most of them
were created by Babe the Blue Ox back in the frontier days.
Babe and Paul helped the lumberjacks solve all sorts of problems.
Once there was a river that was full of twists and turns.
Sometimes the trees would get stuck in the turns and never make it downstream to the
sawmill.
But Paul Bunyan thought of a way to fix that!
He went to one end of the river and sent Babe to the other end.
Paul grabbed the river and pulled in one direction.
Babe pulled the other end in the opposite direction.
Then—snap!
Just like that, all of the kinks were pulled out, and the river was as straight as an ax
handle.
Of course, this tightening operation left the river a good deal longer than it had been
before, and there was a lot of extra water lying around.
Paul and Babe worked together to dig five big holes
to hold all the extra water.
Nowadays these are called the Great Lakes.
One day, the logging bosses got to talking.
One of them said that the United States was a fine country, to be sure, but it could still
stand a little improvement.
For one thing, it could use a few more rivers.
And what it really needed was a big river running right down the middle of the country,
all the way from Minnesota down to New Orleans.
“If we had a river like that,” the man said, “we could ship timber down to New
Orleans and all around the world!”
Paul Bunyan happened to overhear this conversation.
He told the bosses he would see what he could do.
He hitched up Babe and they started plowing south.
As they plowed, they threw a great mound of dirt and rocks to the right and a smaller
mound to the left.
On the right side they made the Rocky Mountains, and on the left side they made the Appalachian
Mountains.
Paul Bunyan and Babe didn’t stop until they had plowed a channel all the way south to
the Gulf of Mexico.
And the river that flows in that channel nowadays, that’s what we call the Mississippi River.
From that day on, Paul and Babe went around the country, using their size and strength
to help anyone who needed it.
Later, they dug the Grand Canyon as they made their way to the West Coast of California.
And when the wind blows just right from the west, you can still smell those infamous,
colossal pancakes cooking on the frontier.