The Story
In the big, wild forests of North America, long before there were paved roads or cities, there was a lumberjack so enormous that when he was born, it took five storks to deliver him.
His name was Paul Bunyan.
By the time Paul was a week old, he had already outgrown his parents' house. By the time he was a month old, his laughter shook the trees for miles around. And by the time he was big enough to work, well — he was bigger than a barn and stronger than a hundred men put together.
Paul's best friend was Babe the Blue Ox, who was the biggest ox who ever lived. Babe was so wide that it took a crow a full day to fly from one horn to the other. Together, Paul and Babe could do the work of a whole lumber camp in a single morning.
One winter was so cold that the words people said froze solid in mid-air. You had to wait for spring to hear what anyone had said in December.
Paul's camp needed a new logging road through the forest, but the road was too twisty to use for hauling timber. So Paul hitched Babe to one end of the road and pulled. Babe strained and heaved, and the bends in the road began to straighten out like a ribbon being stretched. By the end of the day, the road was as straight as an arrow. (All those extra curves? They piled up at the end and formed what we now call the Rocky Mountains.)
When Paul finished clearing the forests of the North Woods, he looked at all the stumps. He couldn't leave such a mess behind. So he invented the shovel, and he dug — and dug — and dug. And that is how the Great Lakes were made.
Paul Bunyan is still out there somewhere, people say, in the deep forest where the trees are tallest, working and laughing and looking after the land.