Today I will talk about Paul Bunyan and His Blue Ox Babe. Their superhuman feats of strength originated with the oral stories of American and Canadian loggers. The first known reference of Paul Bunyan and Babe in print was on March 17, 1893, in the Gladwin County Record.
Many stories, commercials, children’s books, and cartoons starred this giant-sized duo performing feats such as logging the Dakotas, geography creation, their giant size, etc. There is not a lot of complete research on them, however their stories are a staple source of entertainment through the years.
The earliest recorded story of Paul Bunyan is an uncredited 1904 editorial in the Duluth News Tribune which recounts: “His pet joke and the one with which the green horn at the camp is sure to be tried, consists of a series of imaginative tales about the year Paul Bunyan lumbered in North Dakota. The great Paul is represented as getting out countless millions of timber in the year of the “blue snow”. The men’s shanty in his camp covered a half section, and the mess camp was a stupendous affair. The range on which an army of cookees prepared the beans and “red horse” was so long that when the cook wanted to grease it up for the purpose of baking the wheat cakes in the morning, they strapped two large hams to his feet and started him running up and down a half mile of black glistening stove top”
Legends and Myths usually have an amount to truth to them as well as exaggeration. There very well could have been a man and animal with gigantism (a known condition now) that performed what could be viewed as superhuman feats in that time.
Keep looking for the truth, always. Love and light,
Druid Jess
druidjess77 
I had never thought of that possibility! How amusing and not too big a stretch to believe.
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