Paul Bunyan was about expansion and the loud explosion of the American dream – we need new myths to wake us up to the shrinking, silent implosion of it.

I’ve been spending time with this truly American tall tale, and the story behind the story is our nation’s story. Below is a collection of reflections on the larger than life character, and what it meant and means to the country and our mythology going forward….

When Paul Bunyan (a pure content marketing play) was popularized in early 20th century literature by ad exec WB Laughead, from the Red River Lumber Company, to mythologize and gin up public support for deforestation (particularly of protected Ojibwe lands), they didn’t really focus too much on his history, because the nation was young and without history. Fuzzy references to a before time, murky parentage, a crib 200 feet high, and untamed lands.

So the urge for Bunyan to do his thing and create the country, is not necessarily coming from anywhere, or answering to anything – it’s a clean slate myth, or it’s a myth that cleans the slate by its own steam (hot air).

A modern American myth might require a bit more backstory – but is it because Bunyan lacks precedence that his legend was so impactful? You don’t have to understand much anything else than awe and wonder to have these stories work on you. In fact, ignorance is a great canvas to paint a myth on. This isn’t to say smart people can’t get mythological, or that myths are suited for dumbasses, but the expansion of myth rests on audiences having a fuzzy grasp on facts.

Bunyan was one giant man, bigger than a thousand men. He casually invented cutting edge tech. His waste products become homes for wayward creatures. In being encouraged to make up stories venerating a giant man, men could feel their work tied to something bigger than them.

Now that our modern American hero is the very real and human entrepreneur, we’re less inclined to work with anyone else, because the next hero could be us, the next American expansion is up our own asses.

Bunyan’s mythological hiking trail started out in the forests chopping it all down, but its end is inside of us, and the axe is aimed to split all remaining logs in the universe, so we stop believing in and feeding from myths, and finally live them out. We can all be Bunyan now. That was the hope all along.

The tall tales are big on imagery and team – blue ox, cooks, “colored” kids skating around with hams on their feet to grease a giant pan, the seven axmen, little chore boy – full universes are required.

Throughout Laughead’s book, lots of random names and “experts” are quoted and cited throughout, giving credence to the bullshit – big numbers, big things, and a lot of men getting lost, hurt, or waiting around for help from being trapped or caught or just needing supernatural help.

Interesting to note natural phenomena were “installed” by Bunyan, like mountain ridges and the Aurora Borealis. The natural world is the way it is because some brave man sought to mechanize processes first and foremost. What is natural to us has been engineered by a giant man. Nature is actually abandoned technological experiments. Nothing more. There is veneration of the land, many mentions of locations and tracts of land, but it all ultimately comes from Bunyan.

There’s an interesting segment about Lucy, Bunyans cow, who answers the call of the limitless wilds until Paul decorated her with a bell borrowed from a church buried in the snow. Stealing from faith to provide function.

“If Paul Bunyan did not invent Geography, he created a lot of it”

Bunyan was a commercialized myth engineered by a lumber company to fight back against forest conservationists who took issue with expansion – the answer to the deforestation of our external world was to plant mythological seeds and steward the country’s internal nature toward the interests of business.

I thought Paul Bunyan was a myth that said more about our national character and grit than it did about the fundamental nature of a country built off expansion. The goal of Paul Bunyan wasn’t national identity, commity, or even mythology, but narrative control.

I think it would behoove us to start mining and growing some new myths that work for us, from the bottom up, or we’re gonna keep getting chopped down by top-down myths that are engineered to work on us.