Dark Justice

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In 1906, a journalist named James MacGillivray struggled to think of something different to fill the pages of the Oscoda Press, a small-town northern Michigan newspaper. In those days, papers were more flexible and often used fiction pieces to liven up their pages. Because the town had recently seen an influx of lumberjacks and businessmen in the fledgling logging industry, MacGillivray concocted a tale, based in part on stories he had heard around town, about the Goliath of loggers, a superhuman lumberjack called Paul Bunyan. In “The Round River Drive,” the mighty Bunyan fells “about a mile a day” of forestland. “You see,” MacGillivray wrote, “back in those days the government didn’t care nothin’ about the timber and all you had to do was hunt up a good tract on some runnin’ stream-cut her and float her down.”

The Bunyan story was very popular, and in the years that followed, more appeared by a variety of writers. In 1914, an advertising copywriter working for the Red River Lumber Company produced a booklet collecting and embellishing the Bunyan saga-adding, for instance, Babe the blue ox. The company’s advertising circulars gave the “legend” national prominence, popularizing both the logging industry and the stouthearted, manly lifestyle of the lumberjack.

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