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Show ' Vx-'X r' N V i gdgsa ? jY -r1 ' 1 KWAS1ND VX- 76Co I " . rv, r a --;7CT. ; .,PAUL BUNYAN Bad Man ; - fTit - -d .. v- n.-i. .: ? Straps ms All illustrations by Eben Given, from "Here's TONY BEAVER I fi Virqinia BtlCKNER Audacity! American IjCgenilnry Heroes," by 7 Prank Shay, courtesy the nincnuluy eoninnnv. 1 pnblishers. E5y ELMO SCOTT WATSON fOR many, many years Americans " have had to look to European sources for a certain type of imagl-! imagl-! native tales to the German 5 Grimm and the Danish Andersen JUL, for their fairy tales and to the T"w Greeks, the Romans and the Scan-C'sjiUy Scan-C'sjiUy i dinavians for their legends and JsmR myths. It has. been only within ?Jt)X recent years that they have dis-&.Q-"..OJf covered that their native land Is rich In folk lore, some of which they may have learned as it was passed along by word of mouth but little of which has heretofore hereto-fore been collected and published in book form. So the recent publication of Frank Shay's "Here's Audacity! American Legendary Heroes" He-roes" by the Macaulay company Is an event of Importance to those who want "Made in America" Amer-ica" myths and legends. In the Introduction Mr. Shay tells how Americans, Amer-icans, like other people "create their giants In their own Image and endow them with powers pow-ers greater than their own . . . We are an industrial in-dustrial nation, therefore our heroes are audacious auda-cious industrialists. In the North and Northwest North-west the hero is Paul Bunyan, the lumberjack. In West Virginia he is again a lumberjack but his name Is Tony Beaver. In the Southwest he becomes a cowboy and changes his name to Pecos Bill. In Virginia he is a negro, a steel-driving steel-driving man, John Henry hy name. In the oil fields of Texas and Oklahoma he is a rotary well-digger and calls himself Kemp Morgan. On the railroads he becomes a mighty engineer and has won fame as Casey Jones. On the old windjammers, he is still the same mighty superman super-man but his alias is "Old Stormalong." Old Stormalong's full name was Alfred Bull-top Bull-top Stormalong, and when he signed his initials, on the ship's log for his first skipper, that worthy looked him over and said, "A. B. S. Able-Bodled-Sailor. By your size and strength they should measure the talents of all other sea men." As for his size the sailors disagree. Some say that he was fourteen fathoms tall and others that he was "jes'.four fathoms from the deck to the bridge of his nose." And he w:as fearless, too. One day his fellow sailors couldn't pull up the anchor. An octopus was wrapped around it and was holding it fast to the bottom of the ocean. Over the side went old Stormalong. There was a terrific struggle under the water and then he emerged triumphant. trium-phant. After the anchor was safely shipped, somebody asked Old Stormalong what he had done to the octopus. "Jes' tied his arms in knots. Double Carrick bends. It'll take him a month o' Sundays to untie 'em." But Stormalong was never satisfied. He never nev-er could find a ship big enough for him until finally he signed on board the Courser. Later when a new man was taken on, the first tiling he saw when he hit the deck was a stable full of horses, for the Courser was so big that all officers and men on watch were mounted on horses and rode about their duties on them. "Man alive, her rigging was so immense that no living man could take her in at a single glance. Her masts penterated the clouds and the top sections were on hinges so they could he bent over to let the sun and moon pass. Her sails were so big that the builders had to take all the able-bodied sailmakers out in the Sahara ; desert to find room to sew 'em." Kemp Morgan, the Texas oil driller, was like : Old Stormalong in that he too had to put , hinges In three different places on his derrick so that it could be folded up to let the sun and ! moon go by. It was so high that It took thirty men to man it, fourteen men going up, fourteen four-teen men coming down, a man on top and a A) fa- X k vs V'i John HENRY 3tee Drivinq Man man on duty. When he brought in his well, "it spouted so high they had to put a roof on it because St. Peter and all the angels were raisin' all h 1 about the oil that was shootin' through the floor of heaven. It took ten days for the oil to reach the top and then it rained down for three weeks." But super-man that he was, not all of Morgan's Mor-gan's wells, brought in oil. Occasionally he got a "duster," a dry hole. But did he abandon it as did other drillers? Not Kemp Morgan! "He knew that no Kansas farmer could ever dig a post hole in his hard bottom soil. He would get his hands around his duster hole and pull it up, four feet at a time, saw it off and ship it to Kansas. Ask any Kansas farmer what he thinks of the Kemp Morgan Portable Tost Holes." But Kemp Morgan wasn't the only Lone Slar Pfoduct of note. There was Pecos Bill who was lost. by his parents when he was a year old and grew up among the catamounts and coyotes. One day he wandered into the Golden Swan saloon, sa-loon, and there met a cowboy who told him of the joys of cow-punching. So Bill decided to quit being a coyote, put on human clothes (it took three coats, and two pairs of trousers pieced out with three or four blankets and pieces of cowhide to cover him) and became a cowboy. No horse was strong enough to carry him so he caught a huge grizzly bear and broke It to ride. And of course he became the greatest cowboy of them all. He could outshoot any other cowboy, he could outride any other cowboy and he could out-drink any other cowboy. Once Bill rode a Kansas cyclone. He rode it through three states until they got to California and when the cyclone saw it couldn't throw him it rained out from under him and that was what washed out the Grand canyon. Bill came down with a mighty thud in California and the spot where he landed Is now known as Death valley, a big hole in the ground, 300 feet below sea level. Another mighty Texan was Strap Buckner who went to that state with the first party of settlers led by Stephen F. Austin. Strap had the pleasant pleas-ant custom of knocking men down with a blow between the eyes which he would "do in the most friendly and courteous manner and with no intention in-tention of harming them." He knocked down his friends and his enemies, he knocked down Indians In-dians and grizzly bears and wildcats and buffalo. But the greatest fight in which he ever engaged was his battle with the Devil and in that fight for once in his life he was defeated. Since Strap Buckner was a heavy drinker the stories about him are something In the nature of moral allegories alle-gories and the Devil with whom he fought and hy whom he was worsted was the Demon Rum. Of him, Mr. Shay says: "Strap Buckner joins the great army of avengers. He will be likened to AngoulafTre, the giant Sarasen, who had the treoih of thirty men and whose cudgel was the solid trunk of an oak tree. The Tower of Pisa lost Its perpendicularity by the weight of thi giant leaning against it." Whole books have been written about Paul Bunyan, the super lumberjack, so of course he gets considerable space In "Here's Audacity I" Most of the facts about his youth and his logging operations on the Big Onion river in Michigan are well known. But some of the other facts about his life as given by Mr. Shay seem to be new. For instance, after he used Babe, the Blue Ox (Babe, you remember, measured forty axe handles and a plug of Star tobacco between the eyes), to straighten out a winding logging road. Paul discovered that he had fourteen miles of road left over. So he rolled up the fourteen miles and sold It to the city of Chicago for a boulevard. And It is one of the shameful things about that wicked city that they call it Michigan Michi-gan boulevard in honor of the state from which it came and not Paul Bunyan boulevard in honor of the greatest lumberjack that ever lived! Then there was the time that Jim Hill, the builder of the Great Northern railroad, decided to build a barbed wire fence along the right-of-way to keep the tramps off his trains. So he gave the job of building the 1,800-mile fence to Paul Bunyan. He soon found that It was going to take too long to get through with the work so he sent up to Montana to a man who had trained gophers for two thousand post-hole-dig ging gophers. Then he sent an order to another man who specialized in beavers and ordered five hundred of these animals. He set the beavers to work cutting six-inch trees Jnto six-foot lengths and set the gophers to work digging holes. "The gophers were Innocent and when one had finished digging his hole he prepared to make It his home. Then Paul would come along with a post in one hand, drag the gopher out of his hole with one hand and shove the post In. There was nothing for the poor gopher to do but to begin work on a new home. The gophers got pretty mad but who cares what a gopher thinks?" Paul didn't and he got his fence done in plenty of time. As for Tony Beaver In West Virginia they will tell you that Tony who carries on his logging log-ging operations on Eel river Is as great a lumberman lum-berman as Paul Bunyan. But logging wasn't his only Interest; he was also a grower of the biggest watermelons in the world which were so big that by whittling out the insides, cutting doors and windows and building fire places and allowing the rinds to dry out in the sun, they made wonderful houses. As for the other super-Americans one Is black and the other is red. There is John Henry, the negro steel driving man who was so fast with his 12-pound hammer that he was known to wear out two handles in one shift and he always had to have a boy with a pail of cold water standing by so that he could keep his hammer cool. But when steam driven drills came on the market John Henry declared that such new fangled inventions in-ventions were not necessary. He said he could beat a steam drill and In a contest that was specially arranged he did beat it. But he killed himself In doing it for after the contest was over John Henry "laid down his hammah an' he died." Then there is Kwasind, the Hercules of the American Indians, of whom Longfellow wrote In Hiawatha. It was Kwasind who filled his pipe with tobacco, kindled it with a bolt of lightning, and then emptied the live coals into the sea. For three days be did this and on the fourth day there rose up an Island which Is now known as Nantucket Island off the coast or Massachusetts. Massa-chusetts. This and many oilier marvels did "lhe very strong man Kwasind, he lhe strongest of all mortals." lira by Wesurn Nowipupor Union.) |