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The Life and Origins of Paul Bunyan: Part One Brigham Young University BYU ScholarsArchive Theses and Dissertations 2009-12-03 The Life and Origins of Paul Bunyan: Part One Michael Ryan Croker Brigham Young University - Provo Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons BYU ScholarsArchive Citation Croker, Michael Ryan, "The Life and Origins of Paul Bunyan: Part One" (2009). Theses and Dissertations. 1937. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/1937 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by BYU ScholarsArchive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of BYU ScholarsArchive. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. The Life and Origins of Paul Bunyan: Volume 1 By M. Ryan Croker A thesis submitted to the faculty of Brigham Young University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts Department of English Brigham Young University December 2009 Croker ii ABSTRACT The Life and Origins of Paul Bunyan: Volume 1 M. Ryan Croker Department of English Master of Fine Arts This novel is a chronicle of the early days of Paul Bunyan, an important figure in American folk culture. While Paul Bunyan is a central figure in the tale, the story itself is told through the eyes of Clay Filinger, a young man from the backwoods of Kentucky who leaves his home on a journey of American exploration. Clay reaches Boston, where he hires on to work for John Patrick, a wealthy merchant headed to Maine in search of pirate treasure. John is travelling with his nephew, Randolph Bunyan. Along with them are two more hired men: Stokes, a foul riverman, and Silas Jefferson, a smooth-talking man with criminal intentions. As they travel up the coast, they encounter a shipwreck with one survivor, a pregnant Irish girl named Muirenn. Muirenn reveals to Clay that she is, in fact several hundred years old, having been trapped as a girl by the King of the Fair Folk. It is this supernatural king who is the father of her child. Clay, not wanting anything to do with these events, flees as soon as possible. He is turned back, however, by threats from a pooka, a mysterious creature. Shortly thereafter, Clay confronts a mysterious and powerful being called Liath Luacra. During the conflict, Muirenn gives birth to a boy named Paul, who is adopted by Randolph Bunyan. She then dies. The men finally find themselves in The Aroostook Valley of Maine. John Patrick continues looking for his treasure, and Clay does what he can to protect Paul. After some months, Silas Jefferson rides into town with a band of armed men, looking for Patrick’s treasure. Clay fights him, and Jefferson is killed, but promptly possessed by Liath Luacra. The pooka is forced to become a huge blue ox while Clay and the others flee. Finding themselves on the other side of a river, Clay and his companions eventually are forced into a final confrontation with Constance Jefferson, who came with her brother, and finally with Liath Luacra. With luck and supernatural help, Constance is defeated and Liath Luacra is forced to flee. Keywords: Paul Bunyan, Maine, Aroostook War Croker iii CRITICAL INTRODUCTION The Life and Origins of Paul Bunyan: Volume 1 M. Ryan Croker Department of English Master of Fine Arts My first experience with the folklore surrounding Paul Bunyan was with the Disney cartoon produced in 1958. The deep, booming voice of Thurl Ravenscroft is something I still remember, even though it has been many years since I’ve seen the cartoon. I remember thinking that it was an almost otherworldly voice, something that made Paul Bunyan linger in my memories longer than other characters from similar cartoons. Around the same period of my childhood, my mother gave me an old copy of a book of Greek and Roman mythology that she had read as a child. I was very taken with the stories of gods and heroes, incorporating them in my play as other children might incorporate popular television characters. I compared the gods to superheroes like Superman, or the Flash, melding them into my own personal mythology. It is no surprise, then, that when I found a book of American “tall tales” I could easily fit them into the world of gods and heroes. These characters, like Mike Fink, Stormalong, and yes, Paul Bunyan, were, to me, simply the demigods of Americana. As an undergraduate in college, I was a history major. Progressing through my course of study, I became more and more interested in the folkloric aspect of history, the melding of beliefs and ideas to reflect new cultural identities. For example, my capstone paper in the History program was an exploration of the Cibola myth. Cibola is the name given to the legendary seven cities of gold, a legend made most famous by the Coronado expedition. I posited that the Cibola Croker iv myth was the result of a cultural blending that began soon after the Spanish conquest of Mexico. There was the legend of Antilia, which told of seven Portuguese bishops fleeing from Iberia during the Moorish invasion in the early 700’s (Weaver 25). There was the Aztec legend of Aztlán, their mythical homeland, which consisted of seven caves (Zorita 145). It was these myths, along with several others, including ancient traditions connected to the number seven (Reynolds 669), and the medieval legend of Prester John (Nowell 435), which, in my theory, joined together to create the Cibola myth; one strong enough to send Coronado and hundreds of men chasing a dream. It is this idea of exploring mythological origins that led me to want to look at the American myth of Paul Bunyan in a new way. This is not to say that my novel is claiming to be a true understanding of the various myths involved, rather, my novel is an attempt to incorporate different mythologies into a new understanding of Paul Bunyan. It is, in other words, a new take on an old character as well as an attempt to demonstrate the usefulness of combining mythologies in order to understand them. This is, of course, a piece of fiction, but fiction can be very useful for exploring mythology as opposed to a historical or folkloric approach. My original intention was to explore the entire life of Paul Bunyan in one novel. However, as I wrote, the story became more and more interesting and complex, forcing me to divide it into pieces, the first piece ending when Paul is less than a year old. This is not to say that I have failed at my goals, rather, quite the opposite. By focusing on the origins of Paul Bunyan in such detail, I was able to combine myth and history in a satisfying way as well as being able to lay the groundwork for future volumes in the Paul Bunyan saga. I began with a look at what could be considered defining American impulses of the nineteenth century. There is of course, the notion of Manifest Destiny, the idea that the United Croker v States would eventually fill the North American continent. This idea was very important during the nineteenth century, showing up in political campaigns and in the popular media of the time. However, I decided to look beyond this to the writings of Fredrick Jackson Turner. Turner was a historian who, at the 1893 World’s Fair, read his “Frontier Thesis” which claimed that America’s westward expansion functioned as a “safety valve.” In his own words, “As has been indicated, the frontier is productive of individualism. Complex society is precipitated by the wilderness into a kind of primitive organization based on the family. The tendency is anti-social. It produces antipathy to control, and particularly to any direct control” (Turner 33). This is to say that America’s frontier created individuals who looked at individuality as a virtue and rejected being told what to do. If they disagreed with prevailing cultural norms or taxes, they could simply pack up and move. If these ideas are viewed as a sort of American myth, it is possible to see how these ideas might work well with other ideas. After all, the myth of Manifest Destiny is the offspring of Christian beliefs and doctrines, particularly within the cultures of the predominately Protestant groups that immigrated to America. Likewise, the myth of the staunchly independent American has been around longer than the United States and while Turner helped to explain it, the idea still persists in many forms today. It is this idea that most influenced the creation of my main character, Clay Filinger. He is a product of the frontier, having grown up in Kentucky, a state which, in the early nineteenth century, was the frontier, settled by and producing individuals defined by their individuality. Jackson went on to describe this type of American by saying, Croker vi The works of travelers along each frontier from colonial days onward describe certain common traits, and these traits have, while softening down, still persisted as survivals in the place of their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded. The result is that to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy, that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom—these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier (Turner 38).
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