Birth of Paul Bunyan Maine Tall Tales retold by S. E. Schlosser Now I hear tell that Paul Bunyan was born in Bangor, Maine. It took five giant storks to deliver Paul to his parents. His first bed was a lumber wagon pulled by a team of horses. His father had to drive the wagon up to the top of Maine and back whenever he wanted to rock the baby to sleep. As a newborn, Paul Bunyan could hollar so loud he scared all the fish out of the rivers and streams. All the local frogs started wearing earmuffs so they wouldn't go deaf when Paul screamed for his breakfast. His parents had to milk two dozen cows morning and night to keep his milk bottle full and his mother had to feed him ten barrels of porrige every two hours to keep his stomach from rumbling and knocking the house down. Within a week of his birth, Paul Bunyan could fit into his father's clothes. After three weeks, Paul rolled around so much during his nap that he destroyed four square miles of prime timberland. His parents were at their wits' end! They decided to build him a raft and floated it off the coast of Maine. When Paul turned over, it caused a 75 foot tidal wave in the Bay of Fundy. They had to send the British Navy over to Maine to wake him up. The sailors fired every canon they had in the fleet for seven hours straight before Paul Bunyan woke from his nap! When he stepped off the raft, Paul accidentally sank four war ships and he had to scramble around sccooping sailors out of the water before they drowned. After this incident, Paul's parents decided the East was just too plumb small for him, and so the family moved to Minnesota.
There are competing claims of course, while the truth is likely that he was born entirely in people's imaginations. Still, Bangor has a Paul Bunyan statue and I think I read that they recently commissioned someone to erect a Babe the Blue Ox statue next to it.
At the age of seven, Paul Bunyan was my first crush. I thought he was real, and cows did come in different colors. We had a Blue Tick hound at the time.
What other stories of Paul Bunyan have you heard? I grew up in the Midwest, and I was told that he spent his lumbering years in the Midwest and the Dakotas. Imagine my surprise to find that he was from Bangor, Maine.