The Legend of Logging: Timber Industry Culture and the Rise of Paul Bunyan, 1870-1945

This dissertation is a history of Paul Bunyan, America's most famous fictional lumberjack. As folksy as Bunyan may seem, the character became popular not in the premodern past, but in the twentieth century as a corporate mascot. Plucked from obscurity in Great Lakes logging camps, Bunyan rose to prominence as an advertisement for the Red River Lumber Company. In this study, I ask why one of the nation's largest and most advanced lumber companies chose to promote itself with this old-fashioned symbol. What did a modern corporation gain by associating itself with a premodern lumberjack? I answer this question by situating the history of Paul Bunyan within two overlapping contexts: the business history of the lumber industry and the history of modern marketing and mass media.

Paul Bunyan helped the lumber industry reconcile an important contradiction that lay at the heart of capitalist expansion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Extractive corporations needed to bind themselves to places closely enough to justify owning and exhausting their resources, yet these corporations also needed to maintain enough distance to leave without taking responsibility for the consequences of their actions. Bunyan allowed Red River and the timber industry as a whole transform its history of colonizing and depleting forested lands into a folksy tale about a jolly giant in an idyllic wilderness. Paul Bunyan's mythic camp never seemed to change, and neither did its location. In it, there was no resource exhaustion or environmental degradation, no capital flight or community abandonment, no class tension or labor unrest. In Bunyan's world, a cast of quirky, collegial characters chopped trees for fun, and they did so without any long-term impacts on the nation's forests.

The cultural work Bunyan performed for the lumber industry was significant. Lumber companies used nostalgic representations of logging to consolidate power over their timberlands. Mass culture cloaked logging camps in a flannel shroud that few outside viewers could penetrate. As such, Bunyan bolstered corporations' authority over worksites by obscuring the actual work of industrial extraction. This cultural victory represents an important chapter in the history of American capitalism.