ything except coffee out of sourdough. When Shot Gunderson
put his winter's cut of logs into Round River and then drove them around
its whole course three times before he found that it did not have any
outlet, Sam made up a large batch of sourdough and dumped it into the
river and when it got to working it lifted the logs over the divide. But
Sam was seriously injured one day when his sourdough barrel blew up and
Big Joe was employed. His famous Black Duck dinner was so fine that none
of the American loggers cared to eat again for five weeks; but he could
only satisfy the French-Canadians by dumping a car load of split peas in a
boiling lake.

The most authentic group of Bunyan stories came from the Lake States where
they originated. A comparison of these older stories with the newer ones
from the Pacific Coast shows a marked difference. (And it is noteworthy
that the Bunyan tales never had much of a vogue in the South.) According
to the Lake States version, Bunyan always stayed in the logging camps or
on the drives, he attended strictly to business, while according to the
Western tales he branched out into all sorts of enterprises. The Lake
States tales were the product of the true, the professional lumberjack,
the winter recluse, who was shut in with others like minded with himself
and with none but his kind as auditors. The Western logger was not so
exclusive a type. There were many of the professional loggers, but there
were many men in the woods whose main interest was elsewhere, and so the
story teller did not have such a select audience. There were other
interests in the West to divert Bunyan from his real job and naturally it
suffered in consequence.

It was perhaps inevitable, but none the less unfortunate, that the Bunyan
stories did not reach the outside world directly from the Lake States
story tellers, but first passed through the hands or mouths of the Western
loggers. Of all the publications perhaps W. B. Laughead, in _Paul Bunyan
and His Big Blue Ox_, published by the Red River Lumber Company of
Minneapolis, has most nearly preserved the Lake States flavor of the
stories. Certainly James Stevens and Esther Shepperd in their books of the
same title, _Paul Bunyan_, have more nearly portrayed the Western Bunyan
than the Eastern one. The same is largely true of the poems here given.
They take the Western point of view, and most of them are Western stories.
The first of these represents the Western conflict b