We all know how fun it is to read a tall tale. I can think of no tale taller than that of Paul Bunyan, the huge lumberjack who, along with his blue ox, Babe, cleared the land for the new settlers. But did you know that Paul got married and had a family? I certainly didn’t until I read this picture book.
It seems that one day, while Paul was out clearing a road in the forest of Kentucky, he noticed that the ground was shaking, and he saw a hole in the side of a mountain. He did some investigating, and found a giant woman working her way through the mountain with a pickax. She was looking for her lucky wishbone, which she had dropped through a crevice in the earth. Paul was smitten, and asked her to marry him. Her name was Carrie McIntie, and in her search for the wishbone, she dug two hundred miles and uncovered a crystal chamber. Thus the famous “Mammoth Cave” in Kentucky came to be.
After the wedding, the Bunyans settled down and started a family. They had a son, named Little Jean, and a girl, named Teeny.
One day Teeny got a bunch of syrup in her hair and needed a way to get it all washed out. So Paul took her to the Niagara River, dug out a hole to let the water cascade down, and set his daughter in the newly formed Niagara Falls to wash her hair. It worked great!
On another day, Paul went to work in Montana and took Little Jean with him. Wanting Jean to stay out of harm’s way, he put him in a barren canyon in Utah to play. When he came back for his son, he found that Jean had taken his little shovel and dug the land into creative shapes. This is how we came to have Bryce Canyon.
But Jean couldn’t walk home; his shoes were full of sand. So he sat down to shake them out, and the sand blew a state away. This is how the Great Sand Dunes of Colorado were created.
But that wasn’t the end of adventure for the family. While on vacation, Little Jean took his pickax and sliced some chunks out of a fifty-mile stretch along the California coast. When Ma Bunyan saw what had happened, she was pretty upset. “What’s the big idea, sir?” she asked her sheepish son, and to this day, that area is known as Big Sur.
Did you know that the Rocky Mountains were built by the Bunyans to keep their children away from the ocean? And that Old Faithful was created so Ma would have a regular source of hot water for washing her dishes? It’s simply amazing!
You’ll learn all these “facts” plus a few more in this fanciful book by Audrey Wood.
(This book was published in 1996 by Blue Sky Press and was illustrated by David Shannon.)
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