DLTK's Crafts for Kids
The Tall Tales of Paul Bunyan

When Paul was born it took five storks to deliver him to his mother and father. Paul's parents had to have 14 cows in order to get enough milk to feed their gigantic baby.

Paul's parents were a bit worried what the townsfolk would think of their gigantic baby boy, so they built a huge cradle and placed it in the ocean off the coast of Maine.The waves would rock Paul to sleep at night.

One day, Paul began to jump up and down in his cradle and it created a 70-foot tidal wave that washed away many towns and villages.

After that Paul's parents moved into the woods of Maine, so everyone would be safer. As a boy, Paul spent his time in the woods helping his father cut down trees. Even as a boy he had the strength of a dozen men. One day, the man at the sawmill refused to buy the Bunyan logs because he said they were too large for his saws. Paul chained up the logs and pulled them upstream back to camp all by himself.

Once when plowing the fields, Paul came to the end and there wasn’t room to turn around. Paul solved the problem by simply picking up the plow and the two oxen and turning them around and starting the other way.

When Paul was a boy, he was fast as lightning. He could blow out a candle at night and hop into bed before it was dark. One time Paul's quickness got the better of him. He shot a bear and he was so anxious to see if he'd hit it- that he ran as fast as he could up to the bear, but he outran the bullet and he got hit in the seat of his pants by his own buckshot.

Paul found babe during the winter of the blue snow. Paul was out looking for firewood by his cabin and he saw two ears sticking out of the snow. He dug out the animal and saw that it was a baby ox. He decided to place the ox in his pocket and took him back to the cabin to warm him up. Since it was a baby, he named him babe. Even after he thawed, babe still kept his blue colour.

Babe grew very fast. One night Paul put babe in a barn because it looked like it was gonna rain. The next morning the barn was gone and so was Babe. Paul found Babe with the barn on his back grazing in a field.

Babe was very useful in many ways. For instance- Paul had a logging road that was very long and twisted. Finally he tied one end of the road to a stump and attached the other end with a big chain to Babe. Babe dug his hooves into the ground and tugged and strained until he pulled the entire road straight.

When winter came Babe had trouble finding enough to eat because everything was covered with snow.He began to lose weight and became sick with a fever. Big ‘Ole, the blacksmith, made babe a custom pair of green sunglasses. With the sunglasses on, Babe thought all the snow was grass and he returned to health and strength once more.

And those are some of the fun tall tales of Paul Bunyan.