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www.mybaycity.com November 28, 2013
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AN AMERICAN DREAM! Canadian Video Includes Bay City's Paul Bunyan

November 28, 2013       Leave a Comment
By: Dave Rogers

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Damien Robitaille, Canadian singer-songwriter, who hosts a new video "An American Dream."
 
The Paul Bunyan Trophy is now located in East Lansing after being in Ann Arbor in 2012.

The Canadians are the latest to discover, and explore, how Paul Bunyan came into being.

Last year a television crew from Eureka! Productions of Quebec showed up in Bay City as part of a national tour seeking Canadian roots in America.

The crew headed by Claude Godbout and Bruno Boulianne filmed an interview of yours truly, as author of a history of the folklore here, with a singer-songwriter of some note in Canada, Damien Robitaille.

The talented Robitaille strums his guitar, sings and muses his way around the country in the two-hour video that awaits a distribution channel.

The video is called An American Dream. Bay City, Oscoda, and Ossineke were among stops from Maine to California where traces of Canadian culture in America were documented, including Detroit, New York City and Los Angeles.

The Canadians wanted to know how the Paul Bunyan legend came to be, and were astounded -- as are many -- that he did not materialize out of thin air, he was based on Fabian "Saginaw Joe" Fournier, very much a real man and one who migrated from Quebec to Bay City about 1865.

Why did many Canadian natives migrate here? The same story as the one here emerged in Lewiston, Maine, in Minnesota, and other places in the U.S. There were jobs in Bay City and mid-Michigan, mainly in lumbering, causing the Canadians to migrate south.

The video includes dozens of interviews with Canadian immigrants, and their offspring, as Robitaille moves about the country. The host even found a whole passel of the Robitaille clan in California where they had a joyful family reunion.

On the night of November 6, 1875, on the Water Street ferryboat dock in Bay City, Fabian Joe Fournier was knocked over the head and into the pages of history.

The brawling, Quebec born lumberjack, emerged from American imaginations as Paul Bunyan, perhaps the most famous folklore figure of all time.

How did this happen?

And why?

Because of the American need for heroes, and the love of tall tales stemming from Native Americans, Joe Fournier was transformed to Paul Bunyan, the greatest lumberjack of all time.

First, newspaper stories in the Saginaw News glorified Fournier's exploits in the woods as a lumber camp boss and champion log chopper -- a terrible timber feller described in the 1993 book "Paul Bunyan: How a Terrible Timber Feller Became a Legend."

Then, in 1906, James T. McGillivray wrote an article in the Oscoda Press that first mentioned Paul Bunyan, a name used by lumberjacks telling tall tales around campfires. Then came a famous poem in American Lumberman magazine, a Detroit News article by McGillivray in 1910, and a book by James Stevens, Seattle lumberjack author.

After Esther Shepard's 1925 book that was doubtful about Bunyan's place of origin Stevens, spent nearly all of 1930 in Bay City researching the legend. He stayed at the Kimbark Hotel on Water Street, a site now home to the northern end of Mill End Lofts. His book, The Saginaw Paul Bunyan, was proclaimed the definitive work on the first home of the legendary lumberjack -- the Saginaw Valley and specifically Bay City.

The local book published by Historical Press in 1993 is not another in the countless fanciful stories about Paul Bunyan streaming out of writers' minds and typewriters for the past century. It is a folklore history, documenting how Joe Fournier became Paul Bunyan.

It is a tale of how American imaginations built their working man hero, an inspirational model for laborers of the day and children of all ages.

Every year the trophy for the winner of the Michigan vs. Michigan State football game takes home the Paul Bunyan trophy. That trophy appeared in 1953 when State joined the Big Ten.

"Paul Bunyan's Axe" goes to the winner of the Minnesota-Wisconsin football game, as it has every year since 1948, perhaps the height of the national fever over the lumberjack.

Don't buy the myth that Paul Bunyan is a myth. If you read the book, you'll know he was a real man who lived, and died, in Bay City. And created a legend that will never die.

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Dave Rogers

Dave Rogers is a former editorial writer for the Bay City Times and a widely read,
respected journalist/writer in and around Bay City.
(Contact Dave Via Email at carraroe@aol.com)

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