True or not, these legends inspire us

Parents never have an easy time. Children are always asking questions that demand scientific answers — questions like "Why is the sky blue?"

But for the past 100 years, American parents have had an easy alternative when small children ask complex questions about geology, like "How was the Grand Canyon formed?" and "Where do the Great Lakes come from?" Instead of explaining erosion and glacial retreat, they can simply quote from a popular folk legend.

Paul Bunyan

Paul Bunyan was a lumberjack of enormous size whose actions carved all the wonders of the American outdoors. Together with Babe, a giant blue ox, he cleared the American Midwest for farming.

Walking around Minnesota, Paul and Babe made deep tracks, which filled up with rainwater and became the 10,000 lakes for which the state is famous. Paul dug the nearby Great Lakes for Babe to drink from. He formed the Grand Canyon while walking out West, dragging his axe behind him.

I personally found the Bunyan stories terrifying, as I imagined the danger of being crushed beneath his oversized boots. But in Michigan and Minnesota, he is a gentle colossus often remembered in roadside statuary.

Some sources say Paul Bunyan was the subject of "tall tales" told by Midwestern lumberjacks around their campfires. Others name journalist James MacGillivray as the author of a newspaper story about Bunyan in 1906 and a collection of Bunyan stories in 1910.

Pecos Bill and John Henry

Other invented legends, or "fakelore", soon followed.

In Texas, a giant cowboy known as Pecos Bill was said to have been raised by coyotes. As an adult, he tied rattlesnakes into lassos, roped a whole herd of cattle at once, and rode a tornado like a bronco. Author Edward O'Reilly published these stories in a magazine in 1916, then as a book in 1923.

John Henry, the leader of a gang of West Virginia railroad workers, appeared in a 1931 novel by Roark Bradford. Henry was so powerful that he could drive in railroad spikes with a single swing of his giant hammer. When his boss bought a steam-powered machine to do the same task, Henry tried to prove the machine was unnecessary, in order to save his job. He summoned all his strength to show he was faster than the machine, but he collapsed and died.

The age of giants

Why did all these stories about hard-working "big men" become popular around the same time? I don't know, but I have a few theories.

1. Industrial Age nostalgia for the ways of the pioneers. The land had been tamed and settled, and all the gaps closed. Arizona became the 48th and last state in the continental U.S. in 1912.

2. Peak immigration around 1910. The legends might have been a way of reminding people that the early settlers had worked just as hard as recent immigrants.

3. America's awakening as a global power. The defeat of Spain in the Spanish-American War (1898) and of Germany in World War I (1918) contributed to strong feelings of nationalism and a dislike of all things European.

Poet Carl Sandburg, for example, decided that stories about princes and castles weren't relevant to American children, so he wrote his own American fairy tales. His Rootabaga Stories, published in 1922, took place in farm country.