Paul Bunyan Lived Here
Family stories and scholarly research into the source of the Paul Bunyan image has led to its linkage to Pete Dick, an early resident of St. Anthony Township a century ago and a logging contractor in northern Minnesota. Dick owned a large acreage on Silver Lake and built a house on the lake which is still in place just east of Stinson Blvd on Silver Lane. This story was brought to SAV Historical by Nicole Gubbins Belting, who grew up and lives close by in New Brighton and provided a wealth of information including family lore of her great grandfather Peter Dick as well as many photos and documentation of the Paul Bunyan stories that were later developed including a newspaper clipping of a 1972 letter to the editor by Eva Dick Clemens. Eva was a daughter of Pete and great aunt to Nicole. This letter identifies William Barlow Laughead as a publicist and as the creator of the image of Paul Bunyan which was used to show the “bigness and sturdiness of the Red River Lumber Co.” She identifies Laughead as a cousin of Archie Walker who owned Red River Lumber Co. and gave tribute to Archie as the “godfather of Paul Bunyan” for “us[ing] the idea for the purpose of selling lumber.”
John Patrick Harty in his doctoral dissertation, “Legendary Landscapes: A Cultural Geography of the Paul Bunyan and Blue Ox Phenomena of the Northwoods” (Kansas State University, 2007), wrote “W.B. Laughead worked as an advertiser for the Red River Lumber Company in the early 1900s and had first heard the tales of Paul and the Blue Ox when passing through some of the camps of northern Minnesota.” Laughead created trademark images, ads and pamphlets advertising Red River Lumber’s California Pine when it moved west from Minneapolis in 1913 and is “widely credited with being the spark for the popularization of Paul” and moved Paul out of the woods and into mainstream culture.
W.H. Hutchinson, in his 1963 book “The Cesarean Delivery of Paul Bunyan” quotes Laughead as saying that when he was looking for inspiration for a caricature of Paul: “The general expression of it was a memory of the face of a logging contractor in Minnesota, Pete Dick, one of the greatest fellows that ever lived. The moustache that stuck out sideways—I knew a loud-mouthed French cook in the camps by the name of Charlie Revoir and he had a moustache like that and I kind of stuck the two together.’” Hutchinson also noted that Laughead "clothed Paul in a blanket-coat with a sash in the habitant fashion" ..."as he thought the stories may have a French-Canadian origin as well" [original source of quotes: Forest History Foundation, Inc. St. Paul, MN, “Oral History Interview with W.B. Laughead, Susanville, California, September 17 and 18, 1957 by W. H. Hutchinson”, page 6].