Flutterby™! : Paul Bunyan

Racket MN: What's the deal with Paul Bunyan? From the subject of ribald tales in logger camps to a mascot to sell lumber to...

University of Wisconsin professor Kasey Keeler describes this as settler nostalgia, a process by which settlers to an area create an imagined past of the region to which they can connect. If Paul Bunyan, a white settler himself, created the rivers and lakes that white settlers now vacation in, then it follows that the land was made for them. How could Ojibwe or Dakota people have lived for hundreds or thousands of years in a landscape that was custom built by a giant lumberjack and a blue ox?