Minnesota History: Ad man turned Paul Bunyan into a folklore icon

Editor’s note: This is the final installment of Minnesota History.

William Barlow Laughead dropped out of high school and went to work as a lumberjack and cook in Minnesota’s North Woods in the early 1900s. But a career switch from lumbering to advertising — and a well-connected cousin — changed his course.

Still largely unknown 66 years after his death, Laughead helped popularize perhaps the biggest name in American folklore: Paul Bunyan.

Tall tales of Bunyan’s exploits date back to the lumber camps of the mid-1800s. Today, images of Bunyan statues fill Minnesota family photo albums — standing tall in onetime lumber boomtowns Bemidji, Brainerd and Akeley.

“That lovable Paul, by all accounts, was likely first born in the mind of William B. Laughead, an advertiser for the Red River Lumber Company,” writes author Willa Hammit Brown. Her new book — “Gentlemen of the Woods: Manhood, Myth, and the American Lumberjack” — will be released in 2025 by the University of Minnesota Press.

At 17, Laughead (pronounced “law-ed”) quit school and headed for the lumber camps — working from 1900 to 1908 as a cook, surveyor and timber cruiser. His cousin, Archie Walker, was the youngest son of lumber baron Thomas Barlow Walker (1840-1928) — namesake of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and founder of the city’s public library.

The 1900 Census lists Laughead as a laborer living in Akeley, roughly halfway between Brainerd and Bemidji. Now a town of 400, Akeley’s railroad depot opened in 1899 just a year before Laughead arrived. Archie’s father and Healy Akeley started their Red River Lumber Co. in 1893, building the state’s largest sawmill there in 1902. Akeley’s population nearly doubled to 3,500 by 1908 as Red River became the nation’s third-largest lumber company.

While working in the Minnesota woods, “It was [Laughead’s] delight to draw from the lumberjacks the stories about Paul Bunyan,” a 1935 Minneapolis Journal article said, “and being of an artistic flair he put on paper his conception of this novel character.”

Frank Tozer, an old logging roommate of Laughead’s, recalled in that article “many trips that we made to the camps to collect the material.”

By the 1910s, Minnesota’s white pine forests had been largely leveled, and Red River Lumber Co. shifted its sawmills to California. Laughead gave up lumber camps and moved to the Twin Cities. He married and went into advertising.

In 1914, Laughead’s cousin and Red River’s secretary, Archie Walker, commissioned him to design and illustrate about 30 postcard-sized pamphlets which intertwined ad copy with Bunyan tales that both men had heard around lumber camps. As the stories gained in popularity, Laughead moved to northern California and became the company’s advertising manager from 1922 to 1945.

At first, the Paul Bunyan promotion sputtered.

“Apparently, nobody had ever heard of Paul Bunyan,” Laughead told the Minneapolis Tribune in 1947. “As an advertising symbol, Bunyan carried no significance. Only a few loggers … had ever heard Paul’s name. … And of course he was completely unknown to the public.”

Laughead was not the first to collect and publish Bunyan stories. Paul Bunyan’s name appeared in a 1904 Duluth News Tribune article, a Detroit newspaper assembled some Bunyan tales in 1910 and American Lumberman magazine published some of the stories in verse and prose in 1914. But by 1922, when Red River Lumber repackaged Laughead’s early material into “The Marvelous Exploits of Paul Bunyan,” tales of the legendary ax-man with his blue ox spread like wildfire.

“The work was an instant success with the public, especially with children, who viewed Paul Bunyan as a national hero rather than just a folk character,” according to the Forest History Society.

Red River Lumber made Bunyan as its pitchman, copyrighting Laughhead’s illustrations that showed a moon-faced and amiable Bunyan wearing a plaid shirt and smoking a pipe beneath his long cat-like whiskers and woodsy cap. A photo from the 1920s, in the University of Minnesota Libraries Paul Bunyan Collection, shows Laughead at his desk in a white shirt and tie, smoking his own pipe beneath a framed image of his Bunyan sketch.

“The Paul of Laughead … was friendly, kind to his men and involved in good-natured japes,” Brown writes in her new book. “He had the rough constitution of a thoroughly masculine American hero with the gentlemanly demeanor and generous big heart. … He served as the industry’s figurehead, a sign that the lumber industry, unlike oil or steel, was made up not of giant corporations but of small, romantic camps filled with strong, jovial and fundamentally classless white men.”

Before his death in 1958, Laughead served on the Western Pine Association in California and painted several acclaimed forest and mill scenes in oil. But it was his cartoons of Paul Bunyan that defined his career — a fact that likely made him shrug in amazement.

“It was just an advertising job,” he said. “It never occurred to me it was ‘folklore.’ … All I wanted to do was sell lumber.”

Curt Brown’s latest book looks at 1918 Minnesota, when flu, war and fires converged: strib.mn/MN1918.