Richard Dorson would have loved this book. Keep in mind that Dorson’s Ph.D. from Harvard was in the History of American Civilization, so he was steeped in American social and cultural history, but his lifelong project was to persuade other historians of the colonial and post-colonial United States to look to folklore for writing the history of ordinary people. Willa Hammitt Brown’s book is an American Studies book, and her topic—the lumberjack—permits her to tap several branches of American historical writing and to make a significant contribution to each branch.
At its heart, Brown’s book is about capitalism and workers, business history and labor history, a story that cannot be told without attention to social class. It is also about struggles over the wilderness, the environment, and the conservation of natural resources. This book contributes to the relatively recent trend in American historiography to chart the ideological dimensions of the history of American memory, the social construction of a past that never was. And Dorson is a player in this book.
Brown uses a wide range of documentary evidence to reconstruct the nineteenth- and twentieth-century images of the lumberjack (called loggers in the Pacific Northwest). She makes skillful use of newspapers and periodicals, memoirs, journals, oral testimony, and period photographs to tell her story. On the one hand, there is plenty of evidence for reconstructing many “truths” about the men who did dirty and dangerous work in the forests of the Great Lakes region. At the same time, she documents the increasingly romantic view of the lumberjack as an American cultural hero. Assisting this transformation was the twentieth-century view that the wild woods had a revitalizing effect upon tourists who escaped their urban life to experience the North Woods, beckoned by the appealing image and mythology of Paul Bunyan. By mid-century the Northwoods boosters had created elaborate festivals and lumberjack contests for the tourists.
Hers is a very savvy look at the image of the lumberjack introduced to folklorists a half century ago by Richard Dorson (Bloodstoppers and Bearwalkers: Folk Traditions of the Upper Peninsula, 1972), and at Dorson’s invention of the term “fakelore” regarding folk heroes like Paul Bunyan. She returns often to the notion of “fakelore” as she describes in detail—using an array of printed and visual evidence—the conscious strategies employed by lumber companies and community boosters to construct a verbal and visual image of Paul Bunyan in order to further a social, political, or economic interest.
Still keeping the workings of capitalism in mind, in later chapters Brown explores in detail how local boosters, politicians, and journalists transformed the lumberjack into a romantic hero, not unlike the romantic view of the cowboy that came together in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. One sleight-of-hand in this transformation, argues Brown, makes the lumberjack a hero of environmentalism.
An overarching theme in Brown’s book is that the story of “the gentlemen of the woods” is an example of modern American mythmaking, the creation of large, seductive stories that have little to do with the realities on the ground. Some folklorists will chafe at her use of the term “myth” to describe the larger stories people tell one another, but this is an American Studies book that uses folklore to help construct in the mass-mediated popular culture, formulaic narratives about lumberjacks and the people of the Northwoods, narratives that serve political, social, and economic interests. The folklorist reading this book should understand that historians have in mind this meaning of “mythologies.”
Testimony to the breadth of Brown’s book is that it touches upon so many specialties in writing American history and, perhaps, in teaching American history with folklore. The use of folklore is one of those specialties, but, as I indicated above, Brown’s book taps scholarship in regional history, business history, labor history, tourism studies, environmental studies, popular culture studies, and masculinity studies, at least. As I said: Richard Dorson would love this book.
[Review Length: 660 words • Review posted on September 12, 2025]