Paul Bunyan Vacationland

Double sided brochure featuring a large pictorial map of the “Land of Blue Sky Waters.”

According to lore, the 10,000 lakes of Minnesota were made by the footprints of Paul Bunyan and his faithful blue ox, Babe. His home varied from place to place across the Upper Midwest, wherever tall tales were told by lumberjacks around the campfires of remote logging camps.

This map, looking to capitalize on the fame of the American folk hero, advertises for the Paul Bunyan Vacationland in central Minnesota. The association with the rugged outdoors is emphasized with numerous vignettes exploring the mythology behind the legendary lumberjack – Babe drinking the Mississippi dry and Paul using a pine tree as a fishing pole are just two examples.

The upper right features a notable tale in which “black boys with bacon slabs on their feet greased Paul’s pancake griddle.” This story can be traced to one of the earliest printed stories of Bunyan, in a 1904 edition of the Duluth News Tribune. However, that editorial omitted all mention of race, which implies this later telling was injected with the racist caricature.

The map was originally drawn in 1949 and was copywritten by the Lakeland Color Press. It was included as part of a brochure printed in 1958 by the Paul Bunyan Vacationland, Inc. – a regional travel association promoting tourism to the ‘Land of the Blue Sky Waters’ in central Minnesota.