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DULUTH — Like a lot of Minnesota kids, I grew up with books about Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox. The books told incredible stories of the man who could fell an entire tree with one swing of his ax, and about his bovine companion, whose footprints became the state's 10,000 lakes.

"Paul Bunyan: The Invention of an American Legend" tells the story behind those stories of the legendary logger — and it's not pretty.

After a lumber company marketer invents a host of tall tales about Bunyan, a railroad porter chides the slimy ad man, saying his invention is "a fine way to put a shine on what happened to the landscape around here."

"Now the land is bare, and Native people have been forced away from their ancestral homes," adds another passenger, "and logging here in the Great Lakes is DEAD for lack of trees."

Contributed / Astra Books for Young Readers

The new book was written and illustrated by South Carolina cartoonist Noah Van Sciver, with contributions from others including St. Paul artist Marlena Myles. According to the publisher, it's appropriate for children ages 7 and up. Earlier this month, Van Sciver and Myles joined a video call to talk about their work on the project.

"This cartoon character, this mascot, has a negative impact on Native people that actually has affected our real lives and communities," said Myles, who is Spirit Lake Dakota/Mohegan/Muscogee.

Contributed / Marlena Myles

"It's very small, but it packs a big punch," said Van Sciver about the book. "It definitely changes the way you see things."

The character Paul Bunyan emerged from oral history, as dramatized in the book. The story is set in 1914 Minnesota, where a train experiences a delay and stops in the woods. The passengers disembark and fill the time trading tales about the likes of "Big Joe" Mufferaw and a super-strong Finn named Otto Walta. Finally, the lumberman weighs in with the incredible story of "the greatest lumberjack of them all."

The true story behind the book's simplified account is that the Red River Lumber Co. with a series of pamphlets in the 1910s and 1920s. The company needed a public relations boost for a new California mill, which some consumers doubted would match the quality of the company's previous Minnesota product.

The character gained national fame, but had a special resonance in Minnesota's northwoods. While Paul and Babe were initially embraced as symbols of the industry that had provided decades of employment for local loggers, the mythical giants came to be regarded as emblems of the state generally.

Contributed / Astra Books for Young Readers

"When people are being lazy and creating a mural of Minnesota, you'll see Paul Bunyan somewhere on it, but you won't see a single Native person," said Myles. "He represents the destruction of the land and the disconnection of people from nature."

"It's pretty frightening to see what actually happened," said Van Sciver. "How much of this country was clear-cut, how much of it was destroyed."

"If someone said, 'Let's clear-cut the forest' now, people would go freaking insane," said Myles. "Back then, that's what they did."

Not only did logging transform the traditional homeland of Native people who were displaced by European settlers, Myles writes in the book, the invention of characters like Paul Bunyan obscured Indigenous stories about wood spirits that live in harmony with the very trees the giant lumberjack was laboring to fell.

"It's a little bit sad," said Myles, who describes those spirits in a section of the book featuring her art, including a Dakota map of southeastern Minnesota. Even the real-life lumberjacks, the book suggests, were ultimately working to fill the pockets of corporate executives who picked up and headed west as soon as our region's forests had been cleared away.

It's an "outdated way of thinking," Myles continued, "that you need to be so proud of working for a company. Using these mascots makes these people feel like they're part of something bigger, when really they're being used just like the land."

Northern Minnesota communities haven't celebrated Paul Bunyan as extensively as have cities like Bemidji — whose Paul and Babe statues, dating to 1937, were "the first permanent landscape feature of the folk giants," according to John Patrick Harty's of the characters' local history. In part, that's because the discovery of iron ore caused mining to displace logging as the Northland's signature extractive industry.

Contributed / Astra Books for Young Readers

Still, Bunyan made his impact on northern Minnesota as well. The St. Louis County Historical Society's J.C. Ryan Forest History Room, in Duluth's Depot, invites visitors to "follow the fascinating trail of Minnesota's forest history" and valorizes the lumberjack as "an American folk hero — a product of the logging world — created in the great white pine forests of Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota."

The room includes a display on how real-life lumberjacks spent their evenings, swapping "swamp sagas of Paul Bunyan, the agropelter, Jesus Billy, Battle Axe Anton, Drop Cake Morley and countless other real and surreal forest figures." What the room does not include is any conspicuous mention of the Indigenous people displaced by the loggers.

While Paul Bunyan is the most famous example, there are other corporate mascots that don't seem as cute when you contemplate what they represent. The Pillsbury Dough Boy and the Jolly Green Giant, for example, both stump for giants of industrial food production. It was only a few years ago that Land O'Lakes removed the "butter maiden" from its packaging.

"It's this Indian maid just happily serving you," said Myles, "after you took all her land and killed all her people."

Contributed / John Lowry

Lee Francis IV (Pueblo of Laguna) contributed an introduction to "Paul Bunyan," which also features a postscript by Deondre Smiles, a citizen of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe. The book's authors know the Paul Bunyan imagery pervasive across North America's woodlands isn't going away any time soon, but they'd like to see it understood in its proper perspective.

"We don't pretend that American legends and icons don't exist," said Van Sciver. "We continue telling the stories, but we make sure that future generations have context about what this actually was, in a way that other generations didn't."

"Minnesota really has to look at the imagery it produces," said Myles. "You can keep Paul Bunyan around as a history lesson, but we need to promote the diverse voices of Minnesota."