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For young people and anyone else who loves West Coast mythology, tall tales, stories of the woods, and just plain fun.
About the author
Tom Henry was born in Duncan, BC in 1961. He earned his BA in history from the University of Victoria, and has worked on tugboats, in logging camps and owned his own firewood business. A former staff writer for
Monday Magazine, Henry has authored several books including
Westcoasters: Boats that Built BC (winner of the Bill Duthie Booksellers' Choice Award),
The Good Company: An Affectionate History of the Union Steamships (winner of the BC Historical Federation's Lieutenant Governor's Award),
Dogless in Metchosin,
The Ideal Dog and Other Delusions,
Paul Bunyan on the West Coast and
Small City in a Big Valley: The Story of Duncan. Henry's audiotape of readings from
Dogless in Metchosin is popular with listeners who know him from his CBC Radio "Country Life" column. He lives in Victoria, BC.
Summary
"Paul Bunyan was in BC, that much we can prove. For evidence there is the Inside Passage, the Gulf Islands, Mount Baker and canned meat." So begins Paul Bunyan on the West Coast, a chronicle of Paul's last adventures, when he worked his way across the continent and finally reached the great conifer forests of the West Coast. It was here he faced his greatest challenges: fallers of old-growth coast timber would often die of old age before they finished making a cut and the next generation would have to finish it off.
Half Canadian, half American and half Scottish, Bunyan was so big he combed his beard with a pine tree, and he fed salesmen and lawyers to his pet moosehound, Elmer. The Inside Passage was dug when he went up north and dragged a glacier back down the coast, and Mount Baker wound up in its present location when Babe, Paul's giant blue ox, got tired of being tied to it in eastern Washington and moved it a few miles.
