Curt Brown, Paul Bunyan, and Incorrect Memory

I've been a fan of Curt Brown's Minnesota history column in the Sunday Star Tribune for a while (past posts here). I just learned that today was his last column (gift link).

The subject of the column is Paul Bunyan, and more specifically William Laughead, a one-time lumberjack who later went into advertising for lumber companies. He created illustrations of Bunyan and compiled and added to stories he'd heard from his coworkers during his days in the woods. 

As Doug Mack said on BlueSky,

Paul Bunyan, the genial mascot of the North Woods, is lumber company propaganda meant to whitewash settler colonialism and environmental destruction.

Which seems obvious to me now, but when I was growing up in Upstate New York, was invisible to me. I had the confusion that Paul Bunyan had built the Erie Canal and was therefore a New York thing, somehow confusing his ox with Sal, the mule named in the Erie Canal song ("Low Bridge"). It seems as though I was taught in school that the song was about Paul Bunyan, but maybe that's an invented memory.

I have just disabused myself of the notion: The canal song never mentions Paul Bunyan, or even building the canal. It's about a mule-driver who works along the canal. I also assumed the song was older than the Minnesota-era of Bunyan lore, since the canal is from the mid-1800s, but it turns out it's fairly contemporaneous. The song was first recorded in 1912; the earliest printed mentions of Bunyan (Bunion) are from 1893 and 1904.

Thanks to Curt Brown for all of the columns, and making me look up things I never questioned.