Question

Twas ’64 or ’65
We drove1 the great Round River Drive;
’Twas ’65 or ’64—​​
Yes, it was durin’ of the war,
5
Or it was after or before.
Those were the days in Michigan,
The good old days, when any man
Could cut and skid2 and log and haul,
And there was pine enough for all. . . .

10
Paul Bunyan and his fightin’ crew,
In ’64 or ’5 or ’2,
They started out to find the pines
Without much thought of section lines.
So west by north they made their way
15
One hundred miles until one day
They found good timber, level land,
And roarin’ water close at hand. . . .

We put one hundred million feet
On skids that winter. Hard to beat,
20
You say it was? It was some crew.
We took it off one forty, too.
A hundred million feet we skid—
That forty was a pyramid;
It runs up skyward to a peak—
25
To see the top would take a week. . . .

At last, a hundred million in,
’Twas time for drivin’ to begin.
We broke our rollways in a rush
And started through the rain and slush
30
To drive the hundred million down
Until we reached some sawmill town.
We didn’t know the river’s name,
Nor where to someone’s mill it came,
But figured that, without a doubt,
35
To some good town ’twould fetch us out
If we observed the usual plan
And drove the way the current ran. . . .

Some two weeks more and then we passed
A camp that looked just like the last.
40
Two weeks again another, too,
That looked like our camp, come in view.

Then Bunyan called us all ashore
And held a council-like of war.
He said, with all this lumbering,
45
Our logs would never fetch a thing. . . .

And then we realized at last
That ev’ry camp that we had passed
Was ours. Yes, it was then we found
The river we was on was round.
50
And, though we’d driven many a mile,
We drove a circle all the while!
And that’s the truth, as I’m alive,
About the great Round River drive

Answer 1

Do you want a summary, a literary analysis, a modern paraphrase, performance tips, or something else? Below are a few quick helpful items — tell me which to expand.

Brief summary
- A narrator recounts a lumber drive “in ’64 or ’65” led by Paul Bunyan’s crew. After felling and skidding an enormous amount of pine and sending logs downriver, they discover they’ve been floating them in a circle: the river is round. The poem treats the mistake with wry humor.

Main themes & tone
- Tall-tale humor and exaggeration (huge quantities, mythic characters).
- Human error and ironic futility (big effort, comic outcome).
- Frontier/labor life and camaraderie among loggers.
- Playful, bragging, folksy tone conveyed by dialect and repetition.

Poetic features
- Use of dialect and colloquial phrasing (“’twas,” “we was,” contractions) creates vernacular voice.
- Repetition and numeric indeterminacy (’64 or ’65, ’5 or ’2) add to the tall-tale feel and comic vagueness.
- Hyperbole (a hundred million feet, pyramid forty) and imagery of logs, skids, rollways, and roaring water evoke the logging world.
- Rhyme and near-rhyme in couplets give a sing-song, ballad-like rhythm; meter is conversational rather than strictly regular.

Historical/literary context
- Draws on American lumbering history and Paul Bunyan folklore — part of the tradition of larger-than-life frontier tall tales that poke fun at boastfulness while celebrating rugged labor.

Ways I can help next
- Line-by-line close reading
- Modern-English paraphrase
- Meter/rhyme-scheme scansion
- Performance/reading tips (pace, tone)
- Compare with other Paul Bunyan or tall-tale poems

Which would you like?