Your history lesson for today: Big Joe Mufferaw

Here’s an excerpt from Wikipedia’s entry on Big Joe Mufferaw : **

**

**
 Big Joe Mufferaw
**
was a
[
 French Canadian
](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Canadian)
folk hero from the
[
 Ottawa  Valley
](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa_Valley)
, perhaps best known today as the hero of a song by
[
 Stompin' Tom Connors
](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stompin%27_Tom_Connors)
. Like
[
 Paul Bunyan
](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Bunyan_%28lumberjack%29)
,  he  made his living chopping down trees. The name is also sometimes  spelled  Muffero, Muffera, and Montferrand. The last spelling is more  common  among francophones; anglophones who had trouble with it used one  of the  other spellings.

In addition to being the subject of  many Paul Bunyan-esque tall  tales, Mufferaw is sometimes enlisted as a  defender of oppressed French  Canadian loggers in the days when their  bosses were English and their  rivals for work were Irish. In one story,  Big Joe was in a Montreal bar,  where a British army major named Jones  was freely insulting French  Canadians. After Big Joe beat the major, he  bellowed, "Any more insults  for the Canadians?"

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** Related: ** Ottawa History Guide **

**