Within the pantheon of American folk heroes, no figure walks taller than Paul Bunyan. A giant lumberjack accompanied by a blue ox named Babe, he’s often credited with carving the Grand Canyon and spilling the trail of water that would become the Mississippi River. Tall tales aside, he literally towers over our national landscape in the form of flannel-clad roadside statues scattered from coast to coast—monuments to the rugged workingmen of an ascendant nation. A century after the Bunyan legend’s heyday, the United States is, to say the least, no longer on the rise.