Genesis
Once upon a time, when there were only a dozen lakes in Minnesota and Paul Bunyan was still nothing but a gleam in God's eye, there lived in the north country twin brothers, Esau and Jacob, sons of a local priestess and a legendary slaughterer of beasts. The slaughterer of beasts spent great stretches of time away from his family, wandering in the wilderness of the north and slaying animals from morning until night, until he was insensate from the iron-rich reek of gore and his entire body was stained with the blood of horribly debased creatures. Over time he became a stranger to his wife and twin sons, as well as becoming a feral curiosity and, eventually, a mangled and dubious regional myth. As the brothers grew to be young men they developed contrary attitudes toward their no-account father; Esau was swarthy and red-headed and had inherited his father's wanderlust and zeal for slaughter. Jacob was a more mild-mannered lad, and was regarded by the local folk as a something of a mama's boy and a dandy. He was interested in homeopathy, and spent his days foraging for medicinal herbs and dreaming of a career as a midwife. Jacob nurtured a festering resentment towards his father, and vowed to avenge the deadbeat's abandonment of his wife and children. The brothers eventually became bitterly estranged over this issue, and there was an ugly incident in late adolescence in which Esau conspired to flay his brother and feed his fat to the fire. The mother of the boys got wind of this plan through a blind local seer who lived along the banks of a dirty river, and banished the brothers to a kingdom in the south, where they were each given a territory on opposite sides of a great river. There the brothers lived into old age, and there they each built around them sprawling, wholly undistinguished cities of equally dim vision, governed by petty concerns and a burgeoning sense of civic pride that was as ridiculous as it was unjustified. Esau made a great fortune in the slaughter of beasts, and assembled around him a coterie of cigar-smoking cronies who built railroads to carry the meat from the slaughterhouses out into the world beyond. Jacob devoted himself to more gentle and genteel pursuits; he smoked a pipe, and fancied himself an art collector and a wine connoisseur. He spent his late years attempting to write a novel of self discovery, which was a miserable failure. After his death his sons devoted themselves to ruining the city of his dreams.
--From Francis Xavier Hodgson's Legends and Lore of Our Great Cities. Dotson and Struther Publishers. Chicago. 1927.
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