People have been building snowmen probably as long as there's been snow. A researcher and writer named Bob Eckstein found the earliest known illustration of a snowman (so, the earliest discovered thus far anyway) in the margins of a Medieval devotional book called The Book of Hours, dating from about 1380.There's a story floating around the 'net that the first snowman was made by Vernon N. Paul and his nine-year-old daughter, little Yetty Paul, in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, in 1809 ("a well-documented fact," said one writer!), but that's pure urban legend. The first thing that clued me in was the date, 1809. As far as I know, there were no white people whatsoever in our neck of the woods at that time. There were some Europeans in the area just earlier, including a French fur trader, Jean Bapti