could travel clear to the landing and the load
would not move from the skidway in the woods. Brimstone would fasten the
harness with an anchor Big Ole made for him and when the sun came out
and the harness shrunk the load would be pulled to the landing while
Bill and the oxen were busy at some other job.

The winter of the Blue Snow, the Pacific Ocean froze over and Bill kept
the oxen busy hauling regular white snow over from China. M. H. Keenan
can testify to the truth of this as he worked for Paul on the Big Onion
that winter. It must have been about this time that Bill made the first
ox yokes out of cranberry wood.

* * * * *

FEEDING Paul Bunyan's crews was a complicated job. At no two camps were
conditions the same. The winter he logged off North Dakota he had 300
cooks making pancakes for the Seven Axemen and the little Chore-boy. At
headquarters on the Big Onion he had one cook and 462 cookees feeding a
crew so big that Paul himself never knew within several hundred either
way, how many men he had.

[Illustration]

At Big Onion camp there was a lot of mechanical equipment and the
trouble was a man who could handle the machinery cooked just like a
machinist too. One cook got lost between the flour bin and the root
cellar and nearly starved to death before he was found.

Cooks came and went. Some were good and others just able to get by. Paul
never kept a poor one, very long. There was one jigger who seemed to
have learned to do nothing but boil. He made soup out of everything and
did most of his work with a dipper. When the big tote-sled broke through
the ice on Bull Frog Lake with a load of split peas, he served warmed up
lake water till the crew struck. His idea of a lunch box was a jug or a
rope to freeze soup onto like a candle. Some cooks used too much grease.
It was said of one of these that he had to wear calked shoes to keep
from sliding out of the cook-shanty and rub sand on his hands when he
picked anything up.

There are two kinds of camp cooks, the Baking Powder Bums and the
Sourdough Stiffs. Sourdough Sam belonged to the latter school. He made
everything but coffee out of Sourdough. He had only one arm and one leg,
the other members having been lost when his sourdough barrel blew up.
Sam officiated at Tadpole River headquarters, the winter Shot Gunderson
took charge.

After all others had failed at Big Onion camp, Paul hired his cousin Big
Joe who came from th