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.
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.
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