It is no picnic to tackle the wilderness and turn the very forest itself into a commercial commodity delivered at the market.  A logger needs plenty of brains and back bone.

Paul Bunyan had his setbacks the same as every logger only his were worse.  Being a pioneer he had to invent all his stuff as he went along.  Many a time his plans were upset by the mistakes of some swivel-headed strawboss or incompetent foreman.  The winter of the blue snow, Shot Gunderson had charge in the Big Tadpole River country.  He landed all of his logs in a lake and in the spring when ready to drive he boomed the logs three times around the lake before be discovered there was no outlet to it.  High hills surrounded the lake and the drivable stream was ten miles away.  Apparently the logs were a total loss.

Then Paul came on the job himself and got busy.  Calling in Sourdough Sam, the cook who made everything but coffee out of sourdough, he ordered him to mix enough sourdough to fill the big watertank.  Hitching Babe to the tank he hauled it over and dumped it into the lake.  When it “riz,” as Sam said, a mighty lava-like stream poured forth and carried the logs over the hills to the river.  There is a landlocked lake in Northern Minnesota that is called “Sourdough Lake” to this day.

Chris Crosshaul was a careless cuss.  He took a big drive down the Mississippi for Paul and when the logs were delivered in the New Orleans boom it was found that he had driven the wrong logs.  The owners looked at the barkmarks and refused to accept them.  It was up to Paul to drive them back upstream.

No one but Paul Bunyan would ever tackle a job like that.  To drive logs upstream is impossible, but if you think a little thing like an impossibility could stop him, you don’t know Paul Bunyan.  He simply fed Babe a good big salt ration and drove him to the upper Mississippi to drink.  Babe drank the river dry and sucked all the water upstream.  The logs came up river faster than they went down.

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Big Ole was the Blacksmith at Paul’s headquarters camp on the Big Onion.  Ole had a cranky disposition but he was a skilled workman.  No job in iron or steel was too big or too difficult for him.  One of the cooks used to make doughnuts and have Ole punch the holes.  He made the griddle on which Big Joe cast his pancakes and the dinner horn that blew down ten acres of pine.  Ole was the only man who could shoe Babe or Benny.  Every time he made a set of shoes for Babe they had to open up another Minnesota iron mine.  Ole once carried a pair of these shoes a mile and sunk knee deep into solid rock at every step.  Babe cast a shoe while making a hard pull one day, and it was hurled for a mile and tore down forty acres of pine and injured eight Swedes that were swamping out skidways.  Ole was also a mechanic and built the Downcutter, a rig like a mowing machine that cut down a swath of trees 500 feet wide.

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