Once in a while Babe would run away and be gone all day roaming all over the Northwestern country.  His tracks were so far apart that it was impossible to follow him and so deep that a man falling into one could only be hauled out with difficulty and a long rope.  Once a settler and his wife and baby fell into one of these tracks and the son got out when he was fifty-seven years old and reported the accident.  These tracks, today form the thousands of lakes in the “Land of the Sky-Blue Water.”

Because he was so much younger than Babe and was brought to camp when a small calf, Benny was always called the Little Blue Ox although he was quite a chunk of an animal.  Benny could not, or rather, would not haul as much as Babe nor was he as tractable but be could eat more.

Paul got Benny for nothing from a farmer near Bangor, Maine.  There was not enough milk for the little fellow so he had to be weaned when three days old.  The farmer only had forty acres of hay and by the time Benny was a week old he had to dispose of him for lack of food.  The calf was undernourished and only weighed two tons when Paul got him.  Paul drove from Bangor out to his headquarters camp near Devil’s Lake, North Dakota that night and led Benny behind the sleigh.  Western air agreed with the little calf and every time Paul looked back at him he was two feet taller.

When they arrived at camp Benny was given a good feed of buffalo milk and flapjacks and put into a barn by himself.  Next morning the barn was gone.  Later it was discovered on Benny’s back as he scampered over the clearings.  He had outgrown his barn in one night.

Benny was very notional and would never pull a load unless there was snow on the ground so after the spring thaws they had to white wash the logging roads to fool him.

Gluttony killed Benny.  He had a mania for pancakes and one cook crew of two hundred men was kept busy making cakes for him.  One night he pawed and bellowed and threshed his tail about till the wind of it blew down what pine Paul had left standing in Dakota.  At breakfast time he broke loose, tore down the cook shanty and began bolting pancakes.  In his greed he swallowed the red-hot stove.  Indigestion set in and nothing could save him.  What disposition was made of his body is a matter of dispute.  One oldtimer claims that the outfit he works for bought a hind quarter of the carcass in 1857 and made corned beef of it.  He thinks they have several carloads of it, left.

Another authority states that the body of Benny was dragged to a safe distance from the North Dakota camp and buried.  When the earth was shoveled back it made a mound that formed the Black Hills in South Dakota.

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The custodian and chaperon of Babe, the Big Blue Ox, was Brimstone Bill.  He knew all the tricks of that frisky giant before they happened.

“I know oxen,” the old bullwhacker used to say, “I’ve worked ’em and fed ’em and doctored ’em ever since the ox was invented.  And Babe, I know that pernicious old reptyle same as if I’d abeen through him with a lantern.”