Bill compiled “The Skinner’s Dictionary,” a hand book for teamsters, and most of the terms used in directing draft animals (except mules) originated with him.  His early religious training accounts for the fact that the technical language of the teamster contains so many names of places and people spoken of in the Bible.

The buckskin harness used on Babe and Benny when the weather was rainy was made by Brimstone Bill.  When this harness got wet it would stretch so much that the oxen 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.

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.