After all others had failed at Big Onion camp, Paul hired his cousin Big Joe who came from three weeks below Quebec.  This boy sure put a mean scald on the chuck.  He was the only man who could make pancakes fast enough to feed the crew.  He had Big Ole, the blacksmith, make him a griddle that was so big you couldn’t see across it when the steam was thick.  The batter, stirred in drums like concrete mixers was poured on with cranes and spouts.  The griddle was greased by colored boys who skated over the surface with hams tied to their feet.  They had to have colored boys to stand the heat.

At this camp the flunkeys wore roller skates and an idea of the size of the tables is gained from the fact that they distributed the pepper with four-horse teams.

Sending out lunch and timing the meals was rendered difficult by the size of the works which required three crews — one going to work, one on the job and one coming back.  Joe had to start the bull-cook out with the lunch sled two weeks ahead of dinner time.  To call the men who came in at noon was another problem.  Big Ole made a dinner horn so big that no one could blow it but Big Joe or Paul himself.  The first time Joe blew it be blew down ten acres of pine.  The Red River people wouldn’t stand for that so the next time he blew straight up but this caused severe cyclones and storms at sea so Paul had to junk the horn and ship it East where later it was made into a tin roof for a big Union Depot.

When Big Joe came to Westwood with Paul, he started something.  About that time you may have read in the papers about a volcanic eruption at Mt.  Lassen, heretofore extinct for many years.  That was where Big Joe dug his bean-hole and when the steam worked out of the bean kettle and up through the ground, everyone thought the old hill had turned volcano.  Every time Joe drops a biscuit they talk of earthquakes.

It was always thought that the quality of the food at Paul’s Camps had a lot to do with the strength and endurance of the men.  No doubt it did, but they were a husky lot to start with.  As the feller said about fish for a brain food, “It won’t do you no good unless there is a germ there to start with.”

There must have been something to the food theory for the chipmunks that ate the prune pits got so big they killed all the wolves and years later the settlers shot them for tigers.

A visitor at one of Paul’s camps was astonished to see a crew of men unloading four-horse logging sleds at the cook-shanty.  They appeared to be rolling logs into a trap door from which poured clouds of steam.

“That’s a heck of a place to land logs,” he remarked.

“Them ain’t logs,” grinned a bull-cook, “them’s sausages for the teamsters’ breakfast.”

At Paul’s camp up where the little Gimlet empties into the Big Auger, newcomers used to kick because they were never served beans.  The bosses and the men could never be interested in beans.  E. E. Terrill tells us the reason: