One pair of the original bees were kept at headquarters camp and provided honey for the pancakes for many years.

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If Paul Bunyan did not invent Geography be created a lot of it.  The Great Lakes were first constructed to provide a water hole for Babe the Big Blue Ox.  Just what year his work was done is not known but they were in use prior to the Year of the Two Winters.

The Winter Paul Bunyan logged off North Dakota he hauled water for his ice roads from the Great Lakes.  One day when Brimstone Bill had Babe hitched to one of the old water tanks and was making his early morning trip, the tank sprung a leak when they were half way across Minnesota.  Bill saved himself from drowning by climbing Babe’s tail but all efforts to patch up the tank were in vain so the old tank was abandoned and replaced by one of the new ones.  This was the beginning of the Mississippi River and the truth of this is established by the fact that the old Mississippi is still flowing.

The cooks in Paul’s camps used a lot of water and to make things handy, they used to dig wells near the cook shanty.  At headquarters on the Big Auger, on top of the hill near the mouth of the Little Gimlet, Paul dug a well so deep that it took all day for the bucket to fall to the water, and a week to haul it up.  They had to run so many buckets that the well was forty feet in diameter.  It was shored up with tamarac poles and when the camp was abandoned Paul pulled up this cribbing.  Travelers who have visited the spot say that the sand has blown away until 178 feet of the well is sticking up into the air, forming a striking landmark.

The Winter of the Deep Snow everything was buried.  Paul had to dig down to find the tops of the tallest White Pines.  He had the snow dug away around them and lowered his sawyers down to the base of the trees.  When the tree was cut off he hauled it to the surface with a long parbuckle chain to which Babe, mounted on snowshoes, was hitched.  It was impossible to get enough stove pipe to reach to the top of the snow, so Paul had Big Ole make stovepipe by boring out logs with a long six-inch auger.

The year of the Two Winters they had winter all summer and then in the fall it turned colder.  One day Big Joe set the boiling coffeepot on the stove and it froze so quick that the ice was hot.  That was right after Paul had built the Great Lakes and that winter they froze clear to the bottom.  They never would have thawed out if Paul had not chopped out the ice and hauled it out on shore for the sun to melt.  He finally got all the ice thawed but he had to put in all new fish.

The next spring was the year the rain came up from China.  It rained so hard and so long that the grass was all washed out by the roots and Paul had a great time feeding his cattle.  Babe had to learn to eat pancakes like Benny.  That was the time Paul used the straw hats for an emergency ration.

When Paul’s drive came down, folks in the settlements were astonished to see all the river-pigs wearing huge straw bats.  The reason for this was soon apparent.  When the fodder ran out every man was politely requested to toss his hat into the ring.  Hundreds of straw hats were used to make a lunch for Babe.