646 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences , Arts, and Letters. 
spread his batter. In a Minnesota version Bunyan employs 
his twenty-four daughters for the same menial task. By 
mistake one day the nearsighted cook put into the batter 
several fingers of blasting-powder instead of baking-powder, 
and when the mixture was spread upon the griddle, the 
cookees made a very rapid ascent through the cook-shanty 
roof and never returned to camp. 
Paul Bunyan’s ingenuity in keeping his men supplied with 
food and drink appears best in the pea-soup lake story, of 
which there are several versions, and in the wondrous tale of 
the camp distillery. Near the Round River camp was a 
hot spring, into which the tote-teamster, returning one day 
from town with a load of peas, dumped the whole load 
by accident. Most men would have regarded the peas as a 
dead loss, but not so Paul. He promptly added the proper 
amount of pepper and salt to the mixture and had enough 
hot pea-soup to last the crew all winter. When his men 
were working too far away from camp to return to dinner, 
he got the soup to them by freezing it upon the ends of 
sticks and sending it in that shape. According to another 
version of the pea-soup lake story Paul deliberately made the 
pea-soup; he dumped the peas into a small lake and heated 
the mess by firing the slashings around the shore. In aWis- 
consinized version of the Michigan tale the peas have be¬ 
come, for some reason, beans. A much exaggerated version 
of this story comes from northern Wisconsin. According to 
this account the tote-teamster was driving across a frozen 
lake when a sudden thaw overtook him. The teamster 
saved himself, but the ox was drowned. Bunyan dammed 
up the lake, fired the slashings around the shore, and then, 
opening the dam, sluiced down the river to his laboring crew 
an abundance of excellent hot pea-soup with ox-tail flavor. 
The legend of the establishment of the camp distillery is 
one of the most entertaining of the Bunyan tales. Paul had 
trouble in keeping any liquor in camp because the men sent 
to town for it drank it all up on the way back. The follow¬ 
ing is Mr. Douglas Malloch’s versified account of how he 
solved the difficulty: 
“One day the bull-cook parin’ spuds 
He hears a sizzlin’ in the suds 
And finds the peelin’s, strange to say, 
Are all fermentin’ where they lay. 
