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Bigfoot Wallace was as crazy an individual as they come. He could spin a yarn better than anyone, and while he was a dangerous foe to his enemies, he was also a jovial giant, who was always on the lookout for a good laugh. What with hunting and fishing and fighting Comanches and avoiding rattlesnakes, Wallace had the time of his life in Texas. Said he wouldn�t swap Texas for the whole shooting match that was the rest of the United States.

I heard tell of one time when the Comanches raided Wallace�s cabin back LaGrange way and took all of his horses in the night �cept one gray mare that was stake on the other side of the house. He was so plumb mad he jumped right on the horse and gave chase. Found them Comanches eatin� his horses torturing and eating his horses over the next hill, which made him madder than a hornet. He stopped the gray mare in a hickory grove, tied off the cuffs of his pants and shirt, and filled his clothes with so many hickory nuts he was rounder than Santy Claus and better armored than one of them old-time knights. Then he crawled through the grass until he about a hundred from the Indian camp.

Taking aim, Bigfoot shot one of the forty-two Comanches in the camp, and then stood to his full height, his massive figure much enhanced by all them hickory nuts in his clothes. Took the Comanches more than a minute to recover from the sight of him afore they attacked, shooting him over and over with their arrows. �Course, none of them arrows could reach Wallace through all the hickory nuts, and the Comanches ran out of ammunition mighty quick. When they saw Bigfoot still standing, they let out a whoop of terror and ran for the hills! The arrows were three inches thick on the ground when Bigfoot untied his clothes and let the rest roll out. And wouldn�t ya know there wasn�t one hickory nut that hadn�t been split open! Being an enterprising fellow, Wallace came back later with his wagon, gathered up them nuts, and took them home to feed to his pigs.

Well now, Bigfoot Wallace was jest about the roughest, toughest Texas Ranger that ever rode west of the Pecos. Came to Texas bent on avenging the death of a brother and cousin who�d been massacred at Goliad by Santa Ana�s army, but by the time he got here the Revolution was won and Texas was a Republic. He might�ve gone home then, but Wallace discovered Texas was a hunter�s paradise, so he made his way to the extreme edge of the frontier, where he hunted the abundant game that he sold to the settlements.

Wallace soon learned that Austin was the place to be if you wanted to earn some good money. So he packed up and went north to Austin, which was the new capital of the Republic. Seems there was plenty of work with high wages for a man who could do construction, and Bigfoot was an expert with a broad-ax. Earned himself two hundred bucks a month plus board hewing logs for the buildings being put up along Congress Ave. Bigfoot partnered up with a fellow named Leggett who was as brave and crazy as he was. They head out into hostile Indian territory to get cedar and other lumber, and then they�d raft down to town. The native tribesmen in that area were so fierce most folks refused to leave the settlement, and forty men were killed in the short time Wallace lived there.

It was during this time that Wallace earned himself a nickname. There was a bloodthirsty Waco warrior living in the area, who stood six foot eight inches in his moccasin feet and weighed over three hundred pounds. Folks called him Chief Bigfoot because his moccasin tracks measured over fourteen inches in length with the right toe protruding from the moccasin. He�d been terrorizing the settlement for nearly twenty years, raiding the good people�s homes, stealing horses and killing any soul he encountered.

Well, one fine day Wallace�s neighbor came home to find his kitchen a mess and large moccasin tracks leading from his house next door to Wallace�s place that he shared with William Fox. Fellow came running over to accuse Wallace of entering his cabin since he knew the hunter always wore moccasins. Wallace had to drag the old coot over to the nearest tracks and put his much smaller moccasin foot inside the track before the feller would believe he hadn�t gone inside his cabin. William Fox was so amused by the incident he started calling Wallace �Bigfoot�, and the name stuck.

Sad to say, it was that same Waco chief who killed and scalped Fox a year later. Bigfoot Wallace tracked down Chief Bigfoot and shot him, but somehow the warrior survived. It was Westfall, a great friend of Bigfoot�s who managed to kill the huge chief in a ferocious hand-to-hand combat on the Llano.

Well now, one winter it was so cold that all the geese flew backward and all the fish moved south and even the snow turned blue. Late at night, it got so frigid that all spoken words froze solid afore they could be heard. People had to wait until sunup to find out what folks were talking about the night before.

Paul Bunyan went out walking in the woods one day during that Winter of the Blue Snow. He was knee-deep in blue snow when he heard a funny sound between a bleat and a snort. Looking down, he saw a teeny-tiny baby blue ox jest a hopping about in the snow and snorting with rage on account of he was too short to see over the drifts.

Paul Bunyan laughed when he saw the spunky little critter and took the little blue mite home with him. He warmed the little ox up by the fire and the little fellow fluffed up and dried out, but he remained as blue as the snow that had stained him in the first place. So Paul named him Babe the Blue Ox.

Well, any creature raised in Paul Bunyan's camp tended to grow to massive proportions, and Babe was no exception. Folks that stared at him for five minutes could see him growing right before their eyes. He grew so big that 42 axe handles plus a plug of tobacco could fit between his eyes and it took a murder of crows a whole day to fly from one horn to the other. The laundryman used his horns to hang up all the camp laundry, which would dry lickety-split because of all the wind blowing around at that height.

Whenever he got an itch, Babe the Blue Ox had to find a cliff to rub against, 'cause whenever he tried to rub against a tree it fell over and begged for mercy. To whet his appetite, Babe would chew up thirty bales of hay, wire and all. It took six men with picaroons to get all the wire out of Babe's teeth after his morning snack. Right after that he'd eat a ton of grain for lunch and then come pestering around the cook - Sourdough Sam - begging for another snack.

Babe the Blue Ox was a great help around Paul Bunyan's logging camp. He could pull anything that had two ends, so Paul often used him to straighten out the pesky, twisted logging roads. By the time Babe had pulled the twists and kinks out of all the roads leading to the lumber camp, there was twenty miles of extra road left flopping about with nowhere to go. So Paul rolled them up and used them to lay a new road into new timberland.

Paul also used Babe the Blue Ox to pull the heavy tank wagon which was used to coat the newly-straightened lumber roads with ice in the winter, until one day the tank sprang a leak that trickled south and became the Mississippi River. After that, Babe stuck to hauling logs. Only he hated working in the summertime, so Paul had to paint the logging roads white after the spring thaw so that Babe would keep working through the summer.

One summer, as Babe the Blue Ox was hauling a load of logs down the white-washed road and dreaming of the days when the winter would feel cold again and the logs would slide easier on the "ice", he glanced over the top of the mountain and caught a glimpse of a pretty yeller calf grazing in a field. Well, he twisted out of his harness lickety-split and stepped over the mountain to introduce himself. It was love at first sight, and Paul had to abandon his load and buy Bessie the Yeller Cow from the farmer before Babe would do any more hauling.

Bessie the Yeller Cow grew to the massive, yet dainty proportions that were suitable for the mate of Babe the Blue Ox. She had long yellow eyelashes that tickled the lumberjacks standing on the other end of camp each time she blinked. She produced all the dairy products for the lumber camp. Each day, Sourdough Sam made enough butter from her cream to grease the giant pancake griddle and sometimes there was enough left over to butter the toast!

The only bone of contention between Bessie and Babe was the weather. Babe loved the ice and snow and Bessie loved warm summer days. One winter, Bessie grew so thin and pale that Paul Bunyan asked his clerk Johnny Inkslinger to make her a pair of green goggles so she would think it was summer. After that, Bessie grew happy and fat again, and produced so much butter that Paul Bunyan used the leftovers to grease the whitewashed lumber roads in summer. With the roads so slick all year round, hauling logs became much easier for Babe the Blue Ox, and so Babe eventually came to like summer almost as much as Bessie.