THE GRIZZLY CANNON BALL
In the early days, when there was more individual and less corporate mining in the gold country of the West, a long and lean Yankee, Jim Evans, who was once a neighbor of mine in Maine, contracted the gold-fever, and went West.
Luckily, he almost immediately struck a pay streak high up the face of a cliff, where there was a wide shelf of rock that afforded a very convenient roadway for his use, as well as considerable area for the transaction of his operations.
Someone before him had started operations on the same site, but had become discouraged and quit, leaving a big steel tank, open at one end, lying upon its side, the open end pointing, like a huge cannon, over the mining settlement a thousand feet below. Jim used this tank to warehouse certain edibles, together with a keg of black gunpowder.
One day, on Jim’s return from grubbing in the ground, he was amazed to find the entrance to his warehouse blocked by a huge grizzly bear that had crawled in to get at the edibles, and that fitted the big tube like a wad in a gun.
Jim was addicted to humor, and as there was a three-quarter-inch hole in the tank near the closed end right over the keg of gunpowder, the head of which had been removed, it occurred to him that he might make it somewhat interesting for the bear by lighting a piece of fuze and dropping it into the gunpowder. This he proceeded to do, and the bear proceeded to leave that tube after the manner of a cannon ball.
Hearing the report, and seeing a large volume of smoke, the townspeople, looking skyward and Jim-ward, were astonished at seeing a ton of grizzly hurtling outward from Jim’s place and descending upon them.
On Jim’s return to the village that evening, he was surrounded by numerous interrogators regarding the bear. “Oh,” he said, casually, “I found the bear in my shack, and just threw him out, that’s all.”