Thirty-One Years on the Plains and in the Mountains, Or, the Last Voice from the Plains / An Authentic Record of a Life Time of Hunting, Trapping, Scouting and Indian Fighting in the Far West

by William F. Drannan

CHAPTER XLIV.

A GRIZZLEY HUNTS THE HUNTER.—SHOOTING SEALS IN ALASKAN WATERS.—I BECOME A SEATTLE HOTEL KEEPER AND THE BIG FIRE CLOSES ME OUT.— SOME REST.

On my arrival at San Francisco the first thing was to get rid of my surplus horses. During the time I was selling them I made the acquaintance of a man named Walter Fiske, who was engaged in raising Angora goats, about one hundred and twenty miles north from San Francisco, and who was something of a hunter also. Mr. Fiske invited me to go home with him and have a bear hunt.

Being tired of the city, I accompanied Mr. Fiske to his ranch. He said he knew where there was a patch of wild clover on which the grizzlies fed, so we were off for a bear hunt. We soon found where they fed and watered. They had a plain trail from their feeding place to the water. Mr. Fiske being hard of hearing proposed that I stop on the feeding ground and he would take his stand down on the trail, and in case I should get into trouble I could run down the trail, and if he were to get into a tight place he would run up the trail to where I was. I took my stand and had not been there long until I saw, just behind, in about twenty feet of me, a huge grizzly bear coming for me on his hind feet. I did not see a tree that I could get behind or climb, so I took out along the trail as fast as I could, the grizzly after me. For the first fifty yards I had to run up grade and then I turned down hill. When I reached the top of the hill I commenced to hallo at the top of my voice, "Look out Walter, we are coming!" Walter was sitting only a few steps from the trail and the moment I passed him I heard the report of his gun. I jumped to one side and gave the bear a shot. I got in two shots and Fiske four. After receiving this amount of lead the bear ran but a short distance and dropped dead. All of the shots were near the bear's heart. We dressed him and started home and we had bear meat enough to last for some time to come. In the mean time Mr. Fiske had told me about a man four miles from, his place who had a ranch for sale, consisting of three hundred and twenty acres of deeded land, one hundred acres in cultivation, eighty bearing fruit trees and two acres of a vineyard. He said the place could be bought cheap, and he also told me that there was a vacant quarter section adjoining this land that I could take up, and I would have the finest goat ranch in the country. Mr. Fiske and I took a trip down and found the owner very anxious to sell. After looking the ranch over and getting his figures, I made him an offer of four thousand dollars for everything, which offer he accepted, he reserving nothing but one span of horses, his bed and clothing. We then went to Santa Rosa, the county seat, to get an abstract of title and a deed to the property, and now I am once more an honest rancher. While in Santa Rosa I hired a man and his wife by the name of Benson, by the year. Mr. Benson proved to be a good man and his wife a splendid housekeeper. All went well for about five months, and having filed on the quarter of vacant land adjoining me, of course I had to move over there. I had noticed a change in Benson's appearance, but had not thought much about it till one Saturday I sent him to haul some pickets over to my preemption claim. That night, having company, I did not go to the cabin on the claim, but stayed on the other place. Benson was not at supper that evening, but I paid no attention to it nor thought it strange, supposing he was just a little late getting home. The next morning I noticed that he was not at the breakfast table, and I asked Mrs. Benson why Mr. Bensen didn't come to his breakfast. She asked if I had not told him to stay on the preemption claim that night. I told her that I had not and that I had the key and he could not get into the house, and besides there was no feed there for the mules. She commenced to feel uneasy then. So as soon as breakfast was over I took one of my hired men and started out to hunt for him. We struck the wagon trail and tracked him around for some time. He had traveled in a terribly round about way. We finally came to him where he had run his team against a tree, and when we came upon him he was down in front of the mules whipping them around the fore legs trying to make them get down and pray. He did not notice us until I spoke to him and told him to quit whipping the mules. When he looked at me I could see that he was perfectly wild. It took us both three hours to get him back to the house. I sent for the constable, who took him to Santa Rosa and from there he was taken to the insane asylum. His wife went East to her folks, and I was told afterwards that he got all right.

I next tried a Chinese housekeeper, but John Chinaman had too many relations in the country. There would be two or three Chinamen there almost every week to see my cook and would stay one or two nights. It was not what they ate that I cared for, but what they carried off.

I tried ranching there for three years and during that time I had three different men with their wives, but there was always something wrong, too far from church or too far from neighbors, so I came to the conclusion that a man had no use with a ranch unless he had a wife. In the mean time I had proved up on my preemption, and had all my land fenced in with a picket fence made of red wood pickets. I had also got sick and tired of ranching, not but what I had done fairly well, but it was too much bother for a man that had been raised as I had. I went to San Francisco and placed my land in the hands of a real estate agent for sale, and it was but a short time when he sent two men out to look at it. This was the fall of the year when my fruit was just beautiful and the grapes ripe in the vineyard, and we were not long in making a trade.

In less than one month I was without a house or home, so I placed my money in the bank and arranged to get my interest semi- annually, and made up my mind to take things easy the balance of my days.

About one year from that time I succeeded in getting up a hunting party, and we went up into the mountains in Mendocino county, where we found game in abundance, deer, elk and bear. I stayed out in the mountains nearly three months, during which time I killed the largest grizzly bear I have ever seen, weighing net, eight hundred and sixty pounds. This bear I killed at one shot, and it is the only grizzly that I ever killed at one shot in all my hunting. We also killed ten large elk. One man in the party killed an elk that the horns measured from tip to tip, five feet and four inches, and those horns can be seen at the Lick House in San Francisco. He sold them for fifty dollars.

I remained in San Francisco until in the spring of 1886, when there was a party fitting up a schooner to go sealing on the coast of Alaska, and I was offered a job as shooter. I agreed to go with them and they were to pay me two dollars for each seal that I killed. The first of April we started, and were twenty-two days getting to where there was seal.

Now this was a new business to me, and my first seal hunting was near the mouth of the Yukon river. The captain anchored about twenty miles from land. There were six sealing boats with the schooner, the shooter had charge of his boat, and there were two or three other men to accompany him. One of my boatmen was a Frenchman and the other a German; they were both stout and willing to work. While I received two dollars a piece for all the seals killed, they only got one dollar each, making in all four dollars each that the seals cost the company.

In the morning the captain gives each man his course and instructions to return at once when the signal cannon is fired. The first morning that we started out we went about four miles before we saw any seal, when we ran on to a school sleeping on the water. The two boatmen pulled up among them and I turned loose to shooting them and got six out of the outfit before they got away from us. Shooting seal out of a boat reminded me very much of shooting Indians when on a bucking cayuse, as the boat is always in motion, and it is all that a person can do to stand up in it when the sea is any ways rough. That day I killed nine seal and we were called in at two o'clock, as there was fog coming up, and we just got in ahead of it. We had fair success sealing until the last of August, when my crew ventured a little too far and the wind changed so that we did not hear the cannon and the fog caught us. Each crew when starting out in the morning always took supplies along sufficient to last twenty-four hours. This time when we got caught in the fog the wind had changed on us, so we tried to remain as near the same place as possible, but this time we had to guess at it as we could not always tell just which way the tide was going. This was beyond any doubt the worst trip that I ever experienced, the fog was very cold and our clothing wet. We were out three days and nights and then were picked up by another schooner. The captain of the schooner that picked us up heard the firing of our cannon that morning and we were picked up about noon. He at once set sail for our schooner, firing the signal cannon every half hour, reaching our schooner just as it was growing dark, and the captain and crew had given us up for lost. We stayed out until the last of September, when we sailed for San Francisco, and this wound up my seal hunting.

There was only one other man in the crew that killed more seal than I did during the season, but I made the largest day's killing of any one in the crew, that being twenty seven. But one season was enough for me in that line of business. I concluded that I would much rather take my chances on dry land.

In the spring of 1887 I took a trip to the Puget Sound country and found Seattle a very lively place; in fact, as much so as any place I had ever seen in my life. After remaining in Seattle about two months I concluded that I would try my hand at the hotel business, as that was something I had not tried, so I bought out a man named Smith, who owned a big hotel on the corner of South second and Washington streets, just opposite John Court's Theatre Building, paying Mr. Smith sixteen thousand dollars for the property, and besides this I spent one thousand two hundred dollars in repairing and fitting it up in shape. I gave it the name of "Riverside House." Here I built up a good business in the hotel line. In fact, inside of six months from the time I opened up I had all that I could accommodate all the time, and this was the first time in my life that I had been perfectly satisfied.

I had all the business I could attend to, and was making money, and as fast as I could accumulate a little money I invested it in different parts of the city in good property.

In the month of May, 1889, two brothers named Clark, from Chicago, came to my hotel for the purpose of buying me out, but I told them my property was not for sale, as I was satisfied and liked the business and did not think I could find a place that would suit me better; but about the first of June they returned and made me an offer of twenty thousand dollars. I told them that I would not sell at any price, as I was satisfied and intended to remain there as long as I lived. On the morning of the sixth of June, 1889, my clerk came to my room and woke me up, saying that there was a fire in the northern part of town and that the wind was blowing strong from that direction. I dressed at once, and when I got out on the street I could see the fire about a half mile from my property, but had not the faintest idea that it would ever reach me, although the excitement was running high on the street. I returned to the hotel, washed, and was just eating my breakfast when one of the waiters came and told me that he could see the fire from the door. I told him he must be mistaken, but he went and looked again and came back and told me that the fire was getting very close. I ran to the door and saw that it was then within one block of my hotel. Now I saw that my property was sure to be burnt, so I sent my clerk up stairs to see whether or not there were any lodgers in the rooms, and I made a rush for the safe and only just had time to get it unlocked and the contents out when the fire was on us.

That fire wiped me out slick and clean as I did not have a dollar's worth of insurance on the property. Any business man would have known enough at least to have a few thousand dollars of insurance on that amount of property, but I had never seen a fire before in a city and thought it folly to insure, and did not find out my mistake until it was too late. During the next six months I had a number of offers of money to build a brick hotel on my lots, but I could not think for a moment of borrowing the money for that purpose.

I remained in Seattle for nine months, during which time there was a great decrease in the value of property, and I sold my lots where my hotel had stood at a very reduced price. I tried various speculations on a small scale during this time, but with very poor success.

By this time I had spent and lost in speculation about all the money that I had realized for my property, and the outside property that I owned I could not sell at any price. Since that time I have wandered around from pillar to post, catching a little job here and there, and at this writing I am temporarily located at Moscow, Idaho, which is situated in the heart of the famous Palouse country, one of the greatest countries on the globe for the growing of wheat, oats, barley, rye, flax and vegetables of all kinds.

And now kind reader, begging your pardon, I would say that I have been two years making up my mind to allow my life to go down in history to be read by the public, as notoriety is something I never cared for. One reason, perhaps, is that I was brought up by noble and generous-hearted Kit Carson, who very much disliked notoriety, and I do not believe that there ever was a son who thought more of his father than I did of that high-minded and excellent man.

I have had many opportunities to have the history of my life written up, but would never consent to anything of the kind. Finally, however, I decided to write it myself, and while it is written in very rude and unpolished language, by an old frontiersman who never went to school a day in his life, all he knows he picked up himself, yet it is the true history of the most striking events, trials, troubles, tribulations, hardships, pleasures and satisfactions of a long life of strange adventure among wild scenes and wilder people, and in telling the story I hope I have interested the reader.

It is not strange that in the wilderness, where all nature sings, from the fairy tinkle of the falling snow to the boom of a storm- swept canyon; and from the warbling of the birds to the roaring growl of mad grizzlies; and from the whispers of lost breezes to thunder of thousands of stampeding hoofs—it is not strange that among all that, even a worn and illiterate old hunter should try to sing, if nothing more than the same sort of a song that the dying sachem sings. So I beg you bear with

THE OLD SCOUT'S LAMENT.

Come all of you, my brother scouts,
And join me in my song;
Come, let us sing together,
Though the shadows fall so long.

Of all the old frontiersmen,
That used to scour the plain,
There are but very few of them
That with us yet remain.

Day after day, they're dropping off;
They are going, one by one;
Our clan is fast decreasing;
Our race is almost run.

There were many of our number
That never wore the blue,
But, faithfully, they did their part,
As brave men, tried and true.

They never joined the army,
But had other work to do
In piloting the coming folks,
To help them safely through.

But brothers, we are failing;
Our race is almost run;
The days of elk and buffalo,
And beaver traps, are gone.

Oh, the days of elk and buffalo,
It fills my heart with pain
To know those days are passed and gone,
To never come again.

We fought the red-skin rascals
Over valley, hill and plain,
We fought him in the mountain top,
And fought him down again.

Those fighting days are over;
The Indian yell resounds
No more along the border,
Peace sends far sweeter sounds

But we found great joy, old comrades,
To hear and make it die,
We won bright homes for gentle ones,
And now, our West, good-bye