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

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.