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.