Mark D. Manlove

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deepest and bring up stones. John's practise [practice] proved to be very useful to him, as on the way home he fell into the sea in climbing up the ladder to get on the ship. He was heavily loaded with a belt of gold around his waist, but he was able to come to the surface. The sailors picked him up and called him their "little diver," but as Kipling says, "that is another story," and we will go back to the bears.

There was a man brought two poor horses to the ranch and left them to be taken care of. One evening they didn't come up with the other horses. It was getting quite dark and John thought he would go off down the valley and try to find them. When he got about a half mile down the valley he saw what he supposed to be the horses, but as he came near them they reared on their hind feet and snorted and champed their teeth and he knew them to be two grizzly bears. He said his legs felt like running and he let them run. I asked if they followed him, but he said he did not take time to see.

That was good hunting country and Jonathan and another man used to go hunting a week at a time. They killed a panther and the man said it was good to eat, so they cooked some of it. When Bill Powell came in from hunting, he ate of it, and upon finding what he had eaten became sick.

Johnathan and Bill went out on the mountain to hunt deer. Jonathan left Bill standing in a certain place while he went around to run in the deer toward Bill. There was thick chaparral as high as a man's head with here and there open places in it. Bill heard something coming

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thru the brush and expecting to see deer, was surprised to see in the open about fifteen steps from him a great grizzly bear. Instead of shooting it, he ran down over the mountain jumping over the brush and losing his hat. Finally he stopped to see if the bear was still after him and saw that it was a few rods away from him to one side. He snapped at it, but he had lost the cap from his gun and it didn't go off. Well, the bear kept right on running apparently as scared as Bill was and not after him at all.

When Jonathan laughed at Bill, he was very much ashamed, and said that if anyone had told him he would run from a grizzly bear he would have called him a liar.

About the first of February, 1852, I had an attack of lung fever and the doctor said I would have to leave there or I would die. Ensleyson was working with us and he was coming home, so we decided to come also. We went to Sacramento and from there we took a steamboat to San Francisco. There we took an old ship called the Isthmus for Panama. There was a heavy heavy wind that drove us out about 200 miles form the coast, so we did not see the volcano that we had expected to see. We saw whales, porpoises and many flying fish.

I was not seasick and my health improved from the day I got aboard the ship.

We stopped at Acapulco, Mexico, and took on coal; ran down to Panama and anchored about three miles from the wharf. It had taken us 21 days to come from San Francisco. There we went ashore and stayed

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all night at a hotel where the service was fairly good. Next morning being Sunday, we saw many Catholics going to Church. There were several churches. Ensley and I went to three of them. There were no benches or seats and the ladies would spread their handkerchiefs down and sit on them on the ground.

There were from the blackest kind of negroes to the whitest and best dressed ladies at the churches.

Monday we started to cross the Isthmus. We walked across to Chagres river [River]. There were many going across, some walking and some on mules. We took a large skiff down the river to Chagres on the Gulf of Mexico, arriving about ten o'clock in the day.

[illegible] got our dinners; had fried chicken, the first we had eaten since [illegible] home; then we went down to the wharf to see about getting a ship. [illegible] were six ships waiting for passengers and they were running each [illegible] on prices. Four sailors from one of these ships offered to take [illegible] $15.00 a piece cabin passage to New Orleans. We had the best food living on this ship I ever saw. They gave us four meals a day and the captain offered to give us lunch at 9 o'clock in the evening, but no one wanted it. They stopped at Kingston, Jamaica, to take on coal. There a couple of men got aboard to go to New Orleans and they were charged $80.00 each. We had a very pleasant voyage, no winds or high waves. The Captain said it was the finest weather he had ever crossed over the Gulf.

When we got to the bayous, tug boats [tugboats] came out to meet us and take us thru the narrows. A ship just ahead of us was aground. Our ship passed within a few feet of it, but got thru all right. When we got

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into the mouth of the Mississippi the ship sank about three feet deeper in the fresh water. At New Orleans we put up at the Veranda, the best hotel in New Orleans at that time. We took a steamboat up the Mississippi to Evansville Evansville, Indiana on the Ohio river and from there we went by boat to Attica, Ind., on the Wabash river, having been gone two years.