IV 



JAMES CAPEN ADAMS 



AND so we come to James Capen Adams. Adams 

 l\. was born in Medway. Mass., in October, 1807. 

 He was trained as a shoemaker, but as soon as he 

 attained his majority he joined a company of showmen as 

 a collector of wild animals and hunted for them in the 

 woods of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. Later 

 a tiger, belonging to the show, having disabled him while 

 he was training it, he invested all his means in boots and 

 shoes and started for St. Louis in search of health and 

 a fortune. Finding neither in this outpost of civilization 

 he joined the rush to California, where he arrived in the 

 fall of 1849, having come overland via Mexico. Here for 

 three years he engaged, with varying success, in mining, 

 trading, and stock-raising, and finally becoming disgusted 

 with the world and his fellows, in the fall of 1852 he took 

 to the mountains and became a hermit, a hunter, and a 

 purveyor of wild animals to shows and menageries. 



At first he took no especial interest in grizzlies and, 

 indeed, avoided them. He says: "I frequently saw him 

 [the grizzly]; he was to be found, I knew, in the bushy 

 gorges in all directions, and sometimes, in my hunts, 



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