36 Fisher, In Memoriam: Lyman Belding. [j" n 



little of their range will ever be cultivated owing to great altitude 

 and soil that is not suited to cereals — I refer mostly to the Sierra 

 Nevadas. I have seen only a few bears in the forest, probably 

 about twenty, and only one undoubted grizzly bear. This I saw 

 in the summer of 1875 when I was fishing on San Antonio Creek 

 near the Calaveras Grove of sequoias. It crossed the stream 

 below and near me and I had a good view of it. The owner of a 

 drove of sheep that ranged in the vicinity told me that he had also 

 seen it. I have been very near many bears but they would slip 

 away unseen. Several of those I saw was when I was in the saddle. 

 The only one I ever shot at was between the middle fork of the 

 Stanislaus River and Beaver Creek, when I had two wire cartridges 

 in my shotgun. My horse wheeled when I shot and the bear ran 

 in the opposite direction to a dense thicket which I did not enter. 



"While I was collecting specimens at C rockers, I tried to get a 

 shot at a large bear feeding in a meadow on a plant growing on the 

 border of a rivulet. He had not seen me, and I went to the edge of 

 the meadow, put buck shot in my gun and waited for him to turn 

 to give me a shot. He was a very large bear and the nearer he came 

 to me, the more I realized his size. I had much time to think as he 

 came slowly toward me, and I remembered the only two buck-shot 

 shells I had were not to be relied on as they were old, and I con- 

 cluded not to shoot at him. When he was about fifty yards from 

 me, he must have smelled me as he turned broadside, sank back on 

 his haunches, held one paw out, cocked his ears forward and sniffed 

 several times. I was greatly relieved when he leisurely walked off 

 toward the river. 



" Beaver and otter were plentiful in the sloughs and tule marsh 

 about Stockton. Beaver built houses on the marshes as the musk- 

 rats do on the marshes in the prairies of the Middle West. There 

 were several of these beaver houses within three miles of Stockton. 

 They were on land that floated, as much of the peat land does in 

 the tule swamps about Stockton. I shot seven beaver in one day 

 in the flood of 1861 and 1862. I would jar the houses and watch 

 for the cautious appearance of the occupants as they came out to 

 ascertain the cause of the disturbance. They would approach 

 under water to within a few feet of me, just as I had often seen 

 muskrats do when I was a boy, and the only evidence of their 

 presence would be a little circular wave caused by their breathing, 



