MY LAST BEAE. 



It^s generally " my First Bear/^ Now, I can scarcely 

 recollect my first bear, but 1 have a most vivid and 

 painful remembrance of my last, and very good care 

 I'll take that it shall be my last. He may be simply 

 and very briefly described as — Species, Cinnamon; 

 character, Ferox. 



A Cinnamon or " Cimmon '' is the savagest animal, I 

 imagine, in all America ; he is smaller than a grizzly 

 but quicker and more active ; he takes quite as much 

 killing, and is more dreaded by the hunters than any 

 other living thing, except perhaps a wild sow with 

 young. 



In the year 186 — , I found myself in Oregon, going 

 up the Columbia river. The bar at the mouth of this 

 river is the most decidedly disagreeable place I know 

 to be on, or rather to be over — it would have been 

 still more disagreeable to have gone on it. I went 

 in the old "Brother Jonathan," as rotten an old tub 

 as ever leaked. The day we crossed the bar it was 

 very rough, and when the pilot came on board, our 

 captain wanted to lie off till higher tide, but the pilot 

 " guessed it was four o'clock, and reckoned he'd chance 

 it." Pleasant — for us. A very few voyages after he 

 chanced it once too often, as she went aground on the 

 bar, and nearly every soul on board was drowned. Her 

 bottom was so rotten that the mainmast went clean 

 through till it rested on the gunwale by the mainyard ! 



G 2 



