Seth Kinman - Life in California

Life in California

Kinman claimed to have migrated to California in 1849 during the great Gold Rush and worked as a gold miner in Pierson B. Reading's party on the Trinity River near present day Douglas City. He then returned to Illinois for two years. In 1852 he travelled to California and explored the Humboldt Bay area, near present day Eureka, California. Humboldt Bay had been recently rediscovered by gold miners seeking a faster and cheaper route to transport supplies. An early settlement in the area was also named Uniontown, but is now known as Arcata. During this period, miners and their suppliers were often flush with gold, but had little to spend it on.

On Christmas, 1852 Kinman was hired to perform on fiddle at the then exorbitant amount of $50, despite his lack of musical training. As described by a fellow '49er:

Seth Kinman, the noted hunter and antler chair-maker, and myself were tendered fifty dollars each to preside as the orchestra for a Christmas ball at Uniontown in 1852. Kinman's repertoire consisted mainly of an alternation of the "Arkansaw Traveler" and "Hell on the Wabash" and mine was little more varied or pretentious. He responded. My conscience has not yet reached that level of elasticity. —David Rohrer Leeper

Over the winter of 1852-53 he lived in what is now Ferndale in the cabin of Stephen Shaw. His wife and two of their children died that winter, and he may have gone back to Illinois to bring back his mother and three remaining children by 1854. In 1853 he started working as a hunter, feeding U.S. troops in Fort Humboldt. While at Fort Humboldt he met future president Ulysses S. Grant, and future General George Crook. According to tradition, about this time, he brought the first herd of cattle to Humboldt County.

Some events and their timing are unclear during this early period. Sources disagree on whether he brought his family to California from Illinois in 1852 or 1854. Carranco dates Seth's first return to Illinois starting in 1850, with his return to California in August 1852, his arrival in Humboldt County in February 1853, another return to Illinois in September 1853, and a trip back to California starting in May 1854 with his mother, two children, and a herd of cattle. Thus, in the course of the six years 1849-1854, he is believed to have crossed the Great Plains, Rocky Mountains, and the Sierra Nevada Mountains five times, travelling mostly on foot.

Kinman lived in several places in the county, including houses near Fern Cottage and a dairy farm on Bear River Ridge. He bought 80 acres (320,000 m2) of farm or ranch land 1 mi (1.6 km) east of the future Table Bluff Lighthouse in October 1858, and about 10 mi (16 km) south of Fort Humboldt. This was the first purchase of land in the Humboldt Land District, which was established by an Act of Congress in March, 1858. He later built a hotel and bar on the site.

Kinman made his name first as a hunter, especially as a hunter of grizzly bears. California was noted for its large population of grizzlies. Seth's son Carlin claimed that they once saw 40 grizzlies at one time. But by 1868, the last grizzly in Humboldt County had been killed. While Kinman was on his way to deliver one of the presidential chairs, he met Methodist bishop and writer Oscar Penn Fitzgerald on a California steamboat. Fitzgerald recorded his impressions in the sketch The Ethics of Grizzly Hunting. He presented Kinman as a drunkard who cruelly abused Indians and grizzly bears.

His countenance was expressive of a mixture of brutality, cunning, and good humor. He was a thorough animal. Wild frontier life had not sublimated this old sinner in the way pictured by writers who romance about such things at a distance. —Oscar Penn Fitzgerald

Kinman's eyes made a special impression on Fitzgerald. Decades later he compared Kinman's eyes to those of the California bandit Tiburcio Vásquez "His eyes were nature's special label of one of her malignest creations. Only in two other human beings have I ever seen such eyes as those.... It was the eye of a wild beast, the baleful glitter you have seen in the eyes of snakes, panthers, catamounts, or other creatures of the reptile or feline kind."

During a gale on the night of January 5–6, 1860, Kinman was alerted by distress signals from the Northerner which had been breached by a submerged rock. Kinman tethered himself to the shore and waded into the surf to save many passengers. In all, seventy people were saved by various means, and 38 people perished. He was hailed as a hero and awarded a Bible and free life-time passage on the Pacific Mail Steamship Company's ships.