Seth Kinman - Presidential Chairs

Presidential Chairs

Kinman first used the large number of elkhorns shed near his farm every year to create a fence. With the help of George Hill, about 1856 he created his first elkhorn chair, which he traded to Dr. Josiah Simpson of Fort Humboldt for a telescope. The construction of an elkhorn chair included using matching horns to make the front legs and arms of the chair. These horns interlocked with another matching pair, which formed the rear legs and the back of the chair. An elk-hide seat was added, along with actual elk feet as the feet of the chair, and the horns were connected beneath the seat.

Inspired by the 1856 election of James Buchanan, a fellow Pennsylvanian, to the presidency, Kinman built his first presidential elkhorn chair and brought it to Washington.

I kill deer and elk meat up in Humboldt County. My range is from Bear Valley into Oregon. This winter I killed considerable meat so I thought I would take it easy and set about to make this cheer with a view of sending it on to Washington for Old Buck. After I got it finished, though, the boys up in our parts thought it enough to travel on; so I thought I would try and go on with it to Washington myself, leaving my mother and four children behind, and started with nothing but my rifle and powder horn. Nobody has yet sot in this cheer, and never shall till after the President. —Seth Kinman

He arranged free passage on the ship Golden Age to Panama, then to New York, and finally to Washington. With some help from Peter Donahue and O.M. Wozencraft, on May 26, 1857, after an introduction from the Commissioner of Indian Affairs James W. Denver, Kinman presented the chair to Buchanan. The President was so pleased by the present that he bought Kinman a rifle and two pistols in return.

In 1861 he advertised that he had made a chair that he would present to Napoleon III. Later, because of French involvement in Mexico, he abandoned the idea. Kinman took two chairs on his 1864 trip to the East Coast for use in exhibitions.

Kinman's presentation of an elkhorn chair to President Abraham Lincoln at 10 a.m. on Saturday, November 26, 1864 was recorded by artist Alfred Waud, the only known picture of Lincoln accepting a gift. The drawing shows Lincoln examining Kinman's rifle, which he called "Ol' Cottonblossum." Kinman also presented a fiddle made from the skull and a rib of his favorite mule and played the instrument.

Much to the amusement of Lincoln and other spectators, he played 'Essence of Old Virginia' and 'John Brown' on the bones of the mule. Lincoln said that if he could play the fiddle he would ask him for it, but since he could not, the fiddle would be better off in Mr. Kinman's hands. —Stanley Kimmel.

Within three weeks, Lincoln stated that he would prefer to eat Kinman's chair, antlers and all, than to appoint a certain office-seeker.

The following April, Kinman marched in President Lincoln's funeral cortege in Washington.

Kinman was allegedly in Ford's Theater the night of the assassination and witnessed the murder. He escorted Lincoln's body on its way to burial as far as Columbus, Ohio. On April 26, 1865, the New York Times described Kinman in the funeral cortege in New York City: "Much attention was attracted to Mr. Kinman, who walked in a full hunting suit of buckskin and fur, rifle on shoulder. Mr. Kinman, it will be remembered, presented to Mr. Lincoln some time ago a chair made of California elk-horn, and continuing his acquaintance with him, it is said, enjoyed quite a long conversation with him the very day before the murder."

During his stays on the East Coast, many cartes de visites photographs of Kinman and his chairs were taken by Mathew Brady. Kinman claimed to have paid Brady $2,100 in one three-month period for photos at 8 cents apiece, which calculates to an unlikely amount of over 26,000 photographs. Kinman sold these photographs, among other places, in the U.S. Capitol. He also toured the country, performing in his buckskins as a frontier story teller and fiddle player.

Kinman's tour de force in presidential chairs was presented to President Andrew Johnson on September 8, 1865.

This was intended to surpass all his previous efforts, and was made from two grizzly bears captured by Seth. The four legs and claws were those of a huge grizzly and the back and sides ornamented with immense claws. The seat was soft and exceedingly comfortable, but the great feature of the chair was that, by touching a cord, the head of the monster grizzly bear with jaws extended, would dart out in front from under the seat, snapping and gnashing its teeth as natural as life. —Marshall R. Anspach

Johnson kept the chair in his White House library, the Yellow Oval Room.

On September 18, 1876, Kinman presented an elkhorn chair to Governor Rutherford Hayes of Ohio, who was soon to become the President of the United States. The chair is now displayed in the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Fremont, Ohio. He later gave a chair constructed of bearskin and other bear body parts to Hayes's vice-president William A. Wheeler.