k was readily
recognizable and served to identify him. Old Brin stood at least five
feet high at the shoulder, weighed a ton or more and found no
difficulty in carrying away a cow. He seemed to be impervious to
bullets, and many hunters who took his trail never returned. A few who
met him and had the luck to escape furnished the formidable details of
his description and spread his fame, with the able assistance of
Truthful James and other veracious historians of the California and
Nevada press.

For several years the clubfooted Grizzly ranged the Sierra Nevada from
Lassen county to Mono, invulnerable, invincible and mysterious, and
every old hunter in the mountains had an awesome story to tell of the
ferocity and uncanny craft of the beast and of his own miraculous
escape from the jaws of the bear after shooting enough lead at him to
start a smelter. Old Brin was a never-failing recourse of the country
editor when the foreman was insistent for copy, and those who undertook
to preserve the fame of his exploits in their files scrupulously
respected the rights of his discoverer and never permitted any
vain-glorious bear hunter to kill him. As one of the early guardians
of this incomparable monster, I can bear witness that it was the
unwritten law of the journalistic profession that no serious harm
should come to the clubfoot bear and he should invariably triumph over
his enemies. It was also understood that a specially interesting
episode in the career of Old Brin constituted a pre-emption claim to
guardianship, and, if acknowledged by the preceding guardian, the claim
could not be jumped so long as it was worked with reasonable diligence.

While Old Brin infested Sierra Valley and vicinity he was my ward, and
I regret to say that his conduct was tumultuous and sanguinary in the
extreme. I can remember as if it were but yesterday how, one afternoon
when Virginia City was deplorably peaceful and local news simply did
not exist, Old Brin went on a rampage over toward Sierra Valley and
slaughtered two Italian woodchoppers in the most wanton and sensational
manner. More than ten years later I met in Truckee an old settler who
remembered the painful occurrence well, because the Italians were
working for him at the time, and he told me the story to prove that Old
Brin had once roamed that part of the mountains. Naturally I was so
pleased to learn that my humble effort to keep the local columns of the
Virginia Chronicl