In the morning the captain gives each man his course and instructions to return at once when the signal cannon is fired.  The first morning that we started out we went about four miles before we saw any seal, when we ran on to a school sleeping on the water.  The two boatmen pulled up among them and I turned loose to shooting them and got six out of the outfit before they got away from us.  Shooting seal out of a boat reminded me very much of shooting Indians when on a bucking cayuse, as the boat is always in motion, and it is all that a person can do to stand up in it when the sea is any ways rough.  That day I killed nine seal and we were called in at two o’clock, as there was fog coming up, and we just got in ahead of it.  We had fair success sealing until the last of August, when my crew ventured a little too far and the wind changed so that we did not hear the cannon and the fog caught us.  Each crew when starting out in the morning always took supplies along sufficient to last twenty-four hours.  This time when we got caught in the fog the wind had changed on us, so we tried to remain as near the same place as possible, but this time we had to guess at it as we could not always tell just which way the tide was going.  This was beyond any doubt the worst trip that I ever experienced, the fog was very cold and our clothing wet.  We were out three days and nights and then were picked up by another schooner.  The captain of the schooner that picked us up heard the firing of our cannon that morning and we were picked up about noon.  He at once set sail for our schooner, firing the signal cannon every half hour, reaching our schooner just as it was growing dark, and the captain and crew had given us up for lost.  We stayed out until the last of September, when we sailed for San Francisco, and this wound up my seal hunting.

There was only one other man in the crew that killed more seal than I did during the season, but I made the largest day’s killing of any one in the crew, that being twenty seven.  But one season was enough for me in that line of business.  I concluded that I would much rather take my chances on dry land.

In the spring of 1887 I took a trip to the Puget Sound country and found Seattle a very lively place; in fact, as much so as any place I had ever seen in my life.  After remaining in Seattle about two months I concluded that I would try my hand at the hotel business, as that was something I had not tried, so I bought out a man named Smith, who owned a big hotel on the corner of South second and Washington streets, just opposite John Court’s Theatre Building, paying Mr. Smith sixteen thousand dollars for the property, and besides this I spent one thousand two hundred dollars in repairing and fitting it up in shape.  I gave it the name of “Riverside House.”  Here I built up a good business in the hotel line.  In fact, inside of six months from the time I opened up I had all that I could accommodate all the time, and this was the first time in my life that I had been perfectly satisfied.