Taking Care of (Un)finished Business

Next week is a doubleheader of sorts to wrap up two recent Chronicles.

Last week’s post was the story of the legendary prospector R.A. ‘Volcanic’ Brown who, in his 80s, continued to brave the forbidding mountains of Pitt River alone in search of the equally legendary Lost Creek Mine.

That trip in 1931 was his last; searchers who risked their lives to find him, found only his camp—and a Mason jar of gold nuggets—but of Brown himself, not a trace.

But there’s another story about Volcanic Brown I didn’t get to: the night he fatally shot Bill Brown, who shared his name by coincidence rather than kinship. It’s a dramatic tale to say the least, one which I first wrote 40 years ago and which drew a letter with a firsthand description of the tragedy by an eyewitness.

I’ve never published Mr. Jepson’s letter. He was just a boy at the time and will be gone by now. It needn’t be said that, even in 1980, 56 years after that fatal night at Volcanic Brown’s cabin, he vividly recalled Bill Brown’s last, frenzied minutes and his last words before he was struck down by a .30.30 rifle slug fired by Volcanic Brown...

Previously, I’d told you of the bigger-than-life ‘Sea Wolf’ McLean who’s been immortalized—libelled is probably a better—by author Jack London.

He hardly needed London’s gifted pen to make him notorious.

McLean’s exploits as a seal hunter and poacher who defied the Russian and American coast guards to raid the Bering Sea rookeries, then thumbed his nose at the French while looting their pearl beds in the South Pacific, made newspaper headlines time and again.

In 1922, based upon a number of conversations he’d had with McLean several years before (which would have been shortly before McLean’s death), a writer named Noel Robinson wrote what he claimed to be the story of “The Real Sea Wolf” for Macleans magazine.

Among other things, he describes McLean’s reaction when he finally read London’s book and found himself portrayed as a seagoing hellion who beat and tormented his seamen while pirating the seven seas.

No wonder that Hollywood made a movie about “him”!

That and more in next week’s Chronicles while I gear up for Halloween and dig into my files for a good ghost story. Come to think of it, Remembrance Day is fast approaching, too...

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