Page:History of California, Volume 3 (Bancroft).djvu/411

Rh, Laframboise, the leader of the beaver-hunters, was warned by Comandante Vallejo at Sonoma to suspend his operations.

Over thirty hunters had been added to the population of California by the expeditions that have been mentioned, and most of them resorted to hunting and trapping as a means of living, for some years at least. This they did with and without license, with their own license or with that of another, separately or in bands of foreign comrades or in partnership with Californians and Mexicans, and paying taxes when they could not avoid it. Wolfskill on his arrival associated himself, as did Yount, with the earlier comers, Prentice, Pryor, and Laughlin. He built a schooner at San Pedro, and in her hunted otter up and down the coast in 1832. Being a Mexican citizen, with a passport from the governor of New Mexico, he was able to get a license, but he soon abandoned the business to become a settler. Ewing Young, with Warner and others, also engaged in otter-hunting for a time in 1832, building two canoes at San Pedro with the aid of a ship-carpenter; and with these