His unfortunate propensity for liquor had involved him in several serious affrays before he came to the Idaho mines. On one occasion, in Southern Oregon, a man who had suffered injury at his hands, while on a drunken spree shot him in the side by stealth. Patterson with the quickness of lightning drew his revolver, and fired upon and wounded his assailant. Both fell, and Patterson, believing the wound he had received would prove fatal, fired all the remaining charges in his pistol at his antagonist, and then called for his friends to take off his boots. The original expression, “he will die with his boots on some day,” uttered many years ago as the prediction of some comical miner that a murderer would be hanged or come to his death by violence, has grown into a fantastic belief among the reckless and bloodthirsty ruffians of the Pacific coast. Patterson, who shared in this faith, intended, by having his boots taken off, to signify to those around him that he had never been guilty of murder. When we consider that of the great number of those who in the early history of the mining regions were guilty of murder, nineteen at least of every twenty have expiated their crimes upon the scaffold or in bloody affrays, the faith in this frontier axiom seems not to be greatly misplaced: but why it should be any more potent as a human prediction than as the stern edict of the Almighty denounced against the murderer four thousand years ago, I leave for the solution of those modern thinkers who build their belief outside the lids of the Bible. Another bloody _rencontre_ in which Patterson was engaged was with one Captain Staples in Portland, Oregon. Staples, an ardent Unionist, boisterously patriotic from liquor, insisted that all around him should join in a toast to Lincoln and the Union arms. Patterson refused, and an unpleasant altercation followed, but the parties separated without collision. Later in the evening they met, and the difficulty was renewed, and in the fight Staples was killed. Patterson was tried and acquitted; and became, in consequence of the quarrel and trial, a great favorite and champion among the secessionists of Portland. Some time after this, in a drunken frenzy he scalped a disreputable female acquaintance. His own version of this affair was as follows: “I was trying,” said he, “to cut off a lock of her hair with my bowie-knife, but she wouldn’t keep her head still, and I made a mistake, and got part of her scalp with the hair.” For this act he was arrested and recognized to await the action of the grand jury; but before the term of court he left the State, and his bondsmen were compelled to pay the forfeiture.