Calvin Price: “I Saw the Panther”, and Many Others Did Too
“I saw the panther. I whistled at him, and he growled at me,”- Calvin Price, 1956.
Skip Johnson was a well followed outdoors writer for the Charleston Gazette. He passed away in 2010, but a book that he completed just before his death, called West Virginia Mountain Lions, the Past Present and Future of the Long Tailed Cat, has recently been posthumously released. One of the chapters is dedicated to another newspaperman and outdoors writer from an earlier generation, Calvin Price, who Johnson calls “The Pocahontas Panther Man”. Like Johnson, Cal Price was fascinated by the very idea that mountain lions might still roam wild in the woods of West Virginia. For this story, we found a 1956 interview with Cal Price where he talks about his own encounter with a mountain lion.
There is a photo of Calvin Price, standing with his walking stick beside a hollowed out tree. Snow surrounds him. He stands in the rugged landscape, wearing a black tie and a suit, a black, weather-beaten hat, and brown hiking boots. His face beams with serenity, and his eyes are those of a man who has just climbed a mountain and for whom it is an everyday occurrence. Calvin Price never drove. He walked everywhere, all over Pocahontas County, spending many nights camping in the backcountry. He once wrote, “I have lain with my feet to a campfire so many times I cannot sleep at nights with my feet under covers. This little weakness has been the cause of strained domestic relations in an otherwise happy, blissful household.”
Each week Price wrote about this vivid awareness and fascination he had with the natural world, and he printed these “Field Notes” on the second page of The Pocahontas Times. These stories sometimes documented sightings of mountain lions that were reported to him by people in Pocahontas County. He talks briefly about these panther encounters in an interview that was recorded in Morgantown in 1956, a year before his death.
“We still maintain there’s panthers in Pocahontas County. Fact of the matter is we’re getting ready to follow the lead of New England and establish a brotherhood, or whatever you call it, a lodge, I have Seen a Panther.”
Dozens of West Virginians would probably become members in that “I Have Seen a Panther Brotherhood”. Cal Price had his own sighting of a mountain lion in 1954.
Pocahontas Times editor (1906-1957) Calvin Price avidly documented panther sightings in the newspaper. Photo from the WV State Archives.
“I saw the panther, two years ago. But I was by myself. I whistled at him, and he growled at me, turned around and went off into the woods.”
Today, sightings of mountain lions still persist in West Virginia, even though the last confirmed mountain lion in the state was killed in 1873. But the West Virginia DNR does not recognize these sightings as enough evidence to prove that any wild mountain lions still exist in this state.
Bob Beanblosson is with the West Virginia Department of National Resources. “According to our biologist, there is to date no credible evidence that panthers exist in West Virginia. There are numerous sightings, some of them by very reputable people. I know a few myself, that I have utmost respect for, that say they have seen a mountain lion. But beyond a sighting, there’s never any scat, there’s never any tracks. There’s never any evidence to suggest that mountain lions are in West Virginia.”
Skip Johnson’s posthumous book highlights story after story of mountain lion sightings over the past two hundred years. In the book, Johnson says, “There have been so many reports, in fact, that the question has become not whether mountain lions are being seen, but where are they coming from?”
He goes on to write, “Romantics among us can dream the scream of a panther on a dark night will echo once again over rolling hills and hollows.”
Special thanks to the West Virginia and Regional History Collection at the West Virginia University Libraries for allowing us to use the Calvin Price interview for this story. This interview was conducted in 1956 by Dr. O.D. Lambert and Mr. Charles Shetler.
Skip Johnson and his sister-in-law, Margaret Johnson, on the boardwalk in Cranberry Glades in October 2010, shortly before he died. Photo by Rob Johnson.
Skip Johnson’s book is West Virginia Mountain Lions: The Past, Present, and Future of the Long-Tailed Cat, published this year by the West Virginia Book Company. It can be bought at Local bookstores across West Virginia or from the publisher, West Virginia Book Company. Their number is 304-342-1848.
Want to read more about Calvin Price? Read the article by Gibbs Kinderman from Goldenseal Magazine. Also, here is a short biography about him.
Category: Elkins to Marlinton, Marlinton to Lewisburg, Panther Tales, Stories & Legends
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