The Legend of Dan Pullen
A profile of a pioneer 'bull puncher' and pilot in the Quillayute Valley, whose reputation for fearlessness and run-ins with wolf packs defined a generation of settlers.
Daniel Pullen, of Lapush, who has resided in the Sound country for the past thirty years, has been spending a short time in Seattle attending to business. 'Dan,' as he is invariably called, is one of the first white men who settled in the Quillayute valley, where he now owns some 1,500 acres of land. He was engaged in logging camps, principally as a 'bull puncher.' At one time in his adventurous career, he and his brother ran a pilot schooner in the Straits and were noted as being afraid to tackle no wind that blew. When Dan and his brother settled on the Quillayute prairie, the country was infested with big timber wolves, and bands of elk frequented the prairie. They had a lot of cattle and sheep and the wolves proved very destructive. The savage brutes would attack cattle or sheep in the daytime and killed many of them. Dan shot a pig, salted him with strychnine, and dragged the pork out into the prairie. The next morning the bones of that pig were surrounded by a band of dead wolves.
“He’s the only man that dare do it, and he’s neither crazy nor drunk.”
Dan Pullen’s story illustrates the extreme, often violent, environmental transformation brought by early settlers, marking the period when the Olympic Peninsula was being aggressively 'opened' to the logging and agricultural industry.
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