Brother Bud Southwick was assigned by the Canadian government a hunting area that was around the Toad River in British Columbia. The first trip Brother Branham made there was in 1960. That year, Brother Ed Byskal introduced Brother Bud to the ministry of Brother Branham. After this, God showed a vision of Brother Bud’s brother, being healed of epilepsy.
The following year, Brother Branham saw a vision of a caribou and a silver-tipped grizzly bear that he felt the Lord was going to give him on a hunting trip. He foretold it, but didn’t know when or where it would happen. When Brother Bud Southwick invited him to hunt again, he accepted. On that trip he killed the caribou and the bear, just as the vision showed.
On my first trip to Jeffersonville, Brother Branham had me stand in the middle of that bear skin rug. He put his arms around me and prayed a prayer. It was the exact same prayer he’d prayed when I picked him up and put him over in Howard’s car when I was 16 years old. I knew that day that I was to be a part of his ministry.
In 1963, the mother of Oscar and Louise (who are Beaver/Sekani Indians) was healed of a heart attack. Because of this, Brother Branham was able to lead these Indians to the Lord Jesus. They later asked to be baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Months before Brother Branham arrived on this trip, Oscar lost several horses. The Lord showed Brother Branham a vision of the horses in snow. A year later (June 1964) Brother Branham received a letter from Oscar saying he found the horses in snow. When I went there in August and September 1964, Brother Branham looked out the cabin and said, “Here comes Oscar’s sister with one of those horses I saw in the vision.” I took a picture of Brother Branham with Louise and that horse. (photo above)
After hearing about the vision of the caribou and bear, I asked, “Brother Branham, why does the Lord give you visions of the animals like the caribou and the bear?” He answered, “Brother Green, I wondered that too. But the Lord does that in order to give me confidence in those visions. Do you realize how much courage it takes to stand in front of 5,000 people and say, ‘Sir, your name is so-and-so, and you have so-and-so. You did so-and-so and you’re going to do so-and-so?’ God does this out here in the wilderness to give me confidence that those visions are of Him.” But then, that’s what God did to David when He gave him a lion and a bear. Later, I found in the sermons where Brother Branham also gave another reason. God knew his mother was going to die, so He gave him this experience with the caribou and silver-tipped grizzly bear to encourage him so that he’d have it to hold on to when he came back home from this hunting trip and his mother died.
You have to understand that all this is something that was pre-known by God’s Divine intelligence. How else would Brother Branham know about a bear and a caribou, and Bud being given the Toad River area as part of his hunting territory, and the events that took place for Louise and her family to live there? It shows we have a God that knows the end from the beginning.
– Brother Pearry Green
Pastor of Tucson Tabernacle
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Spring of 1960
Vision of Bud’s Brother Being Healed
[These experiences are taken from It Becometh Us To Fulfill All Righteousness, October 1, 1961 a.m., Jeffersonville, Indiana; Presuming, June 10, 1962 a.m., Southern Pines, North Carolina; Spirit Of Truth, January 18, 1963, Phoenix, Arizona; Audio Letter To Lee Vayle, May 1964, Tucson, Arizona]
He was just a young convert, and he’d heard about the meetings. His wife is a Pentecostal believer. He’s a guide: Brother [Bud] Southwick. Bud was a rancher. He’d been allotted—where they drove the Indians out and put them on the reservation—a great territory for hunting. Oh, I guess he got about 300 square miles or more, around in there (a section of the Alcan Road), for a territory allotted to him by the Canadian government.
Well, that spring when I was up there, we went bear hunting after the meetings. The rivers come down and cut us off and we couldn’t get back into the country where we were going to hunt grizzly bear. So, we just had to lay in the tent.
[Bud had] never heard of anything about the meetings. Eddie [Byskal] was telling him about my ministry, about visions and so forth.
“You don’t mean to tell me, that today that God is showing Himself, and shows things that’s coming before it happens?”
Eddie said, “That’s exactly right.”
So he kept talking to me. He said, “You know, I got a brother’s got epilepsy… If I could ever get him to one of your meetings, I believe he’d be healed. He’s had it all of his life.”
I said, “Perhaps so.”
Well, it don’t get dark up there at that time of the year, you know. Any time, midnight, one o’clock, you can just stand and read the newspaper, anything. And about the last part of May the sun never goes down. It just barely tips, gone about ten minutes, and comes back... We just lay down whenever we got tired.
And then on the road coming out, we met the bunch of Indians. And oh, I got the old chief back there. They let him stay there because he’s had two children... They bury their children in a log, their loved ones, some kind of a religion, and they hung them in the tree. So they just let that family stay there. Nice old fellow, past 90 years old, setting up in his saddle just as good as one of his boys.
And so, we left the next day. He said, “There’s no way across now. Go up over the mountains and this way.” Oh, it was another hundred miles to cut a trail. So we couldn’t do that. It was too late. We started back.
Bud’s got a string of young horses. Usually I tied tails, toggers, like that. But in the mountains you can’t use it that way because you’ll lose the whole string of horses. And sometimes they’d fall off a cliff. And on the road out, we’d turned the horses loose, and these young horses roll with their packs and things. We was coming up out of the back a wrangling. Bud was riding on in the front with a bell horse trying to lead on; and I was coming in back, Eddie and I, getting these horses out of muskeg. [Muskeg is a bog of northern North America, commonly having sphagnum mosses, sedge, and sometimes stunted black spruce and tamarack trees.] I guess you all know what muskeg is. And they’d get in that—like quicksand.
We had a couple down, and, oh, I was mud from head to foot, and along there getting them horses out. And one of them jumped in, and I right jumped in on top of him, held his head up like that. We got a rope around, throwed it onto my saddle horn like that, and took one horse, and cut the other packs off, and got him out of there. And just take mud, and scrape it off of you like that. So… Oh my. Them young horses... They just go any way. They’re two or three years old and just broke, and they’re not trail horses at all.
As we was going down there, I was looking out across like that, and I seen that young fellow in a vision. The horse stopped itself. I didn’t have to stop him. I watched that vision for a few minutes, and when it left I seen it was for Bud’s brother. I seen him fall in a fit, going over and over, and frothing, and got real arrogant, and just tearing up everything. And then he quietened down. I seen an old salamander. I seen his shirt burning.
Eddie was about half a city block ahead of me trying to get another horse, young horse run off the trail, getting over in there, pulling the packs off of him, bucking off. So then I run up there to Eddie. We got the horse quiet. I said, “Eddie, I got ‘thus saith the Lord’ for Bud.”
“Brother Branham, what happened?”
“A vision. I seen his brother.”
“Oh, get him.”
I said, “Hold the horses back. I’ll spur mine and get ahead, run around these horses, see if I can get them and hold them against the side of the hill.” I run around the cliff like this on my horse, pushed him up and got up there. And I put my hand over on the saddle.
I said, “Bud.”
“Yes, Brother Branham?”
I said, “I want to tell you something. Your brother...” and described him.
He said, “Yes, who told you?”
“Nobody, the Lord just showed him to me. Will you believe me as His servant?”
He said, “Certainly, Brother Branham.”
I said, “Send down...” About 800 miles back to civilization... “Get your brother to come up here. And the first time he falls in one of those fits...” And I said, “He’s had these since about two years old. You might not believe it, but it’s hereditary. Your grandfather had them.”
He said, “Now, that’s the truth. That’s right.”
And I said, “Now, when this boy has this fit, you jerk the shirt off of his back and throw it into the fire, and say, ‘This I do in the name of Jesus Christ according to His Word,’ and he’ll never have another one, as long as he’ll believe it.”
He just raised up his hands, started screaming. He said, “I’ve never seen it done, but you sure told me just what my brother looked like, and told me the truth about my grandfather.”
I said, “That’s right.”
After we left, he sent and got his brother. And he was going out to cut trail that morning, when... He come up on the bus. And Bud’s wife, Lila, is just a little bitty thing, a little woman, about big as a bar of soap after a family’s washing is done from it...got five children, and a sweet little woman. And so Bud went out to fix his horses because he was going to cut trail so we could get back in with his hunters.
And as soon as he was gone, well, his brother in there, without taking his good clothes off yet, he fell in a fit. They were camping in an old barracks where the Americans, when they was building the highway, had it there. They had a big old salamander as a stove. And little Lila... He got rashal when he got them spells, and she was scared to death of him. She’d clear a window or something or other to get out of the way. But she started to jump out, and she thought of what had been said. She’d been in one of the meetings down at Dawson Creek. She rushes over there and straddles this big fellow, jerks that shirt off his back, crying, buttons and all, his white shirt, walked over to the stove and said, “This I do in the name of the Lord Jesus according to the word of the Lord that was told to us.” And he’s never had one since. That settled it.
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1961
Caribou and Silver-tipped Grizzly Bear
Vision Fulfilled
[These experiences are taken from It Becometh Us To Fulfill All Righteousness, October 1, 1961 a.m., Jeffersonville, Indiana; Spirit Of Truth, January 18, 1963, Phoenix, Arizona; Audio Letter To Lee Vayle, May 1964, Tucson, Arizona]
Many times I know it’s been a little hard. People who wouldn’t understand say, “Brother Branham, why would you take a hunting trip?” See, they just don’t understand. There’s no need of trying to explain it. See? You catch people there would never be caught.
About two months ago, or hardly that long, I was woke up one morning. And in a vision I saw a great animal, looked like a deer, and it had great high horns. I had to go around a side shale, like this, to get to it. And it was a very famous animal. It was a great trophy animal. And there was a man that I saw that had on a green checkered shirt. And then on the road, after I’d got the animal, I’d heard a voice say that, “Those horns are 42 inches high.” And it was a mammoth animal. And on the road back, I saw a great huge silver-tip grizzly bear.
There’s four in the grizzly family. One is the silver-tip, which is the famous. Next is called, the native name, kadish, which is a black with a round ear. Third is the regular grizzly, which is between black and brown, a huge bear. And the next is the Kodiak, which is only found on Kodiak Island and western Alaska; he’s great, mammoth, biggest of all bears, but he’s a grizzly. But the silver-tip is black and the silver is on the end of the tip of the hair. He’s the famous one, very high-strung, ill-tempered bear.
I shot the bear with a heart shot, killed him. But I was questioned, the little rifle I had, about getting it. And then I seen them take the horns, and a little hand reached and get the horn, put the tape on it, and it measured 42 inches from the top of the beam to the top of the horn, 42 inches high. I never seen any animal like it: great big spikes on his horns and yet it looked like a deer. But it... Oh, my, it’d make two or three deer. I never seen anything like it. Well, I said, “Probably it’ll come to pass someday. I’ll just write it down.”
I went down in Kentucky with a friend of mine, and Brother Miner Arganbright called me and said, “Brother Branham, are you busy?”
I said, “Not so bad. I got two weeks now. I’m on a little vacation.”
“Run up to Canada, to Alaska, with me. We want to organize a Business Men’s chapter at Anchorage and also over at Fairbanks.”
I said, “Sounds all right, if I can get the time to do it.”
“Well, Brother Branham, if you’ll do it, I tell you what. We’ll give you a nice grizzly bear hunt.”
“Oh, that sounds fine.” I thought, “Oh, oh. There’s the vision. See? So that’s it. A nice grizzly bear hunt.” I said, “That sounds good. I don’t go for that, but while we’re up there, and some of the guides wants to take me out free, I’ll be glad to go.”
So he said, “Well, they’ll do it. We got it fixed up.”
“Well, now wait. Let me pray over it.” And I went up in the woods that day, and every time I prayed, farther away I got all the time, completely away from it. I thought, “That’s strange.” And two days after that I called Brother Arganbright and I said, “No.”
He said, “Brother Branham, we was just getting things arranged.”
“Don’t do it. The Holy Spirit has condemned it.” And I told him the vision. I said, “I don’t know, Brother Arganbright, but it’s strange. But He won’t let me go up there, and yet it sounds like that would be the place.”
He said, “Well now, we’re all set to go.”
“No. I just can’t do it. The Holy Spirit tells me not...” It’s best to obey, no matter how much, how good it looks. So now, remember, no matter how good it looks, if God isn’t in it, stay away from it. No matter how glamor it looks, stay away from it. How prosperous, stay away from it if God isn’t in it. Stay away from it.
Now, then when I went home, Billy said to me, “Dad, do you know that hunter that you went hunting with last spring up there by the name of Southwick?”
“Oh,” I said, “below the Yukon there?”
“Yes. He’s got a letter here for you.” He had sent for me to come, a free hunt. And I’m always looking for them free things, you know. “Well, I’ll see if the Lord lets me go.” I prayed, and just no more than praying, and everything moving right that way.
I took Brother Fred Sothmann. So I went up to the Alaskan highway, and Brother Fred stopped off at a friend’s to go moose hunting. It’s too far back there for moose, so we’re up in sheep country where we was going. I took dirt and drawed on the windshield. I said, “Now, Brother Fred, so if this is the time, you’ll remember exactly what it will be.” I’d drawed on the windshield exactly how long them horns would be, and how big the bear would be and what kind it would be. Drawed it out on paper, just the way it would be, how the animal would be in a panoramic, and I’d have to go over some snow to get to it. And there’d be more with me. But I’d be the one that got the animal with the 42 inch horns. And on my road back, I’d kill this silver-tip grizzly bear.
I went on up. That night when we got in the camp, Bud hugged me, and jumped up and down, speaking in tongues and hollering—and that an old rough cowboy too—just praising God. He said, “You know what, Brother Branham? My brother hasn’t had a fit from that time on. He’s perfectly normal and well.”
And I said, “As long as he will believe it, it’ll continue that way. Now, tell him to surrender his life to Christ, and serve Him the rest of his days. ‘Go and sin no more, or a worse thing come upon him.’ See? Tell him to do that now.”
So I said, “I have another vision,” and I told him of the vision. “Now, there was some little fellows with me. We was on a hunting trip and they were small men, and one of them had a green plaid shirt on.”
“Well, Brother Branham, I don’t have a green plaid shirt.” His boy Blaine, 18, said he doesn’t have no green plaid shirt. Eddie Byskal, another little bitty fellow, weighed about a 110 pounds, he said, “I don’t have one either, Brother Branham.”
I said, “Well, now, the animal...”
He said, “What kind of a animal was it?”
“It looked like a deer.”
“There’s no deer up here; it’s too high. Maybe it was a caribou.”
I said, “A caribou has a panel.”
“That’s right.”
I said, “This had spikes.”
“Well, Brother Branham, we’re going to sheep country, not deer country or anything like that.”
I said, “Well, it’s probably another trip. It might’ve been Alaska somewhere, ‘cause it was a mammoth big grizzly.”
“What kind of a grizzly was it?”
“Silver-tip.”
He said, “I’m a guide. I’ve been in these woods here all my life. I’ve never seen a silver-tip. I’ve seen a regular old grizzly. But I’ve never seen a silver-tip—never seen one in my life.”
“Well, there’s one somewhere, and I’m going to get him.”
He said, “I’ll say that’s the truth.”
We took off three days later. We made camp plumb up above timberline. And God help me, if they stay that way till the millennium, let me live there during the millennium. I just love to bathe in that nature there. Oh. Anybody couldn’t see God there is blind, deaf, and dumb. Just to see Him reflecting Himself in those great mammoth mountains. Oh, my. The deep calls to the deep then. And up there just having a glorious time.
So we went up on one mountain. You just have to walk straight, like that, to get up it. No timber, just simply caribou moss is all you see. We seen about 30 or 40 head of sheep. There wasn’t none big enough to take. It was just little half-rounds, and three-quarter rounds, and I wanted one big enough to come out of there with, so, by going that far back. I went back down. And the next day we started across, and Eddie fell in the water when he started to jump across with a big pair of shoes on.
Going up the side of the mountain, Bud stopped and said, “Let me have your glasses, Billy.” I give him the glasses. We’d walk a piece, and talk about the Lord, and shout, and run up and down the side of the hill, just have a glorious time. It’s good to go on a hunting trip if you go with brothers. And so, he took my glasses. He said, “Brother Branham, there’s your old ram. There’s about eight of them laying about six miles, right there on top of that other peak. Look at them. See them together?”
I picked up; I said, “I’ll say, there they are, exactly.”
He said, “Well, we might as well go back down, start in the morning about three o’clock. We ought to be up there about nine or ten. The old rams will be laid down. That’ll just be the time.”
I said, “What’s them other things walking around there?”
“That’s caribou.”
Six miles away, you know, it’s hard to tell what they look like. And then from then on, 600 miles the way the crow flies, there’s not even a path or a trail. And when you hit the West Coast, you go about 800 miles to Vancouver, there’s not even a speck of civilization. And the next civilization’s going this way is Anchorage, about seven or eight hundred miles. Go back this way, you run into the little city, Yellow Knife, where you get a ship in there once a year for the Eskimos. And next you hit Russia. So you’re really to yourself. That’s where God can take His rest up there from all of our troubles and trials that we put Him into. So I like to go up there and talk to Him, when He’s resting. You see?
We went back down, and the next morning we started early. Along about eight o’clock we’d wound through shin-tangle, and everything, till we got to the top of the hill. And on the road up, here went an old cow caribou, and a nice-size bull went and started up the hill, and big panels on him. And I said, “Well, and so there is the first caribou I ever seen in the woods wild. I’ve never been this high before.”
He said, “Yeah, that’s a caribou.”
So we went on up the hill and looked. The sheep wasn’t there. So Bud and I walked around—and Eddie started slipping around, and Blaine his boy, looking around for game. And we walked over here, and... Oh, my. I just screamed out, “Glory to God.” I looked down there, and there was them big snow-peaked mountains, yellow caribou moss below the snow. And just below that come in the evergreen, which was the pygmy spruce. And got a little farther down, there was the buck brush, red. A little further than that was the quaking aspen, yellow, all reflecting in the lake down below it. Oh, my.
Bud and I just put our arms around one another and just danced a little jig around there, just screaming, and shouting, and praising God. And we set down with our arms around one another, and just praised God and had a wonderful time—I guess about two hours.
And I said, “Say, wonder what become of Eddie?” We called him “the dude.” So we went back and started across the hill. I said, “He couldn’t get lost up here.”
“No, Blaine’s back over there somewhere, and he’s an Indian.”
So we looked around and I seen a movie camera laying there. I said, “That was Eddie’s.” I looked back down the hill, and I went over this way, and he went the other way.
And Eddie was going, “Sh-h-h-h.” He was stalking that little bull caribou, and he was going to take him back down to feed him to the Indian friends that he was missionarying to. So he shot the caribou and we went out and cleaned it out.
Come back along about one o’clock. We found our saddle horses again, about a half-a-mile away where they was standing. And we were standing there and he said, “Brother Branham, you like to walk?”
“I sure do.”
He said, “If we scale this mountain... Them rams went across this way, and went down into that other hole there, maybe. If they didn’t, they went back this other way. Let’s let Eddie and them go back, and go through this cut down here, and take my saddle horse and your saddle horse, and pack the caribou to the camp. And we’ll walk just up through here and hit that place. And we ought to get in about ten or eleven o’clock tonight.”
“Fine. We’ll do it.”
So we was standing there. We’d just eat a can of sardines apiece, each one of us, that we’d buried under the moss, this sardines. And our bread we had in our shirt. We’d sweated until it was all in one big lump. But it was good, when you’re hungry, and it’s all right. So we stood there.
And I was just looking around, and I looked through the glasses, and I said, “Bud, looky here. What is that over there?” About three miles away, there laid that caribou. And it was an odd one—wasn’t panels, it was big spikes. I said, “You remember? Looky here. There’s that panoramic just exactly. And there lays that animal just the way... There’s only one thing that hinders the vision, somebody with a green check shirt.” And there stood Eddie with a green check shirt on. I said, “I thought you didn’t have one.”
He said, “My wife must’ve put that in the pack. When I fell in the water yesterday...” He had to change shirts. He said, “Now, I didn’t know she had it in there, Brother Branham. I’m sorry I told you something wrong.”
“You just had to do that, son.”
Oh, Bud begin to shout. He said, “You can stand right here, and shoot him three miles away, can’t you, Brother Branham?”
I said, “According to the vision, I was right on him.”
“Brother Branham, I tell you, how you going to get over there?”
“I don’t know, but I’m going to get over there.”
So he said, “How you going?”
I said, “Going around this panoramic.”
He said, “That’s shale. And if you slide you’ll have about... thousand of tons of snow on you in about a second.”
And I said, “The Lord will take care of that. That’s the way I went in the vision, right on around.”
“Well, I’m going to follow you.” And here he come.
And these boys said, “We’ll stay here now, until we see you get the caribou. And then, we’ll go on down, take the horses and go on in. We’ll meet you down at the end of the draw, about four or five miles down.”
He said, “All right.”
So we started around, Bud and I, and in about a half-hour we worked right around. And that caribou laying right there, looking right at us, and never seen us. He must’ve been asleep. And went up over a little cut, and come back, and come up within 30 yards of him. There he laid—this mammoth big animal. Rose up from there, and I got him.
And while we was setting there taking the cape and so forth from it, like that, Bud said, “Did you say these horns was 42 inches?”
“That’s exactly right.”
“Brother Branham, they must be a 142.”
“No, it’s just exactly 42.”
“I got a tape measure down there.”
I said, “Do you doubt it?”
“No, sir. But wait a minute. Didn’t you tell me that you were going to get a big grizzly bear before you got back down? There’d be a silver-tip before you got back to where that boy was had the green shirt on?”
I said, “That’s the truth.”
He looked back down the hill. Well, there isn’t a thing that high, nothing at all, just moss all you see, miles and miles, just rolling hills of moss. He said, “Where’s he at, Brother Branham?”
I said, “He can provide one. He said so. Do you doubt that, Bud?”
“No, sir.”
Well, coming down the hill, come like this, he’d pack the rifle awhile, and I’d pack the head, and then vice versa. Just have to walk sideways coming down. Them big horns just raking into the moss. And we got within about a mile of it. We stopped and looked around. He said, “That old bear better be showing up, hadn’t he?”
I said, “What you bothered about?”
“Nothing.”
We went on till we hit a little glacier coming across. We set down there and got cooled off a little. He said, “Brother Branham, just think of it. We haven’t got over about, oh, less than a half-a-mile till we hit them boys. And somewhere between here and there you’re going to kill a silver-tip?”
“That’s right. That’s right— You’re doubting that, Bud.”
He raised up and took me by the hand, and he said, “Brother Branham, my brother has never had a fit from that day to this. The God that could tell you of my brother wouldn’t lie to you.”
“Bud, he’ll be there.”
“Where will he come from?”
“I don’t know. But Bud, I’m 52 and I’ve saw visions since a child. And when I saw this caribou here killed... And you see if his horns isn’t 42 inches. And then the same vision, I was on my road back down to where that company was that I was with, I killed this silver-tip grizzly.”
“Brother Branham, I can see for 20 miles. God’s going to have to pull him up out of the ground, or bring him down out of the skies, or something.”
“Don’t you worry—he’ll be there.”
We went about another hundred yards. He was just about wore out too. This weighed about 150 pounds, this trophy. So coming down the hill, and you set it down, he said, “Whew, I’m about give out.”
I said, “Yep.” We come into a little pygmy spruce then, about that high, and there was a few grouse flying around, and there was ptarmigan hens. And so I throwed some rocks at them, like that.
So he said, “Did you ever eat of them ptarmigan?”
“No, I don’t believe so.”
“They’re fine. They’re as good as grouse. Brother Branham...” (took off his big old black hat, fanned hisself) “...about time for that old bear to show up, ain’t it, boy?”
“Bud, you’re doubting that.”
“No, I’m not. But Brother Branham, I just can’t understand.”
“Neither can I. It’s not for me to understand. It’s for me to believe.” Amen. God in heaven knows these things are true. Would I stand here and say this if it wasn’t true? Then I started to turn around to give him the rifle, and me pick up the head, and as I turned I said, “Bud, you got them glasses around your neck. What is that standing up there on the side of the hill?”
And he throwed the glasses up. He said, “Oh, help me. If it ain’t somebody’s milk cow...” (And there ain’t no such thing in the country.) “That’s the biggest grizzly I ever seen in my life. And so help me, look at that yellow sun shining on him, he’s a silver-tip. How far do you say he is?”
I said, “He’s about two mile up there.” We was about wore out. I said, “What are we waiting on? Let’s go.”
“You’re sure of getting him?”
I said, “Sure I’m going to get him.”
“What’s that gun you’re using there?”
And I said, “No, never mind about that.” It was a little bitty gun some brother give me in a meeting one time, several years ago. And I said, “A little cheap .270.”
We kept going a little closer, and the closer we got the bigger that bear looked hisself. See? Oh, he looked like a mammoth haystack a setting up there on that moss, you know, standing. Great big mammoth thing, head about that wide, you know, jaws sticking out, great big paws. And he was plucking up these little blueberry branches like that, you know, eating them. Great big fellow...
We got about, oh, about 800 yards of him.
He said, “Hey, Brother Branham, did–did you ever shoot a grizzly before?”
“I’ve shot many bear, Bud, but I never did shoot a silver-tip grizzly before.”
“You know, the silver-tip is the biggest fighter of all of them.”
“Yeah, I understood that.”
“He don’t know how to die.”
“Well...”
He said, “Don’t... How–how–how far you have... How close you have to get to him with that?”
“Well,” I said.
He said, “Now?”
“No, no. I was closer than this, Bud. I was right up close to him.”
“We’re getting pretty close now. He can charge at any time.”
“I know it. But Bud, it’ll be all right.”
He said, “Now, when you shoot a bear, now, Brother Branham, you shoot him in the back. You have to break him down, ‘cause he’ll keep on fighting, and can’t get up then.”
“No, according to the vision I shot him in the heart.”
“I hope you didn’t make no mistake on that.”
“I didn’t. I remember that.” ‘Cause in a vision you’re in one conscious, and both... As we explained it the other night, you’re in two—you can’t forget it. See? So there you are.
So we got in again about 250 yards, and just the last little coulee we went over. And I said, “That’s just about it now. Look at him. Isn’t he a beauty?”
“Yeah, I guess he is.”
And I said, “All right, Bud. Now when I raise up from here, he’s coming. And you just watch.”
“I’ll be watching.”
So I put a shell up in the barrel of the gun. And we was down under this little coulee. Just as I raised up, here he come. My, my. I stopped, shot, and it sounded like a pea-shooter hitting him. Boy, it never a bit more checked him up than nothing. And my, before... You talk about speed—I never seen anything like that. They’d outrun a horse, or deer, or anything, you know a bear can, like that. Him coming down that hill right towards us, like that. Before I could get another shell in the gun he dropped dead about, oh, about 30, 40 yards from me—just turned end over end. Took heart, lungs, and all from him. It was a nozzler bullet, you hand-loaders know. So it blowed him up, and he fell over.
Bud, standing there, looked over, was real white around the mouth. He said, “Brother Branham, I didn’t want him on my lap.”
I said, “Neither did I.”
“Whew. I want to tell after it’s over, boy. If that hadn’t have been one of them visions, and I’d seen it happen before, I’d have never come up here that close to that bear with you.”
Neither one of us could budge him. He weighed around a thousand pounds, I guess. So, mammoth big fellow. We couldn’t clean him; we skin him.
We started on down, and he said, “Brother Branham...” I picked up the horns. “If them horns are exactly 42 inches, I’m just going to have a running fit.”
I said, “You better have it right now then, ‘cause that’s what it is.”
“I have never seen a... It seems to me like I’m dreaming this.”
And when we got down there, and I said to Eddie, I said, “Now you watch. Blaine will put his hands... You watch it.”
And so Bud said, “Wait.” He got his horse over there. And we had bear on us, you know, those horses just tearing up everything. You know how they do, when they smell a grizzly or any kind of a bear. So I went over there trying to hold the horse, the saddle horse, trying to get away. And he went over and got his tape measure and come walking across there, looking at me like that. Said, “Come here, Blaine.” I punched Eddie.
Put it down on it, and so help me, 42 inches on the nose. Now, them horns shrink about 2 inches when they dry up. That grizzly bear is laying in my den room, and the horns are hanging on the wall. The taxidermist had fixed them up. There’s a tape measure hanging on them—42 inches exactly.
Now, what would God tell a man something like that for, about a hunting trip? When I got back, Mother was sick. I went to see her. She said, “Billy...” See, He was encouraging me, getting me ready for something. [Brother Branham’s mother passed not long after this.]
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Fall of 1963 and 1964
Oscar and Louise’s Mother Healed,
And Oscar Finds Lost Horses in Snow
[These experiences are taken from The Oddball, June 14, 1964 p.m., Jeffersonville, Indiana; Jesus Keeps All Of His Appointments, April 18, 1964 p.m., Tampa, Florida; Testimony, November 28, 1963 a.m., Shreveport, Louisiana]
I got a letter that come in day before yesterday, laying right back there in the file. The last spring—it was a year ago—an Indian boy named Oscar that we hunted on the highway up there with, where the angel of the Lord (I told you across here) would bring that caribou and that silver-tip grizzly. All of you remember it. Then that boy, when he walked into the tent last spring and when Bud asked me to ask the blessing—he took off his gloves, he was riding—he put them gloves on and was ready to go out. He was a Catholic—didn’t have nothing to do with it.
Last fall when he could... standing by my side when his mother was back there dying with a heart attack, he said, “Won’t you come back and pray for her?” I went back in this little hut of the Indians there. And there all of them gathered around this mother, and her dying, couldn’t speak a word of English. And the Holy Spirit came down and told the mother through an interpreter, her daughter [Louise], what had taken place, which was—even called her name, and told her what she was, and what tribe she was from, and how that this would happen. And the mother was instantly healed.
And the next morning when I went back to see them, as I rode out, going 40 miles back for a sheep, there they was all setting there. She was getting on the horse to go back to dry moose meat. And I said, “Last night when I prayed, I said, ‘Our Father Who art in heaven.’ Louise, I... Was a Catholic prayer. You all started, and then, of course, I left you. And now, I’m just going to thank God. We don’t say prayers; we pray.”
She said, “We no more Catholic. We believe like you believe. We want you to take all of us and baptize us the way you baptize. We want the Holy Ghost.”
On the trip back... The boy had lost his horses months before that, couldn’t find them. And the guide was bawling him out, said, “Oscar, you knowed better than to leave them horses like that. The bears (lot of grizzlies) would eat them horses up by this time.”
And he kept standing close to me. And one night he said, “Me ask you something?”
“Yes.”
“Brother Branham, pray God. God give me my ponies back.”
I said, “Bud said the bear eat them up.”
“Brother Branham, ask God. God give Oscar his ponies back.”
“You believe that, Oscar?”
“I believe. God make my mother well; God tell you where bear was, where game was; that God know where game is, know where my horses is.”
Think of it. A year ago while standing back there with Fred Sothmann, Billy Paul (my son)—the Holy Spirit came down. I said, “Oscar, you’ll find your ponies. They’ll be standing in the snow.”
There lays the letter, wrote me last week, and I got it Friday. It’s laying right in the file now: “Brother Branham, Oscar find ponies standing in snow.”
How they lived, nobody knows. At this time of year, June, there’s so much snow. There’s still 20 or 30 foot of snow around them. How did they stay there through the winter in this canyon? Oscar can get in to them on snowshoes, but ‘course, he can’t put snowshoes on his pony. But he found them according to the Word of the Lord.
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I’m going right from here to Tucson, to start again. Come right from there and go to British Columbia to baptize a whole tribe of Indians that I led to Christ (were formerly Catholic) last fall when I was on a hunting trip. And the whole group gave their heart to Christ by the healing of the mother, one of the mothers, that the doctors—no one could touch her. She was laying dying in a heart attack. The priest wouldn’t come too—way back in the jungles where I had to ride for hours, horseback. And they want me to come back as soon as the ice gets melted. See, it gets 85 below zero there.
A great bunch of trappers and hunters, up and down the Alaskan Highway, are all meeting with me to be baptized and accepting Christ. They seen the Lord show a vision of a certain thing, where a certain bear would be, how much he’d weigh, what kind he was, and where a certain animal would be staying, who would be there and what they’d be wearing, and all about it. And told them before it happened. And they said, “There’s not even that kind of things in this country.” And we went right straight to it. And it happened word by word. The trophies hang in my room today. See? They said, “We want to be baptized too.” Rough men, but you know, He’s got seed laying everywhere.
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Tucson Tabernacle
2555 North Stone Avenue
Tucson, Arizona 85705 USA
Phone: 520-623-0381
www.TucsonTabernacle.Info
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