Known for his publicity seeking, Kinman appeared as a stereotypical mountain man dressed in buckskins on the U.S. East Coast and selling cartes de visites of himself and his famous chairs.

His autobiography, dictated to a scribe in 1876, was first published in 2010 and is noted for putting "the entertainment value of a story ahead of the strict facts."

[7] Seth's mother, Eleanor Bower Kinman, was of German descent whose family lived in Reading, Pennsylvania.

[7] Seth spent ten years working in his father's mill in Illinois, sawing lumber and grinding grain.

[14] He married Anna Maria Sharpless, of Catawissa, Pennsylvania, in 1840 and they had five children together: James (1842), Carlin, who is sometimes called Calvin (1846), Austin (1847), Ellen (1849), and Roderick (1851).

There had been a little western "scrimmage" at the "Eagle" the night before, and though things had not been put in order, the proprietor, Seth Kinman, was sitting in front of the door, playing his favorite tune, the "Arkansaw Traveler", with the greatest self-satisfaction.

Humboldt Bay had been recently rediscovered by gold miners seeking a faster and cheaper route to transport supplies.

As described by a fellow '49er: Seth Kinman, the noted hunter and antler chair-maker, and myself were tendered fifty dollars each to preside as the orchestra for a Christmas ball at Uniontown in 1852.

Kinman lived in several places in the county, including houses near Fern Cottage and a dairy farm on Bear River Ridge.

[23] While Kinman was on his way to deliver one of the presidential chairs, he met Methodist bishop and writer Oscar Penn Fitzgerald on a California steamboat.

"[25] During a gale on the night of January 5–6, 1860, Kinman was alerted by distress signals from the SS Northerner, which had been breached by a submerged rock.

[26] He was hailed as a hero and awarded a Bible and free life-time passage on the Pacific Mail Steamship Company's ships.

[27] Native Americans in northern California suffered greatly at the hands of European-Americans in the last half of the 19th century, and their population declined.

[28][29][30] Kinman's brutality was noted by James R. Duff, a fellow '49er, who described him as "an avowed enemy of the red man, ... (who) shot an Indian on sight.

Nevertheless, in May 1860 he was elected to represent Bear River at a county-wide meeting ostensibly called to discuss ways to protect white settlers from the Indians.

[37] In 1864 he scouted for Captain William Hull's California Volunteers, which according to Kinman, "slaughtered and captured Indians, and at one time they took as many as 160 captives to Fort Humboldt.

"[39] He made use of this fame starting in the summer of 1861, together with ventriloquist and magician J. G. Kenyon, by opening an exhibit, first in Eureka and then in San Francisco in August of that same year.

Kinman displayed his "curiosities" including an elkhorn chair, mounted grizzly bears, several fiddles, and scalps, and gave a lecture.

I would finish up by describing my elkhorn chair and how I had constructed it.They then toured gold mining camps and the San Francisco Bay area as entertainers.

[7][43] Inspired by the 1856 election of James Buchanan, a fellow Pennsylvanian, to the presidency, Kinman built his first presidential elkhorn chair and brought it to Washington.

This winter I killed considerable meat so I thought I would take it easy and set about to make this cheer with a view of sending it on to Washington for Old Buck.

Nobody has yet sot in this cheer, and never shall till after the President.He arranged free passage on the ship Golden Age to Panama, then to New York, and finally to Washington.

Mr. Kinman, it will be remembered, presented to Mr. Lincoln some time ago a chair made of California elk-horn, and continuing his acquaintance with him, it is said, enjoyed quite a long conversation with him the very day before the murder.

Kinman claimed to have paid Brady $2,100 in one three-month period for photos at 8 cents apiece, which calculates to an unlikely amount of over 26,000 photographs.

[56] On September 18, 1876, Kinman presented an elkhorn chair to Governor Rutherford Hayes of Ohio, who was soon to become the President of the United States.

Dictated to a "H. Niebur" it was originally titled “Seth Kinman: Life and Adventures of the Renowned Humboldt and Trapper, Guide and Explorer.” [59] He also kept an extensive scrapbook of newspaper articles.

In 1886, Kinman was preparing to send chairs to President Grover Cleveland and former presidential candidate General Winfield Scott Hancock.

Herrick bought Kinman's traveling museum collection of 186 items, including at least two of his famous chairs, and displayed them in San Francisco in 1893.

[64] The Clarke Historical Museum in Eureka once displayed a suit of his buckskins, complete with beaded moccasins, as well as a wooden chest he owned, but no longer does so due to Kinman's problematic legacy.

Kinman modified the pistol, trimming the hammer and adding a front blade site made of horn or bone.