November 18, 2025 • 48 mins
Grizzly bears emerged in North America nearly two-hundred thousand years ago and became the Lord Beast of the American West. Native people regarded them as formidable animal gods. Europeans and Americans thought of them as wildlands monsters that needed to be eliminated. Saved before they disappeared, today grizzly bears are surviving, spreading, and distinguish the Mountain West from all other regions in the Lower 48.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Whether the Grizzly strikes us as the West's most dangerous
creature or as its wilderness avatar deity. The Great Bear's
fate has seen it reduced outside Alaska from fifty six
thousand and eighteen hundred to fewer than two thousand today.
But the Big Bears survive, and their presence distinguishes the
West from every other region. I'm Dan Flores, and this
(00:25):
is the American West, brought to you by Velvet Buck Wine,
where the hunt meets the harvest. A portion of each
bottle goes to support backcountry hunters and anglers. Limited supply
available at Velvetbuck Vineyards dot com.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Enjoy responsible.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
The most Dangerous beet or God of the West. In
eighteen seventy four, on a steamer heading up the Missouri
River in Montana Territory, Western artist William de la Montaigne,
Carrie witnessed a scene one morning that afterwards he replayed
(01:19):
in his mind for the rest of his life. From
the boat deck through good sharp field glasses, Carrie and
his companions, for several minutes watched a drama unfold that
transfixed them with a chill Carrie could not shake off.
It created a memory that never let go of him.
Here's how he wrote the scene. About a mile off
(01:42):
an immense grizzly bear was making for a cottonwood miles away,
and behind the bear came two men, superbly mounted, armed
to the teeth. We could see distinctly the horses straining
every muscle to overtake the bear, who was equally anxious
and making every effort to escape his pursuers. On the
(02:05):
American Serengeti of the last century, this was a site
of sites, and as an artist of the West, Carrie
well knew it. What he was seeing ranked with Western
spectacles like buffalo, sampedes, prairie wildfires, or cavalry or Indian charges,
and for the same reason, all implied furious activity with
(02:28):
mortal outcomes at stake. But what required buffalo in mass
numbers to affect a grizzly bear, even one running for
its very life, could evoke solitaire, and that was what
transfixed Carrie and his companions in the American West. The
grizzly was the counterpart to the lion or leopard of
(02:49):
the Massai Mara, or the striped tiger of the steamy
jungles of the Bengal the.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Largest and most powerful creature of the.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Land mass, fully capable of killing humans, fully capable under
certain unusual conditions, of consuming humans too. We obviously feel
a certain primal dread for any animal that might configure
us as a meal, probably especially so an animal like
a bear that's so much more human like in its
(03:18):
attack than big cats or sharks, even at a distance.
William Carey must have experienced an adrenaline rush from that
kind of genetic memory, but clearly he also felt a
sympathy for the bear as it crashed across the prairie,
fleeing its pursuers. The artist was one of a legion
of nineteenth century disciples of James Fennimore Cooper, and with
(03:42):
two friends he had made a first trip up the
Missouri River in eighteen sixty one, returning home with sketches
and some paintings. He'd gone on to become a magazine
and newspaper illustrator in New York, working for magazines like
Scribner's and Harper's Weekly. It was their assignments sent him
into the Northern planes again in eighteen seventy four. The
(04:04):
grizzly encounter was one of the high points of his trip,
and he ended up executing a beautiful oil painting of
what he believed happened at the end of that chase.
Variously titled Cattleman Tracing Grizzly to a den or mother
bear guarding cubs. It became the prize piece of the
(04:26):
Artists exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in
New York in nineteen seventeen. No less than famed Western
writer conservationist George Bird Grennell penned the accompanying texts for
that exhibit. By nineteen seventeen, Grennell wrote, far from being
the aggressive giant carnivores of the early wilderness West, grizzlies
(04:49):
have become the shyest of game and are well nigh extinct. Somehow,
in barely more than a century, the West's most imposing
creature stood at the brink of extinction on the Great Plains,
the setting where the reading world had first heard about
Urso's Arctos Heribelus. By nineteen seventeen, the giant bears were
(05:13):
entirely extirpated. How we react to other animals is in
part primate hardwiring. Despite our pretensions, we are still animals
out of Africa. The thump in the dark, the start
to full waking. The pounding heart can transport us back
to our origins in a fraction of a second. In
(05:37):
a study done by neuroscientists in twenty eleven among a
large sample of patients, they found we twenty first century
humans still retain a pronounced selectivity for imagery of animals
in the amygdala of the human brain. Amygdala are almond
shaped masses of gray nuclei inside each of our cerebral lobes.
(06:01):
They're centers for emotional behavior and motivation. And what the
science demonstrated was that our right hemisphere amgdala evolved and
yet engages in a neural specialization for processing visual information
about animals. So there is that part of our reaction
(06:22):
to creatures like grizzly bears. But much of what we
think when Bear comes to mind emerges from the tangled
mess of software programs.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
That is culture.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
What we've heard, what we've read, what we've inferred, what
others have implied for some of us, what we've experienced.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
All these and other ways.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
Of absorbing information go into creating a construction in our
minds like Bear. When an Idaho governor publicly opposed recovering
grizzly bears in the Bitterroot Mountains at the turn of
the twenty first century, because he said he didn't want massive,
flesh eating carnivores in Idaho. He was imagining a bear
(07:03):
defined as much by human culture as biology. So the
truth is that many kinds of bears look back at
us a maddening but fascinating aspect of the world. Those
are the bears in the mirror, the bears human see
when we look at grizzlies through the lenses of our
(07:24):
minds and cultures. Non human nature writer D. H. Lawrence
once said, is the outward and visible expression of the
mystery that confronts us when we look into the depths
of our own being. As another writer who sought to
understand our relationship with nature, the remarkable Paul Shepherd, author
(07:46):
of The Tender Carnivore and The Sacred Game, put it
in one of his last books. By disdaining the beast
in us, we grow away from the world instead of
into it. That line stands as almost a summary of
how we reacted to grizzly bears. Lewis and Clark's journey
(08:08):
and Bear experiences indicated some fifty six thousand grizzlies inhabited
the lower forty eight when they trekked across the West,
starting with them across much of Western history. We tried
to disappear that fifty thousand plus bears just as fast
as we could. Despite a scattering of encounters with grizzly
(08:32):
bears as early as the sixteen hundreds, For two centuries
after Europeans settled the continent, grizzly bears were little known
to folk knowledge and only existed as rumors in the
scientific grasp of North America. The first known description of
grizzlies we have by a European was left by Spanish
explorer Sebastian Voscano in the year sixteen oh two, sailing
(08:57):
along California's central coast, in the Bay where Moterey and
Carmel and Pebble Beach golf Course would one day stand.
Two centuries before the Lewis and Clark expedition would bring
white bears to the attention of enlightenment science, Vescano watched
grizzlies clamoring with astonishing nimbleness over the carcass of a
(09:18):
whale washed up on a Moterey Bay beach. Almost a
century later, in sixteen ninety and far far inland, a
Hudson's Bay Indian trader named Henry Kelsey was traveling overland
on the grassy yellow Plains of Saskatchewan when his party
encountered a grizzly. This was not a view from the
(09:39):
safety of a sailing vessel, but face to face on
the ground, and Kelsey's first reaction was to shoot. He
thus became the first European of record to kill a
grizzly bear, an event pregnant with portents for the future
of bears and of the Great Plains. Kelsey's act greatly
alarmed his Indian companions, who warned him that he had
(10:03):
struck down a god. Paleontology, archaeology, and the historical record
have convincingly established that the entire western half of North America,
including California, the River Corridor spilling from the Rockies out
across the plains, and the island mountain ranges of the Southwest,
were all grizzly country. Then Fiscado's sightings were on the
(10:27):
Pacific coast, Kelsey and Lewis and Clark saw all their
grizzlies on the high plains. The bears were in those
locations because of their food sources. Grizzlies in the interior
were primarily plains animals because of the vast opportunities thirty
million Buffalo provided. In other words, when you were in
(10:48):
Buffalo country in the early West, you were in grizzly
country too. One of the stories from early American forays
into the West that has long found me, a story
that passed by word of mouth back to places like
my home state of Louisiana, took place on the southern
high Plains in eighteen twenty one on what was christened
(11:12):
White Bear Creek now known as the Purgatory River, on
the plains southeast of Pike's Peak in Colorado. A group
of Missouri and Louisiana traders had worked their way up
the Arkansas River to trade with the Comanches, and when
the coal snaps of November hit, they moved towards the
mountains to seek winter quarters. For many of the semi
(11:36):
illiterate Southern traders involved, this was their first inkling that
the West held anything like a grizzly bear. I find
this account flavorly preserved and creatively spelled too. In the
journal of a trader named Jacob Fowler, chillingly authentic and
also tragic for both man and bear. This is how
(11:58):
Fowler told this remarkable story in the daily journal he kept.
Thirteen November eighteen twenty one, Tuesday, went to the highest
of the mounds near our camp and took the bearing
of the supposed mountain, which stood at north eighty west.
We then proceeded on two and a half miles to
(12:20):
a small creek, crossed it, and ascended a gradual rise
for about three miles to the highest ground in the neighborhood,
where we had a full view of the mountains. This
must be the place where in eighteen oh seven Zebulin
Montgomery Pike first discovered the mountains. Here I took the
bearing of two that were the highest, crossed the creek,
(12:42):
and camped in a grove of bushes and timber about
two miles up it from the river. We made eleven
miles west this day. We stopped here about one o'clock
and sent back for one horse that was not able
to keep up. We here found some grapes among the brush,
while some were hunted and others cooking. Some picking grapes.
(13:02):
A gun was fired and the cry of a white
bear was raised. We were all armed in an instant,
and each man run his own course to look for
the desperate animal. The brush in which we were camped
contained from ten to twenty acres into which the bear
had run for shelter. Finding himself surrounded on all sides.
(13:25):
Through this, Colonel Glenn with four others attempted to run,
but the bear being in their way, and lay close
in the brush undiscovered, till they were within a few
feet of it, when it sprung up and caught Louis
Dawson and pulled him down.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
In an instant.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
Colonel Glenn's gun missfire, or he would ever lieved the man,
but a large dog which belongs to the party, attacked
the bear with such fury that it left the man
and pursued her a few steps, in which time the
man got up and run a few steps, but was
overtaken by the bear. The Colonel made a second attempt
(14:01):
to shoot his gun, missed fire again, and the dog,
as before, relieved the man, who run as before, but
was soon again in the grasp of the bear, who
seemed intent on his destruction. The colonel now became alarmed
lest the bear would pursue him and run up a
stooping tree, and after him the wounded man, and was
(14:24):
followed by the bear, And thus they were all three
of one tree. But the bear caught Dawson by one
leg and drew him backwards down the tree. I was
myself down the creek below the brush, and heard the
dreadful screams of the man in the clutches of the bear,
the yelping of the dog, and the hollowing of the man.
(14:45):
To run in, run in, the man will be killed.
But before I got to the place of action, the
bear was killed, and I met the wounded man, with
Robert Fowler and one or two more assisting him to camp,
where his wounds were examined. It appeared his head was
in the bear's mouth at least twice, and that when
the monster gave the crush that was to mash the
(15:07):
man's head, it being too large for the span of
his mouth, the head slipped out only the teeth, cutting
the skin to the bone wherever they touched it, so
that the skin of the head was cut from about
the ears to the top in several directions, all of
which wounds were sewed up as well as could be
done by men. In our situation, having no surgeon nor
(15:29):
surgical instruments. The man still retained his understanding, but said
I am killed, that I heard my skull break. But
we were willing to believe he was mistaken, as he
spoke cheerfully on the subject till in the afternoon of
the second day, when he began to be restless and
somewhat delirious, and on examining a hole in the upper
(15:51):
part of his right temple, which we believed only skin deep,
we found the brains working out. We then supposed that
he did here his skull break. He lived till a
little before day on the third day, after being wounded,
all which time we lay at camp and buried him
as well as our means would admit. Immediately after the
(16:13):
fatal accident, and having done all we could for the
wounded man, we turned our attention to the bear and
found him a large, fat animal. We skinned him, but
found the smell of a pole cat so strong that
we could not eat the meat. On examining his mouth,
we found that three of his teeth were broken off
near the gums, which we suppose was the cause of
(16:37):
his not killing the man at the first bite, and
the one tooth not broke to be the cause of
the hole in the right temple which killed the man.
At last, two things strike me about this story every
time I read it. One is how unlucky a mature,
(17:00):
veteran male bear was to have a party of armed
traders stumble closely in a thick brush along a creek
festooned with ripe grapes on which the bear was no
doubt gorging to prepare for hibernation. And second, this was
a familiar consistent reaction from big predators. Once the grizzlys
(17:22):
lair was invaded, the bear focused specifically on one man
and ignored the rest of the party. Fowler mentions hearing
a single shot at the outset of the melee. Given
how many times Lewis and Clark describe a grizzly going
straight for the member of their party who shot it,
(17:43):
I'm convinced Dawson must have shot this bear, and from
that point on he was its single minded focus of revenge.
African lions are known to do the very same thing.
The stories such as this one and the Huge Glass
story from the Northern Plains circulating through the frontier towns
(18:06):
were instrumental in casting all grizzlies as wrathful monsters to
be hunted down and shot to death at every opportunity.
Back in nineteen ninety one, the writers Tim Clark and
Denise Casey compile the volume they titled Tales of the
Grizzly thirty nine Stories of Grizzly Bear Encounters in the Wilderness,
which chronicle grizzly human encounters in the Northern Rocky Mountains
(18:29):
from eighteen oh four through nineteen twenty nine. They charted
five distinct periods in the evolution of the American relationship
with grizzly bears. First, a Native American period, when bears
were mythic figures, teachers of medicines, helpers, a species whose
physiological similarity to humans offered the possibility for transmigration in
(18:51):
both directions, a relationship with nature Clark and Casey assert
that would have been almost incomprehensible to most modern Americas.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
Number Two, there was an.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
Expiration fur trade period, exemplified by the grizzly encounters of
Lewis and Clark, Hugh Glass, and Jacob Fowler, which created
the initial impressions of grizzlies as the horrible bear. The
wilderness fiend that offered Americans a reminder of the dangers
of uncontrolled, chaotic nature that the country must civilize. Periods
(19:24):
three and four in this chronology are the periods of
conquest and settlement, when homesteaders resolved that it was a
Christian duty to eradicate grizzlies and other formidable wildlife in
order to liberate wilderness for God and civilization. During this phase,
tens of thousands of grizzly bears were shot on sight,
and not just to wipe them off the planes for
(19:46):
the arrival.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
Of the livestock industry.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
Settlers killed four hundred and twenty three grizzlies in the
North Cascade Mountains alone just between eighteen forty six and
eighteen fifty one. Then in the Earth only twentieth century,
the Great American War on Grizzly Bears featured an alliance
between livestock interest and the US Biological Survey, whose hunters
(20:09):
made official the war on wolves, coyotes, lions, and bears,
in the process creating an early federal subsidy for the
ranching industry in the West. That same progressive era witnessed
the official rise of sport hunting and its replacement of
market hunting, which now had a black eye. Sport hunters
(20:32):
took to heart President Theodore Roosevelt's advice that the most
thrilling moments of an American hunter's life are those in which,
with every sense on the alert, and with nerves strung
to the highest point, he is following alone the fresh
and bloody footprints of an angered grizzly. For hunters, eliminating
(20:54):
bad animals like predators made sense, not just in terms
of growing the numbers of huntable elk and deer. Going
after grizzlies also had become the ultimate nostalgic capture of
the vanishing frontier, the Hudder's version of a Frederick Remington
or Charlie Russell painting, As Roosevelt put it, telling Lee,
(21:16):
no other triumph of American hunting can compare with the
victory to be thus gained, which in an age when
some Western states are thinking anew about grizzly bear hunts
if and when grizzly bears are no longer on the
endangered species list and their management is given to the states,
makes the following story worth telling. The Earl of Dunraven,
(21:40):
his full name was Wyndham. Thomas Wyndham Quinn, fourth Earl
of Dunraven, spent much of his life in elite English circles,
but he yearned to hunt grizzlies. Born to privilege, Dunraven
had fellow aristocrats and politicians as friends. He also consorted
with painters and actors, even scientists. His circle made up
(22:04):
the audience at the famous evolution debate at Oxford in
eighteen sixty when Robert Fitzroy, formerly the captain of the
HMS Beagle, stood up and, waiving his Bible, exclaimed of Darwin,
had I known then what I know now, I would
not have taken him aboard. While Darwin and evolution were
(22:27):
the talk of the scientific world, the American West and
its animals provided a classic elitist recreational escape for Dunraven.
Hunting first in Colorado and Nebraska, Dunraven was soon drawn
north by eye popping stories of wildlife and primeval abundance
in Montana. Eventually he found the Butler Brothers in the
(22:50):
Paradise Valley and hired them as guides. Colonials in East
Africa claim one couldn't go native without taking on a lion,
which in America, Dunraven translated into a grizzly bear hunt
word was if left alone, a grizzly rarely engaged humans,
but if attacked, the bears tended to respond in kind
(23:13):
and with unparalleled vigor. Doun Raven's guides dutifully put him
on to a grizzly, but when he fired and the
enraged animal world to locate its tormentor, the nobleman's bravado collapsed.
I never heard any beasts roar like it before, and
I hope I never may again, he shakily wrote in
(23:36):
his journal. It was the most awful noise you can imagine.
The nobleman's dreamed off about with America's King of Beasts
didn't go quite as he had imagined, as the wounded
bears searched for him and battled its final blood drenched breaths.
I lay on the ground as flat by God as
a flapjack, he admitted. As grizzly ms dropped drastically in
(24:02):
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an interesting phenomenon
emerged in the way Americans began to perceive animals like
grizzly bears and gray wolves as animal numbers dwindled, or
as the persecution amplified, ranchers, sportsmen and bureau hunters began
to individualize particular animals and give them their own personalities
(24:25):
and names. Once so numerous out on the plains, grizzlies,
elk and other classic Great Plain species had now fled
to the mountains, so these last bears are.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
Always secreted away up in the peaks.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
Among grizzlies, there was the Wyoming bear known as Bigfoot Wallace.
There was a notorious California grizzly of the Sierra Nevada
called Clubfoot, a Colorado grizzly named Old Mose, a grizzly
in Idaho known as Old Ephraim, and a gray bull
river bear Wyoming Ranchers named war whose life story in
(25:02):
much fictionalized form the nature writer Ernest Thompson Seaton told
in his nineteen hundred book The Biography of a Grizzly.
This individualization of grizzly's was an interesting development. It rested
on a sentiment clearly widespread in America at the turn
of the century, which had its sources in Darwinian thought.
(25:24):
As popularized by the natural history writers of the day, Seaton,
Jack London, Enos Mills, and John Muir were all struggling
to erase the Tennyson imagery of a Darwinian world as
Nature read in Tooth and Claw. The literary devices they
used the personification of animals, an emphasis on animal individuality, cooperation,
(25:49):
intelligence and reasoning, and the device of telling their stories
from the point of view of the animals themselves, as
in London's Call of the Wild Are James Oliver Kerry
Woods the Grizzly King? We're designed to affect a more
favorable regard for animals. Humanitarian animal reformers at the turn
(26:09):
of the century even discuss the possibility that animals might
have souls, a specialty religion reserved only for humans.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
As H. W. Boynton, a critic.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
Following these trends, summarized, the message for a world distressed
by the implications of Darwinism seem to be, if we
are only a little higher than the dog, we may
as well make the dog out to be as fine
a fellow as possible. Despite the sympathetic but dubious view
of Grizzly's Seaton presented in his The Biography of a Grizzly,
(26:44):
with so many other bears killed, and his mountains filling
with ranchers and tourists. Aging bear Matitsi wabb takes his
own life, or in Kerwood's The Grizzly King, where the
wounded but peace loving grizzly lets his hunt antagonists walk
away unharmed. The nature writers of the age weren't entirely wrong.
(27:07):
A century later, we know that other animals are certainly individuals,
that almost all higher species hand down culture, another practice
we once thought hours alone equally to the point of
the grizzlies history. Since the time of Lewis and Clark,
the real wob met a rather different end than Seaton
(27:28):
gave him. He was shot by a rancher, the fourth
grizzly the hunter had killed that day.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
Which is what we did everywhere.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
Ranchers, sport hunters, and paid federal hunters steadily extirpated grizzlies
across the West. For many of the shooters a right
of masculinity. A story in Harper's Magazine in eighteen sixty
one claimed that the ladies much admired a child up man.
(27:57):
These largest of our carnivores struck many as too dangerous
to exist, and in America modeled on Europe, Everyone tended
to agree that the huge bears needed to go from
all settled country. Naturalists Elliott Cows, who collected at grizzly
in the San Francisco Mountains of Arizona and also had
(28:18):
extensive experience farther north, believed grizzlies were originally most numerous
of all in the Southwest. The southern Rocky Mountains and
the Ranges of California seemed to be particularly the home
of the huge grizzly, he wrote, which becomes less numerous
farther north.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
There were good reasons for that.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
Grizzlies in California, where the bears fed on foods from
a profusion of habitats included carrion washed ashore on the
Pacific coasts, and they did not hibernate as elsewhere in
the Southwest. Their numbers shot up dramatically with the carrion
possibilities from Spanish introduced cattle and horses. An early American
(29:01):
pioneer in today's Napa Sonoma Wine Country, George Yunt, wrote
of grizzlies there that it was not unusual to see
fifty or sixty within twenty four hours. That kind of
presence terrified people not used to wild America. The grizzly
sheer size also terrified, especially in California, where the bears
(29:25):
grew as large as Kodiak bears in Alaska, but as
carrion eaters. The big bears by the twentieth century were
dying by the thousands from eating poison baits set out
in the general war on predators. By then, settlers had
driven grizzlies off the Great Plains and from the open
country of California, from a vast population of grizzlies that
(29:48):
only seventy five years before had numbered more than ten thousand,
The final one of California's totem animals died near Sequoia
National Park in nineteen twenty two. The last grizzly to
die in Texas in eighteen ninety, was killed by a
group on a Christian outing in the Davis Mountains.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
The last grizzly in Utah.
Speaker 1 (30:10):
Fell in nineteen twenty three, and the last bears in
Oregon and New Mexico in nineteen thirty one. Arizona's last
grizzly died in nineteen thirty five. A hunter shot the
last of Washington's original grizzlies in the North Cascades in
nineteen sixty seven. As for Colorado, a state that supposedly
(30:31):
produced a killing machine of a bear, ranchers claimed the
grizzly called Old Mose, killed eight hundred cattle and five
humans in the state.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
Colorado still hosted.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
Bears in its San Juan Mountains well past the nineteen fifties.
What made it possible for grizzlies to continue to live
in the Lower forty eight were our grand public lands.
But in nineteen fifty a national census estimated that from
a population of fifty six x thousand bears at the
time of Lewis and Clark, only seven hundred and fifty
(31:04):
grizzly bears remained alive in the lower contiguous States. Those
were in two distinct places that, unfortunately for grizzly genetics,
were two hundred miles of settled country apart, in and
around Glacier National Park in northwest Montana and in the
Greater Yellowstone ecosystem in northwest Wyoming. For the past quarter century,
(31:28):
we have been doing our best to get bears into
the bitter roots where they might link the populations in
Glacier and Yellowstone and into the North Cascades again. Grizzly
populations have been growing in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem and
along the Rocky Mountain Front, and with bears once again
making their way out onto the Great Plains Homeland. In
(31:50):
the twenty twenties, grizzly bear populations are approaching two thousand bears.
Old West Indian villages full of dogs that once kept
grizzlies at bay have pointed towards one solution for modern
human coexistence with bears. If grizzlies come off the endangered
(32:10):
species list, it might be that hunting seasons or another.
I'll confess that my own fantasy for the future is
seeing plains grizzlies out in the American Prairie Reserve, where
they're going to add an exclamatory flourish to rewilding our
continental serengetti. But it's still not easy for bears to
(32:32):
settle in any of those places. A few years ago,
a group of us spent five days backpacking into the
Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana. The Bob is a place
where the blocky limestone ridges of Montana's Rocky Mountain Front
drop away to the plains yellow grasslands that roll away
as they always have done, nearly five hundred miles east.
(32:55):
There had been days of rain before we got into
the mountains, and within a couple of miles the trail
had we began to notice not only wolf tracks on
the trail, but as well the prints of a gigantic
grizzly bear splayed out in the mud, like impact craters
on a distant planet. What particularly caught our attention as
we hiked in was that the bear tracks were headed
(33:17):
out towards the plains. A week after we got out
of the mountains back in Missoula, the local paper carried
a headline that shocked all of us. Later, on the
very day we had hiked out to our cars, a
Forest Service ranger had found an immense male grizzly shot
dead and left to right less than a mile onto
(33:39):
the plains. It was not just any bear. Biologists and
rangers had known this particular bear for well over a decade.
They had named him Maximus because of his extraordinary size.
He had stood seven and a half feet tall and
weighed eight hundred pounds. Biologists were certain at the time
that he was the biggest grizzy and Montana. But what
(34:02):
most characterized this bear was his remarkably good behavior. He
was a grizzly that had never gotten in any trouble,
had left stock alone, had retreated into the woods when
hikers passed and ignored their camps. But he was heading
onto the prairie. The grizzies allsion feels for millions of
years that presumably got him shot. A respectful wild grizzly
(34:27):
who knew how to live among us deserved a better fate.
Speaker 3 (34:39):
So Dan, we Sydney and I were out deer hunting
last year and we're out on a piece of property,
piece of state land adjacent to the American Prairie, and
she killed a buck and we had the dogs with us,
so we brought the dogs out while we were cutting
the buck apart, and all of a sudden, they start barking,
(35:00):
embarking at something in the trees.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
And my.
Speaker 3 (35:05):
Mind immediately said, well, thank god, we're not in grizzly country,
because whatever whatever that is, we don't really need to
worry about it. And then my mind, sort of before
I was even doing it consciously, my mind just corrected
itself and it said, no, we're in Grizzly Country. Maybe
twenty years ago we might not have been in Grizzly Country.
(35:27):
In twenty twenty four, it's grizzly Country again, And if
you go back one hundred and fifty years, it's definitely
grizzly Country. So I'm kind of curious, like grizzly bears,
for whatever reason, we sort of placed them in these
two very distinct landscapes in Montana. But the historical record
(35:49):
shows that Grizzly Country is much larger than you'd initially assume.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
I think one of the exciting parts of the grizzly
story in the West is the fact that they were
an open country species. And the reason that's exciting to
me is because you know, like most of us, I
have grown up knowing. Okay, So what distinguishes the Northern
(36:19):
Rockies from the rest of the West is that it
still has grizzly bears. But the bears are all secreted
away in the mountains. They're in Glacier there on the
Yellowstone Plateau, they're up in the Bob Marshall Country. But
it's fun to know that grizzlies originally were way out
(36:45):
onto the Great Plains. I mean, all of those encounters
that Lewis and Clark had with all of their bears,
they're thirty seven or thirty eight bears they encountered. I mean,
they were all out on the high plains, and that
was the case up in till really probably the eighteen
seventies or eighteen eighties. I mean, George Armstrong Cusher killed
(37:06):
a grizzly bear out on the plains too, And so
it's exciting to think that while we drove them back
into the recesses of the mountains, that today they're starting
to starting to return. I mean, and I have had
(37:27):
conversations with people here just in the last few weeks
that make me know pretty convincingly that there are bears
well out onto the Montana Plains now out getting out
into the bad Lands country and getting close to American
prairie lands. And so that's an exciting thing to me
(37:51):
to see a species as charismatic, as you know, as
moving because of danger that their presence implies as grizzly
bears be out in the bigger world again, out in
their original range.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
Yeah. I think.
Speaker 3 (38:12):
This sort of pairs nicely with another thread in this
in this chapter where you're talking about the program to
reintroduce or the attempt to reintroduce grizzly bears into the
bitter Root. And if you talk to anybody in sort
of the Greater Misilla area these days, there are grizzlies
that make their way through the bitter Root, and the
(38:33):
biologists are convinced that they're going to end up there
anyway without a relocation program like a you know, a
resident population. And so it's one of these stories where
I think in some ways, like when you think about wolves,
reintroduction is very controversial, but the wolves are moving there
(38:54):
on their own, and the grizzly bear story, reintroduction is
so unthinkable for a lot of people that the bears
are actually being left to do it on their own.
Speaker 2 (39:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:07):
So when I was living in the bitter Root, of
course I did for more than fifteen years, there were
at least three different times at least three different times
that I was aware of where bears appeared. And I
was on the Sapphire Mountain side of the valley, on
the east side of the valley, and bears, that's where
(39:28):
the bears were coming in. They were coming in from
that side from the Sapphires and getting down into the
edges of the valley itself. I mean they're probably no
doubt were bears over on the Bitter Root side too,
doing the same thing. But I think we seem to
be most aware of the ones that were occasionally coming
down into the east side of the valley, so they
(39:52):
were colonizing. I mean, they're going to do the same
There's no question they're going to do the same thing
that the bears are doing going out onto the Great Plains.
Now they're going to do it on their own.
Speaker 2 (40:03):
But when we.
Speaker 1 (40:05):
Actually attempted, and we got within about two or three
months of actually releasing doing hard releases of grizzlies over
on the Bitterroot side of the valley in about two
thousand and one or so. When that was happening, I
still very much remember that at least a third of
the automobiles in re Valley County, Montana had no Grizzly
(40:30):
introduction bumper stickers on the back of their muddy pickups
and their old Volvos and things. There was a very
definite kind of incomprehension that having managed to make the
Bitter Root Valley Grizzly Bear free, at some point in
our history that we actually were considering the idea of
(40:51):
reintroducing grizzlies to that part of the world. And I
you know, there's no question that living with grizzly this
is a different thing. It's a different thing than living
with wolves. Grizzly bears are are unpredictable and and you
have to kind of be aware all the time when
(41:12):
you're in grizzly country that you have to make noise,
and you have to make sure that you don't come
up on them and surprise them, and you have to
be on the lookout, in particular of course for sows
with cubs, and so it's a it raises the level
of kind of awareness of being in the world to
(41:32):
a degree that I think a lot of modern people
don't want to do. I found it exciting. I mean,
the grizzly bears that I encountered, I mean it was
it was always an exciting thing, and I was always
really careful about how I did it. But I can
(41:54):
understand that, you know, there are people who are pretty
freaked out about the idea of having grizzlies around again.
Speaker 3 (42:00):
Yeah, and that's another point that comes up in this
in this chapter is there's this psychology of of grizzly
bears and people. And one of the things that when
Steve and I were working on the Mountain Man audiobook
and you read their account you read journals, or you
read memoirs, or you read letters, the grizzly is this
(42:23):
looming figure at every turn, and and then you start
to read more deeply and try to figure out, well,
how who who was actually attacked by a gree How
many And there's only a handful. I think, like I'm
trying to remember if it was three or eight mountain
men that were actually killed by grizzly bears. It's single digits.
(42:46):
But you can't read an account without if you if
you took them at their at face value, the grizzly
bear was lurking around every corner, and and you know
they're only surviving these grizzly encounters by the great God.
Speaker 2 (43:01):
Yeah, I know.
Speaker 1 (43:01):
It feels like that when you read those accounts, and
there's certainly you know, and it's like anything. I mean,
we do the same thing today with murder statistics in cities.
All you need is one example, and everybody has kind
of freaked out for months after that. And I think
the grizzly encounters in the West were a little bit
(43:22):
like that. They were actually a few and far between.
And one of the things that has always intrigued me
is by reading closely into these accounts and people's encounters
with bears, is that if you didn't happen up on
them and surprise them, you almost had to intentionally provoke
(43:45):
a grizzly bear to get it to do something that
was dangerous to humans. I mean, there are so many instances,
for example in the Lewis and Clark journals, which I
talked about in an earlier episode of the podcast, where
I mean the bears were just you know, grazing on
spring grass and paying no attention to these guys going by,
but they had a kind of a you know, an
(44:07):
inability to pass up the opportunity to go out and
shoot one. And one of the things that I tried
to make clear from the stories that I read, particularly
that Jacob Fowler story and the Earl of Dunravens story too,
when that I tell in this particular episode is the
bears were kind of in this situation where and as
(44:31):
I say in the in the script for this particular episode,
I've seen this have read about it and also even
seen video of it. Among lions in Africa, they will
very quickly recognize who among a group of humans has
attacked them, and that's who they go after. They will
(44:53):
ignore everybody else and go specifically after the person who
had fired a shot at them or you know, more
egregiously hit them, and man, when that happens, the bears
are just kind of single minded in their focus. It's
one of the things that has always just kind of
given me a little bit of chill about that Jacob
(45:15):
Fowler story that I tell, and this one is, I mean,
there were like thirty five people in that party, and
that bear was determined to get one guy, the guy
that it sounds pretty definitively as if he's the one
who saw the bear first and shot it, and the
bear paid no attention to anybody else, just went after
him and got him.
Speaker 2 (45:34):
And I think that.
Speaker 3 (45:37):
To me, that sort of connects with this idea of
bears being like very individual animals with specific personalities, and
you get into that when you look at much later
in the era, when there's surviving grizzlies on these landscapes,
but people very easily give them names and assign them
(46:00):
personalities and assign them all these characteristics in a way
that it's almost unimaginable for us to do with like
a white tailed deer or something like that.
Speaker 1 (46:09):
Yeah, I think, you know, I think we have difficulty
doing the Bambi thing. It's pretty evident though, and I'll
have a casion to talk about this a couple more
times in other episodes of the podcast. It's pretty evident
that we did this with bears, we did it with wolves.
(46:32):
I mean, particularly when you get down to the last
animals that are out there, and that's when people begin
to assign particular individual qualities to these animals. I mean,
it may be that it's more difficult to do to
a herd animal like a bison, or animals that exist
in large numbers like deer, than it is to these
(46:54):
big carnivores which you start out with. First of all,
there are fewer of them than there are ungulates, and
particularly I think it becomes easier to give them individual
names when the numbers begin to drop. But yeah, that's
you know. And I will say from conversations I've had
with with contemporary biologists that there is an inclination to
(47:15):
go in the direction these days of beginning to look
at animals individually rather than just as a kind of
a lumping species. That's the sort of wildlife management strategy
we've had in place for more than a century. But
there are quite a number of biologists I've talked to
who are thinking in terms of these days of animals
as individuals who have their own life experiences and you know,
(47:39):
and that's something we've kind of I think a lot
of people have pushed back on since the days of
Ernest Thompson, Seaton and Jack London and the so called
nature faker controversy. But maybe we've gone too far. I
think we've probably gone too far. And I think that,
I mean, we have no difficulty whatsoever in recognizing our
(48:01):
companion animals, our dogs, for example, as individuals, and I
think it's not so big a step for us to
assume that that's the same thing that is in play
with you know. I mean, Rick McIntyre is writing the
biographies of individual wolves and Yellowstone these days, and I
(48:22):
think it's probably a step in a good direction.
Speaker 3 (48:25):
Well then, thanks, it's always good
Speaker 2 (48:27):
To chat you bet Randal, Thank you man.
Whether the Grizzly strikes us as the West's most dangerous
creature or as its wilderness avatar deity. The Great Bear's
fate has seen it reduced outside Alaska from fifty six
thousand and eighteen hundred to fewer than two thousand today.
But the Big Bears survive, and their presence distinguishes the
West from every other region. I'm Dan Flores, and this
(00:25):
is the American West, brought to you by Velvet Buck Wine,
where the hunt meets the harvest. A portion of each
bottle goes to support backcountry hunters and anglers. Limited supply
available at Velvetbuck Vineyards dot com.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Enjoy responsible.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
The most Dangerous beet or God of the West. In
eighteen seventy four, on a steamer heading up the Missouri
River in Montana Territory, Western artist William de la Montaigne,
Carrie witnessed a scene one morning that afterwards he replayed
(01:19):
in his mind for the rest of his life. From
the boat deck through good sharp field glasses, Carrie and
his companions, for several minutes watched a drama unfold that
transfixed them with a chill Carrie could not shake off.
It created a memory that never let go of him.
Here's how he wrote the scene. About a mile off
(01:42):
an immense grizzly bear was making for a cottonwood miles away,
and behind the bear came two men, superbly mounted, armed
to the teeth. We could see distinctly the horses straining
every muscle to overtake the bear, who was equally anxious
and making every effort to escape his pursuers. On the
(02:05):
American Serengeti of the last century, this was a site
of sites, and as an artist of the West, Carrie
well knew it. What he was seeing ranked with Western
spectacles like buffalo, sampedes, prairie wildfires, or cavalry or Indian charges,
and for the same reason, all implied furious activity with
(02:28):
mortal outcomes at stake. But what required buffalo in mass
numbers to affect a grizzly bear, even one running for
its very life, could evoke solitaire, and that was what
transfixed Carrie and his companions in the American West. The
grizzly was the counterpart to the lion or leopard of
(02:49):
the Massai Mara, or the striped tiger of the steamy
jungles of the Bengal the.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Largest and most powerful creature of the.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Land mass, fully capable of killing humans, fully capable under
certain unusual conditions, of consuming humans too. We obviously feel
a certain primal dread for any animal that might configure
us as a meal, probably especially so an animal like
a bear that's so much more human like in its
(03:18):
attack than big cats or sharks, even at a distance.
William Carey must have experienced an adrenaline rush from that
kind of genetic memory, but clearly he also felt a
sympathy for the bear as it crashed across the prairie,
fleeing its pursuers. The artist was one of a legion
of nineteenth century disciples of James Fennimore Cooper, and with
(03:42):
two friends he had made a first trip up the
Missouri River in eighteen sixty one, returning home with sketches
and some paintings. He'd gone on to become a magazine
and newspaper illustrator in New York, working for magazines like
Scribner's and Harper's Weekly. It was their assignments sent him
into the Northern planes again in eighteen seventy four. The
(04:04):
grizzly encounter was one of the high points of his trip,
and he ended up executing a beautiful oil painting of
what he believed happened at the end of that chase.
Variously titled Cattleman Tracing Grizzly to a den or mother
bear guarding cubs. It became the prize piece of the
(04:26):
Artists exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in
New York in nineteen seventeen. No less than famed Western
writer conservationist George Bird Grennell penned the accompanying texts for
that exhibit. By nineteen seventeen, Grennell wrote, far from being
the aggressive giant carnivores of the early wilderness West, grizzlies
(04:49):
have become the shyest of game and are well nigh extinct. Somehow,
in barely more than a century, the West's most imposing
creature stood at the brink of extinction on the Great Plains,
the setting where the reading world had first heard about
Urso's Arctos Heribelus. By nineteen seventeen, the giant bears were
(05:13):
entirely extirpated. How we react to other animals is in
part primate hardwiring. Despite our pretensions, we are still animals
out of Africa. The thump in the dark, the start
to full waking. The pounding heart can transport us back
to our origins in a fraction of a second. In
(05:37):
a study done by neuroscientists in twenty eleven among a
large sample of patients, they found we twenty first century
humans still retain a pronounced selectivity for imagery of animals
in the amygdala of the human brain. Amygdala are almond
shaped masses of gray nuclei inside each of our cerebral lobes.
(06:01):
They're centers for emotional behavior and motivation. And what the
science demonstrated was that our right hemisphere amgdala evolved and
yet engages in a neural specialization for processing visual information
about animals. So there is that part of our reaction
(06:22):
to creatures like grizzly bears. But much of what we
think when Bear comes to mind emerges from the tangled
mess of software programs.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
That is culture.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
What we've heard, what we've read, what we've inferred, what
others have implied for some of us, what we've experienced.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
All these and other ways.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
Of absorbing information go into creating a construction in our
minds like Bear. When an Idaho governor publicly opposed recovering
grizzly bears in the Bitterroot Mountains at the turn of
the twenty first century, because he said he didn't want massive,
flesh eating carnivores in Idaho. He was imagining a bear
(07:03):
defined as much by human culture as biology. So the
truth is that many kinds of bears look back at
us a maddening but fascinating aspect of the world. Those
are the bears in the mirror, the bears human see
when we look at grizzlies through the lenses of our
(07:24):
minds and cultures. Non human nature writer D. H. Lawrence
once said, is the outward and visible expression of the
mystery that confronts us when we look into the depths
of our own being. As another writer who sought to
understand our relationship with nature, the remarkable Paul Shepherd, author
(07:46):
of The Tender Carnivore and The Sacred Game, put it
in one of his last books. By disdaining the beast
in us, we grow away from the world instead of
into it. That line stands as almost a summary of
how we reacted to grizzly bears. Lewis and Clark's journey
(08:08):
and Bear experiences indicated some fifty six thousand grizzlies inhabited
the lower forty eight when they trekked across the West,
starting with them across much of Western history. We tried
to disappear that fifty thousand plus bears just as fast
as we could. Despite a scattering of encounters with grizzly
(08:32):
bears as early as the sixteen hundreds, For two centuries
after Europeans settled the continent, grizzly bears were little known
to folk knowledge and only existed as rumors in the
scientific grasp of North America. The first known description of
grizzlies we have by a European was left by Spanish
explorer Sebastian Voscano in the year sixteen oh two, sailing
(08:57):
along California's central coast, in the Bay where Moterey and
Carmel and Pebble Beach golf Course would one day stand.
Two centuries before the Lewis and Clark expedition would bring
white bears to the attention of enlightenment science, Vescano watched
grizzlies clamoring with astonishing nimbleness over the carcass of a
(09:18):
whale washed up on a Moterey Bay beach. Almost a
century later, in sixteen ninety and far far inland, a
Hudson's Bay Indian trader named Henry Kelsey was traveling overland
on the grassy yellow Plains of Saskatchewan when his party
encountered a grizzly. This was not a view from the
(09:39):
safety of a sailing vessel, but face to face on
the ground, and Kelsey's first reaction was to shoot. He
thus became the first European of record to kill a
grizzly bear, an event pregnant with portents for the future
of bears and of the Great Plains. Kelsey's act greatly
alarmed his Indian companions, who warned him that he had
(10:03):
struck down a god. Paleontology, archaeology, and the historical record
have convincingly established that the entire western half of North America,
including California, the River Corridor spilling from the Rockies out
across the plains, and the island mountain ranges of the Southwest,
were all grizzly country. Then Fiscado's sightings were on the
(10:27):
Pacific coast, Kelsey and Lewis and Clark saw all their
grizzlies on the high plains. The bears were in those
locations because of their food sources. Grizzlies in the interior
were primarily plains animals because of the vast opportunities thirty
million Buffalo provided. In other words, when you were in
(10:48):
Buffalo country in the early West, you were in grizzly
country too. One of the stories from early American forays
into the West that has long found me, a story
that passed by word of mouth back to places like
my home state of Louisiana, took place on the southern
high Plains in eighteen twenty one on what was christened
(11:12):
White Bear Creek now known as the Purgatory River, on
the plains southeast of Pike's Peak in Colorado. A group
of Missouri and Louisiana traders had worked their way up
the Arkansas River to trade with the Comanches, and when
the coal snaps of November hit, they moved towards the
mountains to seek winter quarters. For many of the semi
(11:36):
illiterate Southern traders involved, this was their first inkling that
the West held anything like a grizzly bear. I find
this account flavorly preserved and creatively spelled too. In the
journal of a trader named Jacob Fowler, chillingly authentic and
also tragic for both man and bear. This is how
(11:58):
Fowler told this remarkable story in the daily journal he kept.
Thirteen November eighteen twenty one, Tuesday, went to the highest
of the mounds near our camp and took the bearing
of the supposed mountain, which stood at north eighty west.
We then proceeded on two and a half miles to
(12:20):
a small creek, crossed it, and ascended a gradual rise
for about three miles to the highest ground in the neighborhood,
where we had a full view of the mountains. This
must be the place where in eighteen oh seven Zebulin
Montgomery Pike first discovered the mountains. Here I took the
bearing of two that were the highest, crossed the creek,
(12:42):
and camped in a grove of bushes and timber about
two miles up it from the river. We made eleven
miles west this day. We stopped here about one o'clock
and sent back for one horse that was not able
to keep up. We here found some grapes among the brush,
while some were hunted and others cooking. Some picking grapes.
(13:02):
A gun was fired and the cry of a white
bear was raised. We were all armed in an instant,
and each man run his own course to look for
the desperate animal. The brush in which we were camped
contained from ten to twenty acres into which the bear
had run for shelter. Finding himself surrounded on all sides.
(13:25):
Through this, Colonel Glenn with four others attempted to run,
but the bear being in their way, and lay close
in the brush undiscovered, till they were within a few
feet of it, when it sprung up and caught Louis
Dawson and pulled him down.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
In an instant.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
Colonel Glenn's gun missfire, or he would ever lieved the man,
but a large dog which belongs to the party, attacked
the bear with such fury that it left the man
and pursued her a few steps, in which time the
man got up and run a few steps, but was
overtaken by the bear. The Colonel made a second attempt
(14:01):
to shoot his gun, missed fire again, and the dog,
as before, relieved the man, who run as before, but
was soon again in the grasp of the bear, who
seemed intent on his destruction. The colonel now became alarmed
lest the bear would pursue him and run up a
stooping tree, and after him the wounded man, and was
(14:24):
followed by the bear, And thus they were all three
of one tree. But the bear caught Dawson by one
leg and drew him backwards down the tree. I was
myself down the creek below the brush, and heard the
dreadful screams of the man in the clutches of the bear,
the yelping of the dog, and the hollowing of the man.
(14:45):
To run in, run in, the man will be killed.
But before I got to the place of action, the
bear was killed, and I met the wounded man, with
Robert Fowler and one or two more assisting him to camp,
where his wounds were examined. It appeared his head was
in the bear's mouth at least twice, and that when
the monster gave the crush that was to mash the
(15:07):
man's head, it being too large for the span of
his mouth, the head slipped out only the teeth, cutting
the skin to the bone wherever they touched it, so
that the skin of the head was cut from about
the ears to the top in several directions, all of
which wounds were sewed up as well as could be
done by men. In our situation, having no surgeon nor
(15:29):
surgical instruments. The man still retained his understanding, but said
I am killed, that I heard my skull break. But
we were willing to believe he was mistaken, as he
spoke cheerfully on the subject till in the afternoon of
the second day, when he began to be restless and
somewhat delirious, and on examining a hole in the upper
(15:51):
part of his right temple, which we believed only skin deep,
we found the brains working out. We then supposed that
he did here his skull break. He lived till a
little before day on the third day, after being wounded,
all which time we lay at camp and buried him
as well as our means would admit. Immediately after the
(16:13):
fatal accident, and having done all we could for the
wounded man, we turned our attention to the bear and
found him a large, fat animal. We skinned him, but
found the smell of a pole cat so strong that
we could not eat the meat. On examining his mouth,
we found that three of his teeth were broken off
near the gums, which we suppose was the cause of
(16:37):
his not killing the man at the first bite, and
the one tooth not broke to be the cause of
the hole in the right temple which killed the man.
At last, two things strike me about this story every
time I read it. One is how unlucky a mature,
(17:00):
veteran male bear was to have a party of armed
traders stumble closely in a thick brush along a creek
festooned with ripe grapes on which the bear was no
doubt gorging to prepare for hibernation. And second, this was
a familiar consistent reaction from big predators. Once the grizzlys
(17:22):
lair was invaded, the bear focused specifically on one man
and ignored the rest of the party. Fowler mentions hearing
a single shot at the outset of the melee. Given
how many times Lewis and Clark describe a grizzly going
straight for the member of their party who shot it,
(17:43):
I'm convinced Dawson must have shot this bear, and from
that point on he was its single minded focus of revenge.
African lions are known to do the very same thing.
The stories such as this one and the Huge Glass
story from the Northern Plains circulating through the frontier towns
(18:06):
were instrumental in casting all grizzlies as wrathful monsters to
be hunted down and shot to death at every opportunity.
Back in nineteen ninety one, the writers Tim Clark and
Denise Casey compile the volume they titled Tales of the
Grizzly thirty nine Stories of Grizzly Bear Encounters in the Wilderness,
which chronicle grizzly human encounters in the Northern Rocky Mountains
(18:29):
from eighteen oh four through nineteen twenty nine. They charted
five distinct periods in the evolution of the American relationship
with grizzly bears. First, a Native American period, when bears
were mythic figures, teachers of medicines, helpers, a species whose
physiological similarity to humans offered the possibility for transmigration in
(18:51):
both directions, a relationship with nature Clark and Casey assert
that would have been almost incomprehensible to most modern Americas.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
Number Two, there was an.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
Expiration fur trade period, exemplified by the grizzly encounters of
Lewis and Clark, Hugh Glass, and Jacob Fowler, which created
the initial impressions of grizzlies as the horrible bear. The
wilderness fiend that offered Americans a reminder of the dangers
of uncontrolled, chaotic nature that the country must civilize. Periods
(19:24):
three and four in this chronology are the periods of
conquest and settlement, when homesteaders resolved that it was a
Christian duty to eradicate grizzlies and other formidable wildlife in
order to liberate wilderness for God and civilization. During this phase,
tens of thousands of grizzly bears were shot on sight,
and not just to wipe them off the planes for
(19:46):
the arrival.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
Of the livestock industry.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
Settlers killed four hundred and twenty three grizzlies in the
North Cascade Mountains alone just between eighteen forty six and
eighteen fifty one. Then in the Earth only twentieth century,
the Great American War on Grizzly Bears featured an alliance
between livestock interest and the US Biological Survey, whose hunters
(20:09):
made official the war on wolves, coyotes, lions, and bears,
in the process creating an early federal subsidy for the
ranching industry in the West. That same progressive era witnessed
the official rise of sport hunting and its replacement of
market hunting, which now had a black eye. Sport hunters
(20:32):
took to heart President Theodore Roosevelt's advice that the most
thrilling moments of an American hunter's life are those in which,
with every sense on the alert, and with nerves strung
to the highest point, he is following alone the fresh
and bloody footprints of an angered grizzly. For hunters, eliminating
(20:54):
bad animals like predators made sense, not just in terms
of growing the numbers of huntable elk and deer. Going
after grizzlies also had become the ultimate nostalgic capture of
the vanishing frontier, the Hudder's version of a Frederick Remington
or Charlie Russell painting, As Roosevelt put it, telling Lee,
(21:16):
no other triumph of American hunting can compare with the
victory to be thus gained, which in an age when
some Western states are thinking anew about grizzly bear hunts
if and when grizzly bears are no longer on the
endangered species list and their management is given to the states,
makes the following story worth telling. The Earl of Dunraven,
(21:40):
his full name was Wyndham. Thomas Wyndham Quinn, fourth Earl
of Dunraven, spent much of his life in elite English circles,
but he yearned to hunt grizzlies. Born to privilege, Dunraven
had fellow aristocrats and politicians as friends. He also consorted
with painters and actors, even scientists. His circle made up
(22:04):
the audience at the famous evolution debate at Oxford in
eighteen sixty when Robert Fitzroy, formerly the captain of the
HMS Beagle, stood up and, waiving his Bible, exclaimed of Darwin,
had I known then what I know now, I would
not have taken him aboard. While Darwin and evolution were
(22:27):
the talk of the scientific world, the American West and
its animals provided a classic elitist recreational escape for Dunraven.
Hunting first in Colorado and Nebraska, Dunraven was soon drawn
north by eye popping stories of wildlife and primeval abundance
in Montana. Eventually he found the Butler Brothers in the
(22:50):
Paradise Valley and hired them as guides. Colonials in East
Africa claim one couldn't go native without taking on a lion,
which in America, Dunraven translated into a grizzly bear hunt
word was if left alone, a grizzly rarely engaged humans,
but if attacked, the bears tended to respond in kind
(23:13):
and with unparalleled vigor. Doun Raven's guides dutifully put him
on to a grizzly, but when he fired and the
enraged animal world to locate its tormentor, the nobleman's bravado collapsed.
I never heard any beasts roar like it before, and
I hope I never may again, he shakily wrote in
(23:36):
his journal. It was the most awful noise you can imagine.
The nobleman's dreamed off about with America's King of Beasts
didn't go quite as he had imagined, as the wounded
bears searched for him and battled its final blood drenched breaths.
I lay on the ground as flat by God as
a flapjack, he admitted. As grizzly ms dropped drastically in
(24:02):
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an interesting phenomenon
emerged in the way Americans began to perceive animals like
grizzly bears and gray wolves as animal numbers dwindled, or
as the persecution amplified, ranchers, sportsmen and bureau hunters began
to individualize particular animals and give them their own personalities
(24:25):
and names. Once so numerous out on the plains, grizzlies,
elk and other classic Great Plain species had now fled
to the mountains, so these last bears are.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
Always secreted away up in the peaks.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
Among grizzlies, there was the Wyoming bear known as Bigfoot Wallace.
There was a notorious California grizzly of the Sierra Nevada
called Clubfoot, a Colorado grizzly named Old Mose, a grizzly
in Idaho known as Old Ephraim, and a gray bull
river bear Wyoming Ranchers named war whose life story in
(25:02):
much fictionalized form the nature writer Ernest Thompson Seaton told
in his nineteen hundred book The Biography of a Grizzly.
This individualization of grizzly's was an interesting development. It rested
on a sentiment clearly widespread in America at the turn
of the century, which had its sources in Darwinian thought.
(25:24):
As popularized by the natural history writers of the day, Seaton,
Jack London, Enos Mills, and John Muir were all struggling
to erase the Tennyson imagery of a Darwinian world as
Nature read in Tooth and Claw. The literary devices they
used the personification of animals, an emphasis on animal individuality, cooperation,
(25:49):
intelligence and reasoning, and the device of telling their stories
from the point of view of the animals themselves, as
in London's Call of the Wild Are James Oliver Kerry
Woods the Grizzly King? We're designed to affect a more
favorable regard for animals. Humanitarian animal reformers at the turn
(26:09):
of the century even discuss the possibility that animals might
have souls, a specialty religion reserved only for humans.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
As H. W. Boynton, a critic.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
Following these trends, summarized, the message for a world distressed
by the implications of Darwinism seem to be, if we
are only a little higher than the dog, we may
as well make the dog out to be as fine
a fellow as possible. Despite the sympathetic but dubious view
of Grizzly's Seaton presented in his The Biography of a Grizzly,
(26:44):
with so many other bears killed, and his mountains filling
with ranchers and tourists. Aging bear Matitsi wabb takes his
own life, or in Kerwood's The Grizzly King, where the
wounded but peace loving grizzly lets his hunt antagonists walk
away unharmed. The nature writers of the age weren't entirely wrong.
(27:07):
A century later, we know that other animals are certainly individuals,
that almost all higher species hand down culture, another practice
we once thought hours alone equally to the point of
the grizzlies history. Since the time of Lewis and Clark,
the real wob met a rather different end than Seaton
(27:28):
gave him. He was shot by a rancher, the fourth
grizzly the hunter had killed that day.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
Which is what we did everywhere.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
Ranchers, sport hunters, and paid federal hunters steadily extirpated grizzlies
across the West. For many of the shooters a right
of masculinity. A story in Harper's Magazine in eighteen sixty
one claimed that the ladies much admired a child up man.
(27:57):
These largest of our carnivores struck many as too dangerous
to exist, and in America modeled on Europe, Everyone tended
to agree that the huge bears needed to go from
all settled country. Naturalists Elliott Cows, who collected at grizzly
in the San Francisco Mountains of Arizona and also had
(28:18):
extensive experience farther north, believed grizzlies were originally most numerous
of all in the Southwest. The southern Rocky Mountains and
the Ranges of California seemed to be particularly the home
of the huge grizzly, he wrote, which becomes less numerous
farther north.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
There were good reasons for that.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
Grizzlies in California, where the bears fed on foods from
a profusion of habitats included carrion washed ashore on the
Pacific coasts, and they did not hibernate as elsewhere in
the Southwest. Their numbers shot up dramatically with the carrion
possibilities from Spanish introduced cattle and horses. An early American
(29:01):
pioneer in today's Napa Sonoma Wine Country, George Yunt, wrote
of grizzlies there that it was not unusual to see
fifty or sixty within twenty four hours. That kind of
presence terrified people not used to wild America. The grizzly
sheer size also terrified, especially in California, where the bears
(29:25):
grew as large as Kodiak bears in Alaska, but as
carrion eaters. The big bears by the twentieth century were
dying by the thousands from eating poison baits set out
in the general war on predators. By then, settlers had
driven grizzlies off the Great Plains and from the open
country of California, from a vast population of grizzlies that
(29:48):
only seventy five years before had numbered more than ten thousand,
The final one of California's totem animals died near Sequoia
National Park in nineteen twenty two. The last grizzly to
die in Texas in eighteen ninety, was killed by a
group on a Christian outing in the Davis Mountains.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
The last grizzly in Utah.
Speaker 1 (30:10):
Fell in nineteen twenty three, and the last bears in
Oregon and New Mexico in nineteen thirty one. Arizona's last
grizzly died in nineteen thirty five. A hunter shot the
last of Washington's original grizzlies in the North Cascades in
nineteen sixty seven. As for Colorado, a state that supposedly
(30:31):
produced a killing machine of a bear, ranchers claimed the
grizzly called Old Mose, killed eight hundred cattle and five
humans in the state.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
Colorado still hosted.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
Bears in its San Juan Mountains well past the nineteen fifties.
What made it possible for grizzlies to continue to live
in the Lower forty eight were our grand public lands.
But in nineteen fifty a national census estimated that from
a population of fifty six x thousand bears at the
time of Lewis and Clark, only seven hundred and fifty
(31:04):
grizzly bears remained alive in the lower contiguous States. Those
were in two distinct places that, unfortunately for grizzly genetics,
were two hundred miles of settled country apart, in and
around Glacier National Park in northwest Montana and in the
Greater Yellowstone ecosystem in northwest Wyoming. For the past quarter century,
(31:28):
we have been doing our best to get bears into
the bitter roots where they might link the populations in
Glacier and Yellowstone and into the North Cascades again. Grizzly
populations have been growing in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem and
along the Rocky Mountain Front, and with bears once again
making their way out onto the Great Plains Homeland. In
(31:50):
the twenty twenties, grizzly bear populations are approaching two thousand bears.
Old West Indian villages full of dogs that once kept
grizzlies at bay have pointed towards one solution for modern
human coexistence with bears. If grizzlies come off the endangered
(32:10):
species list, it might be that hunting seasons or another.
I'll confess that my own fantasy for the future is
seeing plains grizzlies out in the American Prairie Reserve, where
they're going to add an exclamatory flourish to rewilding our
continental serengetti. But it's still not easy for bears to
(32:32):
settle in any of those places. A few years ago,
a group of us spent five days backpacking into the
Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana. The Bob is a place
where the blocky limestone ridges of Montana's Rocky Mountain Front
drop away to the plains yellow grasslands that roll away
as they always have done, nearly five hundred miles east.
(32:55):
There had been days of rain before we got into
the mountains, and within a couple of miles the trail
had we began to notice not only wolf tracks on
the trail, but as well the prints of a gigantic
grizzly bear splayed out in the mud, like impact craters
on a distant planet. What particularly caught our attention as
we hiked in was that the bear tracks were headed
(33:17):
out towards the plains. A week after we got out
of the mountains back in Missoula, the local paper carried
a headline that shocked all of us. Later, on the
very day we had hiked out to our cars, a
Forest Service ranger had found an immense male grizzly shot
dead and left to right less than a mile onto
(33:39):
the plains. It was not just any bear. Biologists and
rangers had known this particular bear for well over a decade.
They had named him Maximus because of his extraordinary size.
He had stood seven and a half feet tall and
weighed eight hundred pounds. Biologists were certain at the time
that he was the biggest grizzy and Montana. But what
(34:02):
most characterized this bear was his remarkably good behavior. He
was a grizzly that had never gotten in any trouble,
had left stock alone, had retreated into the woods when
hikers passed and ignored their camps. But he was heading
onto the prairie. The grizzies allsion feels for millions of
years that presumably got him shot. A respectful wild grizzly
(34:27):
who knew how to live among us deserved a better fate.
Speaker 3 (34:39):
So Dan, we Sydney and I were out deer hunting
last year and we're out on a piece of property,
piece of state land adjacent to the American Prairie, and
she killed a buck and we had the dogs with us,
so we brought the dogs out while we were cutting
the buck apart, and all of a sudden, they start barking,
(35:00):
embarking at something in the trees.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
And my.
Speaker 3 (35:05):
Mind immediately said, well, thank god, we're not in grizzly country,
because whatever whatever that is, we don't really need to
worry about it. And then my mind, sort of before
I was even doing it consciously, my mind just corrected
itself and it said, no, we're in Grizzly Country. Maybe
twenty years ago we might not have been in Grizzly Country.
(35:27):
In twenty twenty four, it's grizzly Country again, And if
you go back one hundred and fifty years, it's definitely
grizzly Country. So I'm kind of curious, like grizzly bears,
for whatever reason, we sort of placed them in these
two very distinct landscapes in Montana. But the historical record
(35:49):
shows that Grizzly Country is much larger than you'd initially assume.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
I think one of the exciting parts of the grizzly
story in the West is the fact that they were
an open country species. And the reason that's exciting to
me is because you know, like most of us, I
have grown up knowing. Okay, So what distinguishes the Northern
(36:19):
Rockies from the rest of the West is that it
still has grizzly bears. But the bears are all secreted
away in the mountains. They're in Glacier there on the
Yellowstone Plateau, they're up in the Bob Marshall Country. But
it's fun to know that grizzlies originally were way out
(36:45):
onto the Great Plains. I mean, all of those encounters
that Lewis and Clark had with all of their bears,
they're thirty seven or thirty eight bears they encountered. I mean,
they were all out on the high plains, and that
was the case up in till really probably the eighteen
seventies or eighteen eighties. I mean, George Armstrong Cusher killed
(37:06):
a grizzly bear out on the plains too, And so
it's exciting to think that while we drove them back
into the recesses of the mountains, that today they're starting
to starting to return. I mean, and I have had
(37:27):
conversations with people here just in the last few weeks
that make me know pretty convincingly that there are bears
well out onto the Montana Plains now out getting out
into the bad Lands country and getting close to American
prairie lands. And so that's an exciting thing to me
(37:51):
to see a species as charismatic, as you know, as
moving because of danger that their presence implies as grizzly
bears be out in the bigger world again, out in
their original range.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
Yeah. I think.
Speaker 3 (38:12):
This sort of pairs nicely with another thread in this
in this chapter where you're talking about the program to
reintroduce or the attempt to reintroduce grizzly bears into the
bitter Root. And if you talk to anybody in sort
of the Greater Misilla area these days, there are grizzlies
that make their way through the bitter Root, and the
(38:33):
biologists are convinced that they're going to end up there
anyway without a relocation program like a you know, a
resident population. And so it's one of these stories where
I think in some ways, like when you think about wolves,
reintroduction is very controversial, but the wolves are moving there
(38:54):
on their own, and the grizzly bear story, reintroduction is
so unthinkable for a lot of people that the bears
are actually being left to do it on their own.
Speaker 2 (39:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:07):
So when I was living in the bitter Root, of
course I did for more than fifteen years, there were
at least three different times at least three different times
that I was aware of where bears appeared. And I
was on the Sapphire Mountain side of the valley, on
the east side of the valley, and bears, that's where
(39:28):
the bears were coming in. They were coming in from
that side from the Sapphires and getting down into the
edges of the valley itself. I mean they're probably no
doubt were bears over on the Bitter Root side too,
doing the same thing. But I think we seem to
be most aware of the ones that were occasionally coming
down into the east side of the valley, so they
(39:52):
were colonizing. I mean, they're going to do the same
There's no question they're going to do the same thing
that the bears are doing going out onto the Great Plains.
Now they're going to do it on their own.
Speaker 2 (40:03):
But when we.
Speaker 1 (40:05):
Actually attempted, and we got within about two or three
months of actually releasing doing hard releases of grizzlies over
on the Bitterroot side of the valley in about two
thousand and one or so. When that was happening, I
still very much remember that at least a third of
the automobiles in re Valley County, Montana had no Grizzly
(40:30):
introduction bumper stickers on the back of their muddy pickups
and their old Volvos and things. There was a very
definite kind of incomprehension that having managed to make the
Bitter Root Valley Grizzly Bear free, at some point in
our history that we actually were considering the idea of
(40:51):
reintroducing grizzlies to that part of the world. And I
you know, there's no question that living with grizzly this
is a different thing. It's a different thing than living
with wolves. Grizzly bears are are unpredictable and and you
have to kind of be aware all the time when
(41:12):
you're in grizzly country that you have to make noise,
and you have to make sure that you don't come
up on them and surprise them, and you have to
be on the lookout, in particular of course for sows
with cubs, and so it's a it raises the level
of kind of awareness of being in the world to
(41:32):
a degree that I think a lot of modern people
don't want to do. I found it exciting. I mean,
the grizzly bears that I encountered, I mean it was
it was always an exciting thing, and I was always
really careful about how I did it. But I can
(41:54):
understand that, you know, there are people who are pretty
freaked out about the idea of having grizzlies around again.
Speaker 3 (42:00):
Yeah, and that's another point that comes up in this
in this chapter is there's this psychology of of grizzly
bears and people. And one of the things that when
Steve and I were working on the Mountain Man audiobook
and you read their account you read journals, or you
read memoirs, or you read letters, the grizzly is this
(42:23):
looming figure at every turn, and and then you start
to read more deeply and try to figure out, well,
how who who was actually attacked by a gree How
many And there's only a handful. I think, like I'm
trying to remember if it was three or eight mountain
men that were actually killed by grizzly bears. It's single digits.
(42:46):
But you can't read an account without if you if
you took them at their at face value, the grizzly
bear was lurking around every corner, and and you know
they're only surviving these grizzly encounters by the great God.
Speaker 2 (43:01):
Yeah, I know.
Speaker 1 (43:01):
It feels like that when you read those accounts, and
there's certainly you know, and it's like anything. I mean,
we do the same thing today with murder statistics in cities.
All you need is one example, and everybody has kind
of freaked out for months after that. And I think
the grizzly encounters in the West were a little bit
(43:22):
like that. They were actually a few and far between.
And one of the things that has always intrigued me
is by reading closely into these accounts and people's encounters
with bears, is that if you didn't happen up on
them and surprise them, you almost had to intentionally provoke
(43:45):
a grizzly bear to get it to do something that
was dangerous to humans. I mean, there are so many instances,
for example in the Lewis and Clark journals, which I
talked about in an earlier episode of the podcast, where
I mean the bears were just you know, grazing on
spring grass and paying no attention to these guys going by,
but they had a kind of a you know, an
(44:07):
inability to pass up the opportunity to go out and
shoot one. And one of the things that I tried
to make clear from the stories that I read, particularly
that Jacob Fowler story and the Earl of Dunravens story too,
when that I tell in this particular episode is the
bears were kind of in this situation where and as
(44:31):
I say in the in the script for this particular episode,
I've seen this have read about it and also even
seen video of it. Among lions in Africa, they will
very quickly recognize who among a group of humans has
attacked them, and that's who they go after. They will
(44:53):
ignore everybody else and go specifically after the person who
had fired a shot at them or you know, more
egregiously hit them, and man, when that happens, the bears
are just kind of single minded in their focus. It's
one of the things that has always just kind of
given me a little bit of chill about that Jacob
(45:15):
Fowler story that I tell, and this one is, I mean,
there were like thirty five people in that party, and
that bear was determined to get one guy, the guy
that it sounds pretty definitively as if he's the one
who saw the bear first and shot it, and the
bear paid no attention to anybody else, just went after
him and got him.
Speaker 2 (45:34):
And I think that.
Speaker 3 (45:37):
To me, that sort of connects with this idea of
bears being like very individual animals with specific personalities, and
you get into that when you look at much later
in the era, when there's surviving grizzlies on these landscapes,
but people very easily give them names and assign them
(46:00):
personalities and assign them all these characteristics in a way
that it's almost unimaginable for us to do with like
a white tailed deer or something like that.
Speaker 1 (46:09):
Yeah, I think, you know, I think we have difficulty
doing the Bambi thing. It's pretty evident though, and I'll
have a casion to talk about this a couple more
times in other episodes of the podcast. It's pretty evident
that we did this with bears, we did it with wolves.
(46:32):
I mean, particularly when you get down to the last
animals that are out there, and that's when people begin
to assign particular individual qualities to these animals. I mean,
it may be that it's more difficult to do to
a herd animal like a bison, or animals that exist
in large numbers like deer, than it is to these
(46:54):
big carnivores which you start out with. First of all,
there are fewer of them than there are ungulates, and
particularly I think it becomes easier to give them individual
names when the numbers begin to drop. But yeah, that's
you know. And I will say from conversations I've had
with with contemporary biologists that there is an inclination to
(47:15):
go in the direction these days of beginning to look
at animals individually rather than just as a kind of
a lumping species. That's the sort of wildlife management strategy
we've had in place for more than a century. But
there are quite a number of biologists I've talked to
who are thinking in terms of these days of animals
as individuals who have their own life experiences and you know,
(47:39):
and that's something we've kind of I think a lot
of people have pushed back on since the days of
Ernest Thompson, Seaton and Jack London and the so called
nature faker controversy. But maybe we've gone too far. I
think we've probably gone too far. And I think that,
I mean, we have no difficulty whatsoever in recognizing our
(48:01):
companion animals, our dogs, for example, as individuals, and I
think it's not so big a step for us to
assume that that's the same thing that is in play
with you know. I mean, Rick McIntyre is writing the
biographies of individual wolves and Yellowstone these days, and I
(48:22):
think it's probably a step in a good direction.
Speaker 3 (48:25):
Well then, thanks, it's always good
Speaker 2 (48:27):
To chat you bet Randal, Thank you man.
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