Humans and bears - Wild encounters

[brotherbear]

The California Grizzly - bear in mind - from the collections of the Bancroft Library:

California's grizzlies weren't able to survive long enough for science to dispel the power of the bear stories and grizzly myths. Advances in biology came too late, and the eradication of the bears was too swift. Early scholars usually relied upon the testimony of explorers, mountain men, trappers, and Indians for information about bears, and because few scientists observed the great bears directly, that knowledge was borrowed and passed along, causing the dissemination of erroneous, subjective, anthropocentric anecdotes. most of the early data was that which could be gathered down the sights of a rifle.

Grizzlies were earliest and best described by Meriwether Lewis during the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804-1805. Lewis' journal entries regarding animals of the western states were then passed along by statesman De Witt Clinton in his seminal address to the Literary and Philosophical Society of New York I 1814, in which he characterized the grizzly bear as "the ferocious tyrant of the American woods ... the terror of the savages ... devouring alike man and beast, and defying the attacks of whole tribes of Indians." This in turn led to the 1815 classification of the American grizzly bear as Ursus horribilis, "horrible bear," by George Ord, who wrote that the grizzly "literally thirsts for human blood." Later, after the heated controversy on nomenclature had quieted, when the Alaskan and European brown bears were united with the grizzlies into one taxonomic classification - Ursus arctos - the "horrible" was retained for the North American grizzlies in the scientific name of the species Ursus arctos horribilis. Although grizzlies have been called brown bears, white bears, silvertips, gray, and golden, color is not a defining characteristic of a bear's species. Conservationist Enos Mills wrote in 1919 of a mother grizzly with four cubs, each a different color: she was cream-colored, one cub was black, one brown, a third gray, and the last black and white. The inability to distinguish a from the more retiring forest-dwelling black bear - Ursus Americanus - often led people to erroneously believe all bears were grizzlies. Or just bears.

Nineteenth-century exploratory expeditions to the Far West frequently included naturalists eager to collect, catalog, and name new species. But emphasis was put on the categorization and potential use of all that was observed, with little careful description and much behavioral misinterpretation. "Grissley bears are very numerous" did not provide the annals of science with much new information. When the curious bears stood up to get a better look at the newcomers, the posture was interpreted as aggressive. In hindsight, the bear's reputation as a gratuitously ferocious man-killer might more correctly have been attributed to the female of the species protecting her young when facing down strangers bearing arms and ill will. Regardless of how accurate these interpretations were, this reputation influenced encounters between bears and humans, and even the scientists were not immune.

Ironically, it was the bear hunters themselves who probably knew the California grizzly best, as they had to learn the habits and routines of the bears to prepare for safe successful hunts. Seasoned hunter Grizzly Adams, George Nidever, and Jim Duncan all describe waiting patiently, acquainting themselves with the patterns and habits of their targets, revising plans according to a bear's age and gender, learning the ways of a particular bear in order to kill it. It is significant that twentieth-century zoologists read Theodore Hittell's biography of Grizzly Adams to learn about bears.

As the number of bears in the state declined, science began to take notice. As early as 1890, C. Hart Merriam recognized that the grizzlies were hurtling toward extinction without sufficient documentation. He would later serve for twenty-five years as the first chief of the U.S. Biological Survey, during which he brought new and higher standards to the study of mammalogy. His method was one of collecting and labeling many specimens, taking careful measurements, making elaborate field notes, and gathering corollary data such as geographical and climatic conditions.

Another advocate for the accumulation of grizzly data was Joseph Grinnell. Born in 1877 and raised in Pasadena seeing grizzly tracks on camping trips to the San Gabriel Mountains, he later lamented never having seen a live California grizzly other than the captive Monarch in Golden Gate Park. He became the first director of the University of California's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology when it was founded in 1908, and he worked avidly to procure the remains of grizzlies for the museum.

To preserve some lasting biological record of the dwindling species, Merriam Grinnell, and others desperately gathered bits and pieces - claws and tall tales both - of the remaining bears. They consulted hunting lore, clipped newspaper stories, interviewed witnesses, and read many of the same sources found in this book. It was a tremendous disappointment - and dramatic testimony to the speed and manner of the grizzlies' passing - that they were unable to preserve a single complete scientific specimen of a California grizzly with full data measurements. Not even the remains of Monarch - a bear kept captive for twenty-two years - are intact. Grinnell wrote to Jesse Agnew, the Fresno County rancher who is said to have shot the last grizzly killed in the state, to ask for the bear's body for the museum. A tooth pried from the skull of the adult female had earlier been positively identified by Merriam as belonging to a grizzly. Agnew replied in 1928 that his nephew had taken the pelt to Korea but, once the snow over the bear's remains melted in the spring, he'd see what else he could find. But, even this story is murky: the tooth has since disappeared and the pelt may not have gone farther than the side of Agnew's barn. Despite the earnestness of science, once again the tall tale won the better share of the meager facts.

Scientists began to better document the lives of grizzlies during the final years of the bears in California. New, more considered assessments of grizzly behavior were published by William H. Wright in 1909, William Hornaday in 1914, and Enos Mills in 1919. In a 1937 farewell essay on grizzlies, Joseph Grinnell wrote sadly of the lack of wisdom in Homo sapiens to have orchestrated the demise of these California natives. Unfortunately, the twentieth-century disciplines of ecology and behavioral science, the doctrine of the interrelationship of species, and the demonstration of chain reactions in habitat destruction were all too late to rally awareness of the plight of the last bears. Reply