Humans and bears - Wild encounters

[brotherbear]

California's Day of the Grizzly by William B. Secrest.

Major Horace Bell, Reminiscences of a Ranger, 1881 ( 1927 ):

...In the '50s grizzly bears were more plentiful in Southern California than pigs; they were, in fact, so numerous in certain locations, as Topongo, Malibu, La Laguna de Chico, Lopez and other places, as to make the rearing of cattle utterly impossible. Those ferocious brutes were the terror of the aboriginal tribes, and dreaded by the California Spaniard, whose only weapon of offensive warfare against them were the lance and riata, more commonly called in gringo parlance the lazo ( lasso ). Reply