The Historic Grizzly

[brotherbear]

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As for North America's own Pleistocene bear, the gracile and active short-faced bear, the Canadian biologist Valerius Geist believes that until it went extinct 14,000 years ago, this super-aggressive bear may have single-handedly kept humans from migrating across the Bering land bridge in America. 
Atop such a long-standing animus, whose outlines are sketchy but in pagan Europe indicate that bears once served as both totems and gods, later traditions like Judaism and Christianity, and eventually the scientific way of understanding the world, layered on a very complex cultural matrix about bears for Europeans. Almost all these strands are evident in the Lewis and Clark encounters, which were so widely read in early America that they became a kind of nineteenth-century guidebook to how to think about the West, its Indians, and its wildlife. 
Jefferson's explorers had heard before they ever left the East Coast about the possible presence of a bear in the West that was different from the well-known black bear. Wintering at the Mandan villages in 1804-1805 they got exposed to more direct evidence by the Indians. Indeed, they had already seen the tracks of a "white bear" in eastern South Dakota, where some of the hunters claimed to have wounded one. But Lewis and Clark's firsthand experiences with grizzlies actually began in April 1805, in present Mountrail County, North Dakota, about halfway between Minot and Williston. Reply