The Historic Grizzly

[brotherbear]

Continued...
William Wright was born in 1856 on a hardscrabble farm in New Hampshire, where the drudgery of work was a constant. After dinner the family would gather around the woodstove and listen to his father read. One evening, William's dad began to read from a book titled The Adventures of James Capan Adams, Mountaineer and Grizzly Bear Hunter of California. William and his brothers pestered their father to read the book over and over again; and though the boys could not yet read, they virtually wore out the book while studying its sketches and illustrations. 
When William was about six years old, the P.T.Barnum Circus came to town, and in its menagerie was one of the bears that Grizzly Adams had captured. William Wright reminisced years later in his book The Grizzly Bear, "That bear was the only thing I can recall from that circus. I dreamed, boy-like, of emulating Adams, and I openly declared my resolve. Strangely, I never changed my mind even as I grew older." Though his apprenticeship as a blacksmith and a machinist almost took him to Australia, Wright at the last minute switched plans and took a train west, hopping off in Spokane, Washington. William Wright, at long last, had arrived in grizzly country. Reply