The Historic Grizzly

[brotherbear]

Continued...

Despite a scattering of encounters with grizzly bears as early as the seventeenth century, 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 a Spanish explorer Sebastian Viscaino in the year 1602. Sailing along California's Central Coast, in the bay where Monterrey and Carmel ( and Pebble Beach ) would one day stand, two centuries before the Lewis and Clark expedition would bring "white bears" to the attention of Enlightenment science, Viscaino watched grizzlies clamoring with astonishing nimbleness over the carcass of a whale washed up on a Monterrey Bay beach. Almost a century later, in 1690 and far, far inland, a Hudson's Bay Indian trader named Henry Kelsey was traveling overland on the grassy yellow plains of Saskatatchewan when his party encountered a grizzly. This was not a view from the 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 struck down "a god." Reply