The Historic Grizzly

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Continued...
Unfortunately, not all men, before or after Lester Smith, have shared his opinion. The first recorded meeting between a white man and a grizzly bear ended typically - with a dead bear, as noted in "The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition". The following decades didn't get any better for the great bear. Settlers and ranchers moved into grizzly country and depleted bear' natural food sources, forcing them to take an occasional cow. As a result stockmen and state governments, along with the federal government, embarked on a century of sustaining eradication - using guns, traps, poison, and fear - to push the grizzly to the verge of extinction in the West. 
Once totaling somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000, only a few hundred bears survived in the most remote, fugged mountainous areas. And still the killing continued. Whenever a grizzly bear was spotted, hunters, houndsmen, and trappers descended upon the area in a macabre show of bravado to lay claim to killing the last grizzly. With bear numbers so low and public sentiments so overwhelmingly against the grizzly, some naturalists went so far as to declare the bear virtually extinct in the lower forty-eight states. Only a miracle would save the great bear. Reply