There is a world somewhere between reality and fiction. Although ignored by many, it is very real and so are those living in it. This forum is about the natural world. Here, wild animals will be heard and respected. The forum offers a glimpse into an unknown world as well as a room with a view on the present and the future. Anyone able to speak on behalf of those living in the emerald forest and the deep blue sea is invited to join.
02-10-2016, 12:03 AM( This post was last modified: 02-10-2016, 12:04 AM by brotherbear )
California's Day of the Grizzly by Willaim B. Secrest.
Oakland Daily Evening Tribune, May 17, 1914:
"I began meeting Club-Foot on the trails. He weighed fully 2,500 pounds, feared nothing and seemed to bear a charmed life. Indians call him the "Evil Spirit." Many times he's been shot. Guess he must pack twenty-five pounds of lead in his pelt.
...Once he lunged at me from a thicket and swiped at me as I dodged behind a boulder. His weight carried him down the slope saving me that time.
Then again we thought we had him. Mexican vaqueros roped him, but the brute just pulled their little mule mounts right up to him by grasping the lariats in his paws. Having no guns in the crowd, we had to let him go.
02-10-2016, 12:05 AM( This post was last modified: 02-10-2016, 12:05 AM by brotherbear )
From the book: The Gunfighters - Paintings and Text by Lea F. McCarty - copyright 1959.
Wild Bill Hickok 1837-1876.
He learned to know every foot of the Sante Fe Trail as he drove a stagecoach, but he had to give up this life after an encounter with a grizzly bear that mauled Bill something fearful.
02-10-2016, 12:07 AM( This post was last modified: 02-10-2016, 12:08 AM by brotherbear )
California's Day of the Grizzly by William B. Secrest.
Los Angeles Times, January 27, 1911:
"While it isn't likely that the grizzly bear will ever become extinct," mused Captain Jerry Kreiter, "he has all the same come to be something of a rarity in many of his original haunts, and the hunter seeking sport with him now must journey into the fastness of the far Sierras and Coast Range Mountains or into the wilderness of the British provinces in the Northwest.
Plumas National Bulletin, October 30, 1911:
...Since the departure of the sheep herds from the summer ranges in the high Sierras to the winter ranges in the foothills, the bears have come down to the intermediate altitudes. They are mostly of the black and brown variety, with an occasional grizzly.
02-10-2016, 04:18 PM( This post was last modified: 02-10-2016, 04:19 PM by brotherbear )
California's Day of the Grizzly by William B. Secrest.
Oakland Daily Evening Tibune, January 3, 1915:
Lone Grizzly Seen in Butte Mountains After Twenty Years
For the first time in twenty years a great grizzly bear, silver tipped and weighing about 800 pounds, has been seen roaming over the mountain trails near here. He is believed to be one of the half dozen or more of his kind left in California, among natural haunts of his species ... Hunters from Camp Mayaro are keeping a sharp lookout for the grizzly's reappearance, as they believe that he will return to his old trail in the canyon in search of wild hogs, which are numerous in the timber along the river.
02-10-2016, 04:19 PM( This post was last modified: 02-10-2016, 04:21 PM by brotherbear )
California's Day of the Grizzly by William B. Secrest.
The Fresno Morning Republican, August 6, 1917:
No Grizzly Left in California
San Francisco, Aug. 5 - The California field artillery, now organizing, wants a grizzly bear for a mascot. It detailed a man to catch or buy one, and he has reported that the only grizzly bear he could find in California was the one on the state seal.
Charleston Daily Mail, July 2, 1919:
During the last 25 years the grizzly population has enormously decreased. The grizzly is in danger of extermination. In California, where he was once numerous, he is now extinct. ...When the grizzly bear shall have passed - and he is found in such lamentably small numbers now that his exit from our midst is but a question of years - there shall have disappeared from our mountains one of the sublimest specimens of animal life that exalts the western wilderness.
02-11-2016, 03:01 PM( This post was last modified: 02-11-2016, 03:02 PM by brotherbear )
Cowboys, Mountain Men, and Grizzly Bears by Matthew P. Mayo:
There was a berry thicket, then a sudden sound. An awful roaring rose up to meet him, eye to eye, and then rose higher yet. An enormous bear looked down at him. Old Ephraim's on me, he remembered thinking, just before the beast's jaws closed about him. No buckskin in the world could stop those gleaming blades of teeth from popping into his chest and taking with them a mouthful of him. The bear swung him around, and that's when he saw cubs. Two of them. Old Eph was a she-bear. The worst kind.
He had little time to raise his trusted rifle. He was shaking so hard, as if gripped with ague, that he felt sure he wouldn't be able to force back the hammer. But he did, and pulled on the trigger without hesitation. Though he heard the report and knew from years of sure shooting that he had shot true, the beast was on him again, rising to its full height and lashing with curved claws as long as a man's fingers. Glass rolled over and made to crawl away. He remembered tasting dirt and thinking of sure death, of being covered with the stuff. This idea did not appeal to him at all.
Another swipe and his back seemed to peel clean off. He felt his scalp rise, heard the pop as it separated and was pulled away. His arms had been raked to the bone and his right hip, too, a glistening, bare ravine of meat and bone. Hugh saw this and heard the shouts and rifle reports of his fellows as he collapsed back to the ground, undone even as the bear charged away, then returned, slower. It swatted and lunged at him again and the last he recalled was the stink of the thing's final breath as it dropped across him, draped like it was sleeping. So familiar and fitting, he remembered thinking, fot they had gone out together. But that was not his end.
...One of two men who left mountain man Hugh Glass for dead, Jim Bridger, later forgiven, went on to become one of the West's most famous frontiersmen.
02-11-2016, 03:03 PM( This post was last modified: 02-11-2016, 03:05 PM by brotherbear )
Cowboys, Mountain Men, & Grizzly Bears by Matthew P. Mayo:
With no warning a massive brown streak burst from the midst of the thicket. It was a huge grizzly and the bawling roar it emitted was matched only by the snapping of its jaws. Horses jerked free and reared high, slashing the air with their hooves, neighing as if they were on fire, eyes rolling white in their frenzy to find escape.
The bruin burst upon the line of men at their middle, menacing the lot of them with its rage before bolting straight for the head of the line. It leapt at Captain Jedediah Smith, grabbed the startled young man by the head, and dragged him down. As their leader thrashed on the ground, shouting and twisting under the bawling beast, the men were immobilized for less than the time it took to draw breath again. Four of them had their long guns poised for a shot at the savage creature, but with Smith rolling about with the beast on top of him, then he on top of it, a clear shot at the rippling brown hide seemed impossible. something had to be done.
Jim Clyman, second in command because of his age and experience, shouted, "Don't shoot the Captain!" and charged at the bawling mass of bear and man, yelling and waving his arms. By that time the bear had turned its attention to Smith's unguarded belly, where its biting jaws snapped ribs and even the steel of Smith's long knife. The other men followed Clyman and, moving closer, let fly volley after volley of lead ball until the brute succumbed to the assault, leaving a grisly mess in its wake.
02-11-2016, 03:05 PM( This post was last modified: 02-11-2016, 03:07 PM by brotherbear )
California's Day of the Grizzly by Willam B. Secrest.
"James Clyman, His Diaries and Reminiscences," California Historical Society Quarterly, June, 1925:
...As he emerged from the thicket he ( Jedediah Smith ) and the bear met face-to-face. Grizzly did not hesitate a moment but sprang on the capt taking him by the head first. Pitching sprawling on the earth he gave him a grab by the middle fortunately catching by the rifle ball pouch and Butcher Knife which he broke but breaking several of his ribs and cutting his head badly none of us having any surgical Knowledge what was to be done one Said come take hold and he would say why not you so it went around...
I got a pair of scissors and cut off his hair and then began my first Job of dressing wounds upon examination I found the bear had taken nearly all his head in his capacious mouth close to his left eye on one side and close to his right ear on the other and laid the skull bare to near the crown of the head leaving a white streak where his teeth passed one of his ears was torn from his head out to the outer rim after stitching all the other wounds in the best way I was capabl and according to the captains directions the ear being the last I told him I could do nothing for his Eare O you must try to stitch up some way or other said he.
Maurice S. Sullivan, The Travels of Jedediah Smith, 1934:
Early in the morning Mr. Rodgers went after the ( previously ) wounded bear in company with John Hanna. In a short time Hanna came running in and said that they had found the bear in a very bad thicket. That he suddenly rose from his bed and rushed on them. Mr. Rodgers fired a moment before the bear caught him. After biting him in several places he went off, but Hanna shot him again, when he returned, caught Mr. Rodgers and gave him several additional wounds. I went out with a horse to bring him in and found him very badly wounded being severly cut in... 10 or 12 different places. I washed his wounds and dressed them with plasters of soap and sugar.
BEARS of the last frontier... Most bears need space - lots of space. In the case of a male grizzly bear in an inland North American ecosystem, this amounts to perhaps five hundred square miles, sometimes more. This means that bears make perfect "umbrella species": Protect them and you incidentally protect countless other species of plants and animals that happen to utilize smaller areas within a bear's home range. Bears also function in two other ways ecologically as indicator and keystone species. As an indicator species, bears provide a litmus test for the health of an ecosystem, and as a keystone species, they actually play an important role in maintaining that ecosystem's health.
BEARs of the last frontier... Anchorage: This city's human population is 280,000, which might not seem like a lot compared to Lower 48 standards, but if you take into account the fact that only 700,000 people live in the entire state of Alaska, the perspective becomes very clear indeed. Some 40 percent of Alaskans call this home. It is estimated that 4 wolf packs, 1,500 moose, more than 65 brown bears, and 250 to 350 black bears call the municipality of Anchorage home.
BEARs of the last frontier... Journal Entry, Anchorage: Being in Anchorage amid this curious mix of people and bears has made me think a lot this week about the relationship that we have with the wild. It's like the front line here: the line between bears and humans. The question is how much of our world can they tolerate, and how much of theirs are we willing to accept? Humans the world over have become so isolated from their common past: a time when we were in tune with the natural world, among wild animals. And in the grand scheme of human evolution, it was yesterday.
The Grizzly Bear by William H. Wright ( 1909 )... Wright began as a bear hunter, and an extraordinarily successful one. He pitted his own strength, endurance, ingenuity, skill, knowledge, and craftiness against that of the grizzlies. He met them on equal terms, killing most of his grizzlies with a one-shot Winchester and following them for days and weeks at a time, seeking them out, not drawing them in with baits. Only an exceptionally skilled hunter could have accomplished what he did in the course of a hunting career. His most remarkable achievement as a hunter was killing five grizzlies with five shots, which he called, "the greatest bag of grizzlies that I have ever made single-handed." From this time on Wright's interest turned from killing grizzlies to studying them. He said, "If one really wishes to study an animal, let him go without a gun"; he set aside his rifle, took up photography, *and continued to learn all he could about the grizzly. His book shows a hunter becoming a naturalist: Wright first studied the grizzly in order to hunt him, then he came to hunt him in order to study him.
The Grizzly Bear by William H. Wright... The actual history of the grizzly begins on April 29, 1805, when, on the banks of the upper Missouri, at the mouth of the Yellowstone River, in what is now Montana, Captain Meriwether Lewis, of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, met one of these animals for the first time. Before this, indeed, hints and rumors of a bear different from the Eastern variety had come back to civilization with returning traders and explorers. Edward Umfreville, writting in 1790 upon "The Present State of HUdson's Bay," had heard of them. In summing up the fauna of the North and West, he says: "Bears are of three kinds: the black, the red, and the grizzle bear." But he goes no further than to add, in regard to the two latter, "their nature is savage and ferocious, their power dangerous, and their haunts to be guarded against."
The Grizzly Bear... Sir Alexander MacKenzie, the explorer, during his second voyage, on May 13, 1795, mentions seeing bear tracks on the banks of the Peace River, some of which were nine inches wide. He says, "The Indians entertain great apprehension of this kind of bear, which is called the grisly bear, and they never venture to attack it except in a party of at least three or four." He never, however, seems to have seen one, nor does he describe it. Lewis and Clark, on the other hand, not only entered in their journals full accounts of their various encounters with these animals, but made inquiries about them among the inhabitants of the regions where they were found, and took in them not only the interest of the fur trader and the hunter, but that of the naturalist. Moreover, for nearly fifty years these field notes of theirs were the chief, if not the only, source of information regarding these animals.
Humans and bears - Wild encounters
