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.
Long before professional biologists developed a strategy for proper human coexistence with the grizzly, French Canadian Bud Cheff learned from his Salish Indian friends while roaming Montana's wild Mission Mountains in the 1920s, "You no bother'um Sumka ( Salish for "grizzly" ), Sumka no bother'um you." Bud's life among the last free-roaming Indians and his acceptance of the grizzly as a treasured animal, became a gospel that he preached - not only about the majesty of the bear but also the nobleness of Indians.
Continued... No one brought the plight of the grizzly bear to the public eye more vividly than Frank and John Craighead, whose pioneering bear studies in Yellowstone were broadcast into our living rooms via black-and-white television in the 1950s. We watched with bated breath as these irrepressible brothers scrambled back to their pickup mere seconds ahead of an angry grizzly that had abruptly recovered from sedation. But the Craighead brothers weren't in it merely for entertainment. Their pioneering use of radio collars to study and track grizzly bears ushered in today's scientific era of bear management. These men, plus a number of others - some famous, some not - stood in the gap and courageously halted the fusillade of bullets, traps, poison, and poor policy in their circles of influence to staunch the flow of innocent blood and bring the grizzly back from the brink of extinction.
Continued... The big sow grizzly hurried down the forested trail but paused long enough to throw her snout skyward, sniffing loudly. The sweet odor of decaying flesh once again reached her nostrils and set her belly to grumbling. Since emerging from hibernation two weeks ago, she had eaten only the same dry grass and bark from a few saplings. The tantalizing odor made her want to gallop forward, but her three cubs were hanging back, play-fighting and snooping under rocks and logs. At any other time, she would have encouraged their play and foraging. Now, she uttered a deep grunt of impatience. The startled cubs scrambled close to her. At a bend in the trail beside a creek, the odor became overpowering, and the sow loped ahead to a pile of freash-cut logs. At the base of the log pile she found the hide and guts of a deer. The sow stepped forward, mouth agape to devour the food. Suddenly she felt a sharp pain in her right leg. For a moment, she stared down, confused by the strange thing fastened to her paw. Then she smelled the steel. A furious bellow ripped through the air, knocking the frightened cubs backward. The sow lunged to escape the massive no. 5 Newhouse bear trap, but the heavy device stayed securely fastened to her paw, even though she dragged two eight-foot logs attached to the trap with heavy chains some 50 feet down the trail. Soon the logs became entangled in a thicket of small trees. The sow turned her fury on the trap and bit it so hard that her upper canine teeth were broke. The pain, at first bothersome, became maddening as the trap bit deeper into her flesh with every frantic lunge. For three hours the sow was a whirling dervish of bellowing, fighting, roaring, tearing fury until at last she lay back, exhausted. The cubs timidly approached her to nurse, but the sow pushed them away and returned to biting at the trap. By sundown, her lower canines and all of her molars were cracked or broken. The next day was a torturous blur for the sow, by now almost mad with pain and thirst, and the pitiful wailing of her hungry frightened cubs. Then came night, then day, and night and day. The pain eventually was replaced by a numbness in the paw, which had swelled to twice its normal size as a mixture of blood and lymph oozed from deep cuts made by the steel jaws. On the morning of the fourt day, the sow was startled awake. She heard and smelled something. She reared up to her full height of seven feet, the big bear trap dangling from her right paw, and spotted the man cautiously approaching. The sow laid back her ears and lunged, but the trap held her fast.
Continued...
In his book "The Lochsa Story" Bud Moore reported:
Trapper Wes Fales laid the sights of his rifle between the sow's eyes. The rifle blast echoed through the narrow canyon, and the sow collapsed. As Wes cautiously approached the inert bear, three small cubs hopped onto a large spruce log and hesitantly approached their mother. They sniffed the sow and began to wail, looking first at the man, then at their dead mother.
Fale's first thought was that this was his lucky day. Besides the bounty and the price of the sow's hide, he'd make good money if he could capture one of the cubs. He tore off his wool jacket and dove at a cub, managing to latch onto a tiny rear leg, then rolled the crying, biting animal in his shirt and stuffed it into his backpack. He hurriedly peeled the hide off the sow and left the oozing carcass and two other cubs behind as he trudged down the trail. All in all, it had been a good day, with more bear traps yet to check. But the cub wailed pitifully throughout the journey, and Wes Fales felt a pang of remorse - a dangerous emotion for a man determined to do his part to rid that corner of Eastern Idaho and Western Montana of every grizzly bear.
Continued... The predator problem was approached with the same zeal. The grizzly bear, because it was big and ferocious when provoked, was considered a threat to the livelihood and personal safety of every man, woman, and child, and consequently deemed evil. The grizzly bear had to go. Infrequent bear attacks on humans were headlined in newspapers, along with atrocious stories of bears killing scores of cattle and sheep. With the taming of the Indian, it didn't take much prodding for the predominantly farming and ranching populace to adopt a policy of eradication toward the grizzly.
The near-extermination of an estimated 100 million buffalo in the West in little more than two decades by market hunters is well documented. Actually, it was relatively simple, due mostly to the herding nature of these dim-witted beasts the habit of which was restricted to open grasslands. The big predators such as the mountain lion, gray wolf, and the grizzly were a different matter. The lion by nature is a secretive animal and seldom seen, even when plentiful. The wolf proved cunning and quickly learned to stay out of sight during daylight hours. And the great bear was difficult to find because it lived mostly in dense cover and rugged mountains, and it possessed none of the dim-wittedness of the buffalo.
02-23-2017, 02:03 PM( This post was last modified: 02-23-2017, 03:10 PM by brotherbear )
Continued...
However, there was a vast difference between the mountain lion and wolf, and the grizzly, in the mind of the average settler. The mountain lion seldom stood its ground when confronted by a human. The wolf garnered even less respect and came to be considered nothing more than vermin, a large version of the lowly coyote, which killed by night, then slunk off back to its hole come daylight and cringed like a coward when cornered. The grizzly, on the other hand, proved its fearsomeness over and over again when cornered, often fighting ferociously to its last breath against hopeless odds. And not just fighting, but sometimes even winning, tearing the life from some brave or foolhardy human soul who had made the fatal mistake of pursuing a grizzly. The demise of the grizzly would not be as easily accomplish as the wolf. To eradicate an animal as powerful, dangerous, and reclusive as the grizzly would take a determined effort by dedicated men who used American ingenuity, technology, and resourcefulness to reach their goal. One other thing was needed: to vilify the great bear to the point where the only good bear was a dead bear.
Looking at the metropolis of Los Angeles today with its population of 50 million, it seems laughable to call this sprawling concrete jungle prime grizzly habitat. Yet, in its natural state it was a fertile land that produced a plethora of native fruits, nuts, and berries, and plenty of grass to feed thousands of elk, deer, and antelope, and a variety of lesser animals. It is estimated that upwards of 10,000 grizzlies roamed southern California alone when the Spanish explorers appeared in the early 1800s. Not only was the California grizzly abundant, it also grew to massive proportions due to the abundance of food. Specimens topping 1,000 pounds were not unusual, and a few tipped the scales at 1,500 pounds.
Grizzlies and Grizzled Old Men by Mike Lapinski - 2006. Much of the West was still uninhabited when professional California grizzly hunters were notching scores of kills. Jedediah Smith, famous scout and trapper, was the first American to note the presence of grizzly bears in California. While beaver trapping in the Sacramento Valley in 1828 he wrote, "I saw a Grizzly Bear and shot at him but did not kill him." John Work and a hunting party in the Sacramento Valley killed forty-five grizzlies between November 1832 and May 1833. George Nidever killed forty-five bears near San Louis Obispo in 1837, and Nidever claimed to have killed about 200 in previous years. William Gordon of Yolo County killed nearly fifty bears in one year in the 1840s. And three hunters in the Tejon Pass region in 1854 are said to have killed 150 bears in less than one year. Farmers and ranchers paid these men to kill bears on their lands, and the bear meat was sold to hungry immigrants and later to gold miners. Then a curious demand sent these men to the hills to bring grizzly bears back, not dead, but alive. ( bear/bull fights ).
Continued... Astonishingly, the poison campaign continued. PARC riders in 1924 spread more than 100,000 poison baits over cooperating ranches in New Mexico alone. The next year, 160,000 baits were spread over 75,000 square miles. Not only was PARC distributing poison and setting out bait stations on carcasses, but "approximately" 155,000 poison baits were given free of charge to cooperators in the predator war. In Colorado PARC men poisoned, shot, and trapped 5,148 bears. A total of 30 million acres were treated with strychnine throughout the West. In 1928 the U.S. Forest Service estimated only about twenty-eight grizzlies in national forests in New Mexico, ten in Arizona, and two in Colorado. That year only one bear was killed by PARC. That year marked the beginning of the mop-up program to eliminate the last of the grizzlies. It was not unusual for a PARC hunter to waste up to two weeks to kill a lone grizzly hiding in some backcountry arroyo or mountain.
Continued... Though strychnine was not used as liberally in the Northern Rockies and bordering states as it was farther south, sheep and cattle ranchers used it extensively in parts of the south and central portions of Idaho. Some ranchers in eastern Montana counties also used poison, often to kill off wolves, but if any wandering grizzlies also fell victim to it, so much the better. PARC also penetrated Wyoming's seemingly vast wilderness and, with the help of strychnine-laced beef balls, managed to exterminate the great bear from all but the northwest corner of that state bordering Yellowstone National Park. Surplus bears that filtered down from the park were killed on site. Colonel William Pickett, a Civil War veteran, founded a ranch on the Greybull River near present-day Meeteetsie, Wyoming, where he killed scores of grizzlies from 1877 to 1904. One fall Pickett killed 19 grizzlies over carcasses he'd set out. And just south of Yellowstone Park in Cody, Wyoming, lived Ned Frost, a famous hunter and guide who claimed he was involved in 350 bear killings.
Continued... In many areas strychnine was used in response to particular acts of predation, especially if the source of the problem was not quickly or easily eliminated. President Teddy Roosevelt recorded one such incident that occurred in 1888 near his ranch in Medora, South Dakota. A large grizzly bear, well known to locals by its tracks, was holed up in dense brushy bottom land along the Little Missouri River. The bear had acquired a taste for beef after feeding on a dead cow it found along the river. Roosevelt went along on a few hunts for the bear and mentioned that the bruin had taken to lying in wait along cattle trails and killing the first cow passing by, regardless of its size. Some of the ranchers, angered by their losses, hunted the bear extensively but were unsuccessful due to the dense tangles of willow along the river. Finally, a rancher sprinkled strychnine on a freshly killed cow carcass and killed the bear.
Continued... Throughout the Southwest, California, the Central Rockies, and most of the Northern Rockies, not one stockman stepped forward to protect the grizzlies on his ranch. Not one U.S. Forest ranger took action to halt the bloodshed in his national forest. No influential landowner, attorney, or county or state official spoke out against eradicating the great bear. These men and their lands, in turn, received their due recompense. The grizzly vanished from their lands. Texas was the first state to officially claim the extinction of the species within its borders when the last bear was killed there in 1890, followed by South Dakota in 1897. The official extinction date for the grizzly in Mexico was 1920. California, once the bastion of the giant grizzly bear, saw its last individual killed in 1922. Utah followed with the last grizzly killed in 1923. The last grizzly was killed in Pregan in 1931, in Washington in 1936, New Mexico in 1933, and Arizona in 1935. The extermination of the grizzly caused few tears nationally. While the press lamented the slaughter of the buffalo - and beaver before it and the elk after it - little ink was wasted on the demise of the great bear. And when a bear story appeared in the newspaper it was usually as account of the killing of a "last grizzly."
inued... By 1930 distraught conservationists declared the grizzly virtually extinct in the West, except for those few enclaves in the national parks of Yellowstone and Glacier, where the bear was protected. With stunning speed and efficiency, the grizzly had been eliminated. Or had it? An article in the April 17, 1931, edition of the Silver City ( New Mexico ) Enterprise newspaper read: "To Carl and Blue Rice of Cliff goes the credit for killing one of the largest grizzly bears ever seen in this section. This bear was hailed as the last of the grizzlies in New Mexico. Problem was, a bear killed the year before on Black Mountain west of Magdalen by a man named George Evans had also been hailed as the last grizzly. Then in 1933 another "last grizzly" was killed in New Mexico - all in a state where the grizzly was "virtually" extinct.
Continued...
Neighboring Arizona was also having problems with its "virtual extinction" of the great bear. An official "last grizzly" was killed on September 13, 1935, when Richard Miller shot a 300-pound bear near Red Mountain, located northeast of Clifton. But the next year, three experienced hunters encountered a grizzly in the same area. Then in 1939 a big grizzly was killed on the slopes of Mount Baldy. This bear has remained the official "last grizzly" in Arizona.
Continued... Sightings of silver-tipped bears persisted through the 1940s, along with rumors of a bear killed here and there, mostly by sheep men who had inundated many of those isolated corners in the West. Every sheepherder carried a rifle to shoot on site any coyote, mountain lion, or wolf. Or grizzly. Most certainly an unknown toll of "last grizzlies" were killed by sheep tenders who simply kept tight-lipped about it. By 1950 even the most optimistic conservationist had thrown up their hands and removed the "virtual" from in front of the "extinction." Those few scattered bears that might have somehow escaped the bullets, traps, hounds, or poison would have surely died off by then.
The Historic Grizzly
