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.
Continued... But they hadn't. And no area of the Southwest was more rife with grizzly bear rumors than the rugged San Juan Mountains in Southern Colorado. Those rumors became reality in September 1951. A federal trapper named Ernie Wilkinson was using poison to kill coyotes in the southern San Juan Mountains near Pagosa Springs after local sheep herders complained of predator problems. One morning when Wilkinson checked his set-guns he was stunned to find a young male grizzly lying dead a short distance from one of his getters. Then it was learned that another small grizzly had been killed by a sheepherder 80 miles to the south. And in September of 1952, a third grizzly, this one a sow with two cubs, was killed following complaints that she has been killing sheep. This was the last official grizzly bear killed in the state of Colorado.
Continued... But in 1958 reports of yet another grizzly encounter surfaced 100 miles to the south, just across the New Mexico border. Though this bear was seen eighteen different times, wildlife afficials in both Colorado and New Mexico never bothered to unvestigate. Ultimately the bear was killed by a Colorado game warden. Talk persisted through the next two decades that grizzlies still roamed Colorado's rugged San Juan Mountains, but after twenty years of little more than rumors, even the most diehard grizzly enthusiast had to admit that this last bastion in the Southwest had seen the last of the great bear.
But all that changed again on the morning of September 23, 1979, when a local outfitter named Ed Wiseman was leading a bowhunting client down a narrow ridge in the South San Juan Mountains. Hoping to surprise a rutting bull elk, both men were quietly paddling down a trail when the hunter spotted a large brown bear curled up asleep just ahead. Wiseman and his client circled the sleeping bear, but as they continued along the trail, the bear burst out of the brush. Wiseman tried to use his bow to fend off the animal and was knocked flat. The bear tore at Wiseman's leg, then grabbed his shoulder and shook him. Wiseman grabbed an arrow from his bow's quiver and jabbed the bear in the neck and ribcage. To Wiseman's amazement, the bear left him and walked a short distance before lying down, In a few minutes it was dead. There had indeed been one last grizzly bear left - but it was now dead. There were no more.
02-28-2017, 12:33 AM( This post was last modified: 02-28-2017, 12:34 AM by brotherbear )
Continued... Forensics proved wrong even that tongue-in-cheek hypothesis. The dead grizzly, a twenty-three-year-old female, had given birth; considering her age, she could have produced anywhere from two to twenty offspring. Where were they? And where were the adult males that had mated with her? Grizzly sightings continue in the San Juans. Peterson notes that in 1990 a female with three sub-adult cubs was observed from a distance of 80 yards with binoculars by local ranch foreman Dennis Schutz. "I've seen hundreds of bears," Schutz told Peterson, "and those were definitely grizzlies." Then in 1993 Peterson photographed a fresh bear dig in a remote subalpine bowl deep in the San Juans. ( Grizzlies commonly dig deep pits when digging for marmots. ) In 1995 a large adult bear bluff-charged a hiker in the same area. The Southwest was not the only region to go without any kind of organized response by wildlife agencies. In Southern Utah, instead of conserving a last foothold of the grizzly in the Paunsaugant area, state wildlife officials allowed sheep herders to flood the area. The usual sheep/bear problems ensued and the last of the grizzlies disappeared from the state.
Continued... James Capen "Grizzly" Adams, William Wright, and Teddy Roosevelt loved bears. Problem is, they mostly loved them dead. Wright and Adams killed bears by the score - some blacks, but mostly grizzlies. Roosevelt accounted for several grizzlies even though he was terrifically busy commanding the Rough Riders in battle during the Spanish-American War and later leading the nation as its president. These men killed bears for monetary gain; they killed bears for sport; they killed bears for trophy rugs; and they sometimes they killed bears just to kill them. And yet, much of the credit for the existence of the grizzly in the lower states today must go to Adams, Wright, and Roosevelt. Their penned exploits, while admittedly brutal and at times bordering on the sadistic, most assuredly influenced many young men in succeeding generations to look beyond the killing of the grizzly and to seek instead the value and worth of the great bear as one of the most majestic, powerful creatures on the face of the earth - sentiments almost unheard of in the latter part of the nineteenth century.
Grizzlies and Grizzled Old Men continued... James Capen Adams was born in Medway, Mississippi, and didn't arrive in California until the autumn of 1849 during the gold rush. Mining wasn't in his blood, though, so he turned to the one thing that did interest him: wild animals. Leaving behind the teeming cities and gold mining towns, Adams headed for the mountains with a team of oxen pulling an old wagon, two rifles, and a pistol, along with several bowie knives. Besides being an excellent shot, Adams possessed a variety of skills that served him well in the wilderness. He became an expert at constructing log cabin traps for bears and also made the steel cages to transport them back to civilization for bear/bull fights or for export . During his first trip afield, he killed several grizzlies, often administering the coup de grace with his bowie knife. Adams was soon doing a brisk trade in the export of pelts and wild animals, and it was his uncanny ability to bring back alive a large collection of lethal predators that furnished Adams with his first taste of notoriety and acclaim. A flurry of activity always surrounded Adams when, dressed in buckskin and beaver hat, he strolled triumphantly through San Francisco's wharf district on his way to the docks with a great menagerie of wild animals drawn behind him in wagons.
Continued...
In the summer of 1853, while on a hunt in Eastern Washington Territory ( probably present-day Montana ), Adams killed a sow grizzly with two cubs. The men chased down and captured the orphaned young. Adams chained the female cub to a tree and muzzled her, then set about "training" her. After trying kindly advances without success, Adams became incensed when the cub swatted his offered hand. He then proceeded to beat her relentlessly until she was reduced to an exhausted, whimpering ball of fur. When he reached out to touch her, she did not protest, instead trembled in fear. Soon he was stroking her lovingly and feeding her by hand. He named her Lady Washington. Before long the bear was allowed to roam around camp on a tether and eventually learned to follow Adams without a tether. On one of her first hunting trips with Adams, Lady Washington assisted him in routing a wild grizzly.
Amazingly, Lady Washington was also taught, after a series of beatings, to carry small packs on her back. The California Menagerie, as it came to be called, caused quite a stir that fall when Adams strolled through the streets of Portland, Oregon, leading every sort of wild animal imaginable, along with Lady Washington, now weighing 300 pounds, walking placidly beside him with a bundle of hides on her back. Much to his pleasure, he was referred to thereafter as "Grizzly" Adams.
Continued... In the early spring of 1854, Grizzly Adams and a Mr. Solon of Sonora traveled through Yosemite Valley and discovered a grizzly den. Adams shot the bear and heard whimpering inside. He crawled into the den and came out with two tiny cubs, sightless and probably only a week old. Adams named the cubs General Jackson and Ben Franklin. A greyhound in the party was nursing a litter of pups, so Adams had the grizzly cubs suckle on the dog. Later that year, Adams took a trip east of the Sierra Nevada through Nevada and Utah seeking wild animals to kill and trap. While he was camped in the mountains, Lady Washington was visited several nights by a Rocky Mountain grizzly. Though tempted to kill the interloper, Adams held off as long as Lady Washington showed no indication of leaving with the big male. His hunch paid off, for the next year Lady Washington gave birth to a single cub that Adams named Fremont.
Continued... Leaving mother and cub behind, Adams returned to the Sierra Nevada on a hunting trip. While he was passing through a chaparral thicket, a huge female grizzly with three cubs sprang upon Adams, knocked his gun away, and threw him to the ground. Ben Franklin attacked the female at the throat, causing the bigger bear to turn on him. This gave Adams time to grab his rifle and kill the sow, but both Ben and Adams carried wicked scars of the fight for the rest of their lives. Actually, the capture and domestication of grizzly cubs was not unheard of in those days. To capture and try to domesticate a full-grown grizzly, on the other hand, was considered suicidal. This dubious honor frll to Grizzly Adams in the winter of 1855.
03-04-2017, 03:25 PM( This post was last modified: 03-04-2017, 03:27 PM by brotherbear )
Continued...
Adams built a large log cabin trap along the Mercedes River in Northern California. Months after first baiting the trap, Adams was awakened in the middle of the night by the unearthly bellowing of a bear. With pine torches, Adams and two Indian boys approached the trap and found a huge grizzly "taking chips out of the pine logs faster than I could with an axe." To distract the bear from tearing through the logs, Adams thrust a torch into its face, then prodded it back with sharp sticks and hot rods. Adams camped on top of the log cabin trap for eight days to keep the huge brute from escaping. He finally left the boys to watch over the bear and hastened for Stockton to fetch a steel cage.
Continued... Adams was forced, at the risk of life and limb, to pass a heavy chain through the steel bars of the cage, then into the trap. After a day of trying, Adams finally got the chain around the bear's head. Then with the oxen pulling mightily on the chain and the men "burning, punching and pulling" finally forced the furiously battling bear into the steel cage. Only after Adams was assured that he'd be able to get the berserk grizzly out alive did he name the bear Samson, alluding to the strong man of biblical times. Grizzly Adams had proven his bravery with wild animals, but even he knew his limits with Samson. He was eventually able to display the huge bear, but always with a heavy chain fastened around his neck. Regardless, visitors took one look at the menacing stare of the enormous bear and gave him a wide birth.
Continued... Anxious to show off his captured animals, Adams opened a live museum on Clay Street in San Francisco. He proved to be a natural showman and his sizeable menagerie of wild birds and animals began to draw large audiences nightly. Theodore Hittell, a young reporter for the Daily Evening Edition in San Francisco, wrote:
Descending the stairway, I found a most remarkable spectacle. The basement was a large one but with a low ceiling, and dark, dingy in appearance. In the middle, chained to the floor, were two large grizzly bears, named Ben Franklin and Lady Washington. They paced restlessly in circles. Not far off were several other younger grizzlies and black bears also chained. Near the front of the room was an open stall in which were haltered several mature elks. Further back were cages with lions and several other California animals. At the rear, in a very large iron cage, was the monster grizzly, Samson. He was an immense creature weighing some three-quarters of a ton, and from his look and actions, as well as the care taken to rail him from the spectators, it was evidenced that he should not be approached too closely.
Continued... On February 1, 1977, NBC aired an hour-long nature-based adventure program titled "The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams." Starring Dan Haggerty as the famous James Capen "Grizzly" Adams, the first episode portrayed Adams as a gentle man seeking the solitude of wilderness who befriended an orphaned grizzly cub ( Ben ). Together this unlikely team of man and bear went about solving life's problems. Their most amazing accomplishment was the bridging of the language barrier. When Haggerty spoke to Ben, this amazing bear somehow understood him and responded with head wags and nods, or occasional bawls and grunts. The series was long on sentiment and short on historical accuracy, for the real Grizzly Adams did things a bit differently. Desiring a young grizzly to train, Adams located a den, stuck his gun barrel against the groggy mother's head, and blew her brains out, at which point he yanked two bawling cubs out of the hole and proceeded to "train" them. The real Grizzly Adams accomplished his training by using clubs, chains, and whips to beat the young bears into quivering balls of submission.
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.
But the fledgling grizzly-bear hunter had a lot to learn. Unfortunately, he listened to and believed much of the misinformation about the great grizzled bear that still stalked some of the forests around Spokane. The most prevalent myth was that one needed only walk to the head of a draw and allow his scent to blow down it. Any grizzly bear, upon catching a whiff of human in the area, would make straight for the man with the intention of attacking him. Wright quickly discovered that not only was this information false, the opposite was true. The grizzly strove mightily to go the other way, rather than face a man with a gun.
The Historic Grizzly
