By Susan Snyder

From the Introduction

Everybody’s got a bear story to tell, And everyone who wrote about California while there were still grizzly bears around had something to say about them. Certainly they were difficult to overlook when they were still numerous enough to matter, contending their right to pass and to make a living. Although the grizzlies are gone, the stories survive in diaries, romantic published narratives, interviews, photographs, brittle newspaper clippings, and drawings. Together they project a composite portrait of the bears but a better portrait of their exterminators. From the pictographs of the native Californians, to 1769, when the first grizzly fell to the fire of a Spanish blunderbuss, and through the 1920s, when the ghost grizzlies of an extinct race of bears generated their own legends, those who lived in or passed through the land wrote and spun tales about the great bears.

There have always been bear stories, as long as there have been campfires and shadows in the night, and as long as humans have shared the earth with their fellow predators. The fables of the animal bigger and tougher and stronger than we are, the lore of the beast that looks like us, eats like us, and acts like us, is multilingual and multigenerational. Even the Old Testament has a bear story or two — one about a couple of she–bears who were called out of the woods to eat up the forty–two naughty boys who teased the prophet Elijah about his bald head. Bear myths are heroic and archetypal. They display the prowess of the hunter, victorious over great odds, imbued with the power of that which he has vanquished. Bear stories are the provisions of celebrations, thanksgivings, and renewals. As with most campfire tales, the tellers “fix ‘em up gorgeous,” and they are adorned with exaggerations and superlatives — shadows are enlarged, fangs elongated, the eyes shine green with rage, and each teller—s tale involves the biggest, meanest, craftiest, most unkillable bear that ever was. The fear that bears engender leads to either veneration or trivialization, creating visions of all’knowing, invincible phantoms, or “Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!”

The poetry of the tales of such legendary grizzlies as “Old Panface,” “those gentlemen,” and “Uncle Ephraim” overwhelm science and reality. The grizzly was cursed by popular belief in which proof and probity were irrelevant. What was heard around the fire and in the saloon, what was then published and illustrated with stock caricatures became fact, became even science. The eradication of the great bears was so swift and thorough that there was little opportunity to temper their fearsome reputation or dispel the fog of superstition that enveloped them. Most people who called California’s grizzlies ferocious are those who killed or tried to kill one.

Part of humankind’s enduring fascination and connection with bears lies in the similarity between us and them. Bears stand upright and their footprints resemble ours. A skinned bear looks much like a naked person. They are intelligent and independent, possessed of distinct personalities. They exemplify maternal care, discipline, and teaching, and they nurse in a sitting position. They can use a claw like a finger or two claws like chopsticks. They can travel fast and lose their tempers. They are omnivorous, and can kill and eat us, as we can kill and eat them. Resilient, brave, and defiant, they did not go quietly. But that is where the similarity ends. The grizzly can tolerate, adapt to, and coexist with humans, but humankind does not accept competition from brute animals. The power of the bear to fascinate us has spanned the course of human existence, but when we became able, we responded with brutality.

There were 100,000 grizzlies throughout the West before the Americans arrived, but in all of this land, California, where there was an amplitude of food to be found year–round, was grizzly paradise. There was seafood washed up on the beaches, fish in the rivers, berries, bulbs and roots, succulent grasses and clover, carrion, wild grapes and plums, honey stored in caves on the shady side of cliffs, and acorns without end. There were fine daybeds in thick chaparral forests and a climate that didn’t require hibernation. The grizzly is a wonderfully adaptable animal and it has managed to survive all the vicissitudes the planet has thrown its way over the last million years, but in California it did better than adapt — it thrived. The bears grew large and bore healthy offspring, and though grizzlies are not considered sociable animals, there are many tales of the California bears feeding on acorns collegially in herds or “sleuths,” going down to water in groups, peaceably browsing in deep fields of clover together. In this bountiful home, there was little need to compete or to seclude themselves in inhospitable dry places or on intemperate mountaintops. Life was good here. The great bears were amicable lords and ladies of the manor on an abundant estate.

Bears had been residents of California for a million years and then they were gone in sixty, extirpated within little more than the life span of a single bear. Their numbers quickly declined past the point of no return in a storm of destruction which “no being of flesh and bone could withstand.” It is lamentable that the meeting of grizzlies and Americans occurred at a time when the nation was young, violent, and too preoccupied with progress and becoming civilized to notice its losses. Some wrote wistfully after it was too late that they had thought there would always be bears around. Ernest Thompson Seton observed in 1929 that it was a national misfortune that the grizzly had been “left at the mercy of men with no mercy.”

Grizzlies were killed for their meat, gallbladders, oil, and sometimes for their pelts. They were hunted out of fear and the need to protect life and property, for sport, for power, and for target practice. The annihilation of the California grizzlies was synonymous with progress, civilization, control, management, and commerce. They were killed because they had no respect for property, because the country had to be made safe for beef, because they possessed the inherent capability of doing damage. As adaptable as grizzlies are, their defenses did not increase as new weapons were developed for use against them — strychnine, whaling guns, pendulum traps, liquor-laced bait, and other ingenious means of slaughter. A man was puny when standing beside a grizzly, but firearms made him arrogant and foolish. Armies of relentless foes were loaded for bear: sheepherders and miners in the hills, founding fathers in towns along the coast, ranchers and farmers in the valleys. While all animals fight in self–defense, grizzlies were big and could do grievous damage in an argument, and hunters were outraged when the bears fought back. But when the powerful breech–loading “bone–smasher” rifles were invented, the contest was over. “Men do not fight fair against the grizzly,” protested a writer to his fellow hunters in a 1901issue of Field and Stream magazine.

Grizzlies epitomize freedom and untamed nature, and Californians sought to conquer that wildness and its lawlessness. But at the same time, they admired the rugged individualist of the frontier and claimed the virtues of the scrappy miner, the giant redwood, and the grizzly to represent them. And still today, ask any ten people which animal they would choose as a personal totem and half of them will answer “a bear.” We have killed off the obsolete and troublesome hide–and–hair grizzly, but have taken as our own the attributes we find most admirable, reinventing the bear into a pet we can live with.

The absence of the grizzly today evokes the absence of what else is now gone from California — perennial grasslands, vernal pools, free–flowing waterways, riparian woodlands, tule marshes, coastal wetlands, oak savannas, and any number of other extinct, or nearly extinct, native species. The necessity of biodiversity coexistence, and living cooperatively within the limits and balances of a finite planet are all lessons still to be learned. Our exploitable resources have been reduced to possession, and much has been lost in support of our rash and rapid progress. The ultimate California bear story is that of the eradication of the grizzly and its reinvention as the proud and ubiquitous emblem of the state, and one of the morals of this story is how quickly such irrevocable loss can happen.

Bear symbols and bear tales are not the same as bears. But in the stories that follow, we can hear what remains of the brief history of the California grizzly through the voices of the narrators of its demise. Let the stories entertain us but let them also educate us, that the last one percent of the original grizzly bear population in the United States might be given the chance to survive and thrive again.