| 1 | Now extinct, but once common |
Barring a miracle, there are currently no wild grizzly bears roaming the state of Colorado. The last confirmed sighting was 1979, but just as the fur traps and wooden lodges of 19th century mountain men gave way to steel skyscrapers and GPS collars, the bear situation in Colorado was once very different. 500 years ago, the range of the grizzly bear in North America stretched continuously from the western tip of Alaska to the Sonora mountains of Mexico. Colorado, with its rocky canyons, 8 foot deep snowdrifts, and haunted mountaintop hotels, was true bear country. The bears spent decades terrorising European settlers and mountain men, and centuries terrorising native American tribes.
One legend, for example, tells of a stranger who purchased a rifle from Dr G.H. Graves in Canon City in 1872, and headed off into the Collegiate Peaks to make his fortune. This young man was never heard of again, until a few years later, a new posse of hunters ventured into the mountains and came across the intertwined skeletons of a human being and gigantic grizzly bear. Beneath the skeletons lay the rifle from Dr Graves’ shop, with 5 inches of gunpowder below the bullet ready to be fired. Naturally, Graves retrieved his gun for resale, and told the story with relish for years afterwards.
| 2 | Tales |
Unlike the Californian grizzly (ursus arctos californicus), the grizzly bears of Colorado belonged to the standard grizzly subspecies (ursus arctos horribilis). The Rocky mountains and San Juan mountains were their main habitat, and they were once so common that extinction was inconceivable. One mystery which still exists is their size. With no non-stop salmon feasts like in Alaska, the Colorado grizzly was probably more in line with Yellowstone’s bears, being forced to eat berries, roots, and hard to catch deer. Yet legends of colossal 1000 pounders were still common among fur trappers.
One story took place in 1870 by north Boulder Creek in the Colorado front range, near the homestead of prominent politician Emery DeLonde (rusty buildings whose ruins still stand today). Thomas Cameron was hunting grouse with some friends, and as he camped out at midday, his tiny little dog ran ahead and started scratching the dirt while barking loudly. Cameron assumed that he’d flushed out some prey, and dashed to the spot with rifle in hand, but was proven wrong when a huge grizzly bear appeared. He fired a musket ball into its shoulder, and was narrowly saved when his friend Mr Jones appeared and fired a shot into its brain.
The grizzly’s carcass weighed a staggering 900 pounds, whereas the heaviest male Yellowstone grizzly ever recorded was 750 pounds. It was “of immense size, a veritable rocky mountain grizzly”. That said, Californian grizzly hunters were often guilty of exaggerating the size of their kills.
| 3 | Old Mose the monstrous |
Every bear region on Earth has its own legendary bears who loom large over the terrified locals long after they’ve actually died, and Colorado’s version was Old Mose. This was another supposedly gigantic bear, whose name came from his relaxed “Moseying” style of walking. The story kicked off in 1883, when James Radliff was hunting for elk in the Black Mountains. Soon he found himself being mauled by a 1000 to 1200 pound cinnamon-coloured grizzly, injuries which were so severe that he died.
Word of the killer bear spread around Park and Fremont county. Before long, newspapers on the east coast were paying attention, and the legend of Old Mose was officially born. He was believed to have supernatural powers, and was supposedly responsible for the murder of 800 livestock animals over his career, taking down 3 year old bulls with ease while most grizzlies struggled for calves. Old Mose pinched cattle like they were his rightful property. Fences and walls failed to stop him, and concerned cattlemen soon put a $100 pricetag on his head (which was worth far more back then).
As a famous Colorado “outlaw”, bounty hunters flocked from all over America to take Old Mose on. They commonly vanished without a trace, including one James Asher, whose gnawed bones were discovered in Old Mose’s established hunting grounds near Salida and Cañon City.
| 4 | Old Mose part 2 |
One Colorado citizen became more obsessed with taking out Old Mose than anyone – Wharton Pigg. He was the owner of Stirrup ranch, 35 miles outside Cañon City, smack bang in the heart of Old Mose’s territory. By now, it was the early 1900s. Old Mose had been a fixture of newspapers for 20 years and was rumoured to be 50 to 60 years old. Pigg was patient, and caught Old Mose in a cleverly laid trap. But when he arrived, all that was left were bloodstains and two bear toes with visible chew marks.
Some newspapers proposed capturing Old Mose and displaying him in the World Fair, but this was deemed too risky for such a violent bear. In 1904, bear hunter J.W. Anthony rode into Colorado with 15 hunting dogs. Teaming up with Wharton Pigg, the duo spotted Old Mose’s distinctive paw prints, now with only 8 toes. Eight miles into their trek, they found the legendary bear by a gulch. Pigg deployed tactics and circled around the bear with his dogs, while Anthony crept forward. Old Mose stirred, and charged Anthony, who fired 7-8 bullets, with the 7th landing in Old Mose’s brain and stopping him in his tracks just inches in front of Anthony.
His weight was estimated at 750 pounds, a huge bear, and the coroner concluded that while Old Mose’ IQ was no higher than a normal bear, the brain regions connected to taste and smell were unusually well developed, sending his cattle-pinching cunning to dizzying new heights. But one conclusion confused everyone – that Old Mose was estimated at 10-12 years old. He wasn’t 30, and certainly not 50. He couldn’t have been responsible for the death of James Radliff in the early 1880s. Old Mose may have been several different bears. Most unexpectedly, Old Mose was actually female.
| 5 | Sightings fizzle out |
The final death of “Old Mose” (whoever he was) caused a big splash of publicity, but this disguised the stark fact that Colorado’s grizzlies were now in freefall. By the 1940s, they were extinct in northern Colorado, and were solely restricted to the San Juan mountains in the south-west. According to the government, only 12 grizzlies remained.
Experienced trapper Lloyd Andersen, AKA the bear man, shot a 300 pound grizzly sow dead in 1950, but her 2 small cubs escaped. He felled another grizzly in the San Juan mountains in 1951, as did Emil Wail, who pursued a grizzly that had dragged a 12 foot spruce deadfall for 5 miles. In the 1870s, nobody would have batted an eyelid, but by now, grizzly sightings were rare enough that they made Colorado’s newspapers in a big way.
In 1954, a “tiny” dog-sized grizzly was killed by a sheepherder, and some protection came from the government at long last. The government established the Rio Grande-San Juan Grizzly Bear Management Area, but it was dissolved only 10 years later, in 1964. Rumours of shadowy bears were constantly trickling in. Andersen found a grizzly skull and followed a set of pawprints in 1957, while a game warden spotted a mother and 2 cubs in 1956.
Environmentalists were eternally optimistic, but before long, it was 1964 and no bears had been killed since the dog-like grizzly of 1954.
| 6 | The long dormancy |
Lloyd Andersen was still on the case. Most of the 1960s sightings were down to him, and while none were officially confirmed, Andersen’s word was his bond. He reported in 1962 that 20 sheep had been found massacred in the San Juan mountains, and in 1964 he chased a grizzly on horseback for 12 miles. This hulking brown bear turned to snap at his dogs repeatedly, before Andersen cornered it by the rocks and killed it. Then in 1967, Andersen was camping in south-west Colorado (did this guy ever rest?) when he noticed a disturbance with his tethered horses. They were acting strangely, and in the distance, Andersen spotted a mother grizzly with two cubs, working their way up a treeless slope. For half an hour, they sniffed out rats’ nests and played with each other, before disappearing over the saddle.
This wasn’t a lone, aged survivor, it was a fully fledged grizzly family. “No doubt about it. I’ve seen grizzlies before. As a government trapper I trapped seven” Andersen said. That year, several other hunting parties saw a mother and two cubs in the area.
Nevertheless, in the towns of greater Colorado, grizzlies were slowly becoming a whisper, a myth, existing only in the imagination and stories of old grandparents told around the fire. David Petersen was one bear expert who wrote the book “Ghost Grizzlies” in 1998. He described how the Colorado grizzly was in the category of Bigfoot by the late 1960s, a romantic creature of legend. In the war-torn jungles of Vietnam, he would cast his mind to the Rocky Mountains and fantasise about its continued existence.
| 7 | The last grizzly |
There was a glimmer of hope in the early 1970s, when biologists laid out the tempting carcasses of dead horses, and found them dragged away by several miles. In 1975 however, John Torres of the Colorado Wildlife Division made a solemn declaration: “Our results indicate that, for all practical purposes, the grizzly bear is now extirpated from Colorado“.
By 1979, only the most starry-eyed optimists believed that Colorado grizzlies still held out. Any serious environmentalist who claimed that they did would be laughed out of the meeting.
They were about to be proven wrong in a big way.
It was September 23rd, the last day of the bow hunting season, and 46 year old Ed Wiseman was hunting elk in the woods south of Pagosa, close to the New Mexico-Colorado border. He was a classic mountain man, barrel chested with a bushy beard. It was a high cliffed area near the headwaters of the Navoa river, where elk had limited paths for manoeuvre, and so at 5pm, Wiseman separated from his friend Mike Niederee in order to flush some game towards him. Because he’d hunted 100 black bears over his career and grizzlies were supposedly extinct, he wasn’t worried at all. But Wiseman was less calm when a few minutes later, he spotted a 400 pound bear charging him 30 metres away. He had disturbed a sleeping grizzly, and after his bestial yells failed to deter it, the bow was knocked out of his hands.
| 8 | Saved by a fallen arrow |
The feeling of flesh ripping soon dominated everything. Wiseman pulled his legs into a tuck position and shielded his legs, and went deliberately limp.
The bear started with his right leg, before biting his right shoulder and shaking him like a rag doll. Wiseman realised that playing dead wasn’t working, and all he could do was grab a loose arrow, and thank the maker that the head coincidentally happened to be pointing bear-wards. He rolled onto his back and stabbed, praying that the shaft wouldn’t snap. His memory went blank at this point, but gripping the primitive wooden shaft, he remembered following with a second stab into the bear’s shoulder and a third which travelled between the ribs and directly into its chest cavity.
Miraculously, the bear roared and retreated. Colorado’s last grizzly (?) managed to amble 20 to 25 yards away before collapsing. “At that point I knew the attack was over” Wiseman later said. His leg was broken, he had 70 to 85 puncture wounds, and he was in total wilderness. The reliable Niederee heard his shouts and strapped him to his appaloosa horse, but the fading Wiseman could go no further, and sent Niederee ahead to camp where fellow hunters were eating supper. Wiseman expected a helicopter to arrive by midnight, his airborne saviour, but no pilot would risk flying into rugged mountainous terrain in pitch darkness. Instead, Wiseman lay there shivering and mangled until morning. When he reached hospital, his nightmare was just beginning.
| 9 | The rumour era |
Colorado was stunned when it awoke to front page news of a man slaying a long extinct animal with a mere arrow, and the story was too fantastical for the FDA: they investigated Wiseman for 6 months, accusing him of trophy hunting. Only two successful polygraph exams cleared Wiseman’s name, and for years afterwards, he told his tale in detail to sceptical reporters, most of whom were ultimately convinced, including David Petersen.
Meanwhile, the government sprang to action. The Colorado Wildlife Division documented extensive trapping and bear monitoring in 1981 and 1982, with the goal of radio collaring any survivors. They scoured the San Juan mountains for possible cubs or siblings of the “last Colorado grizzly” but failed to find pawprints or fur, let alone living bears. They noted that Wiseman’s bear was 20 years old, with arthritis and abscessed teeth, and probably wouldn’t have survived another winter. The bear’s skull was sent to the Denver Museum of Natural History and the cold, hard stamp of extinct came down on the Colorado grizzly once more.
Doug Peacock, however, disagreed. This legendary outdoorsman later wrote the bestselling memoir The Grizzly Years, and in 1990 he began a 6 year odyssey to find signs of the Colorado grizzly’s survival, sometimes accompanied by Doug Petersen. He spotted signs such as distinct dig marks in 1993, and a photo of a blond-looking bear which could have been a blond-phase black bear, but most experts agreed was a grizzly. A hiker claimed to have been bluff-charged by a huge grizzly in 1995, but when experts rushed in, no signs were found. The Colorado grizzly was back to a being of legend.
| 10 | Where do we stand today? |
As of 2022, 1979 remains the last officially logged and documented evidence for the Colorado grizzly’s survival. Peacock’s quest produced one very credible sighting in 1990 when he found 3 sets of pawprints: two that were clearly a black bear’s, and one with dramatically different claw and toe spacing. Not far away, Peacock interviewed a tall, thin rancher called Dennis Schultz, a well respected figure. He swore to have seen a mother grizzly with three cubs, all with distinct humps. Here’s the killer: Schultz’s ranch was only miles away from where Wiseman’s 1979 grizzly had lived. Experts flocked to the ranch and discovered probable grizzly pawprints in the snow, but because they had since been scuffled by elk tracks and their edges dulled by melting, they couldn’t be 100% sure.
Nevertheless, even bear-mad Doug Petersen concedes that they’re probably finished by now: “If there are any grizzly bears left in Colorado, I hope nobody finds them”. Like the Tasmanian tiger or Ivory billed woodpecker, “sightings” happen every year, including a hunting guide called Mark Jaffe who claimed to have seen one in 2012. Many are put down to unusually large black bears with a rare genetic colour pattern, but the last truly credible sighting happened only in 2006. In the San Isabel National Forest 19 miles east of Aspen, two experienced hunters claimed to have watched a mother grizzly with two cubs through their binoculars, for approximately a minute. Helicopters flew over in search, to no avail, but Tyler Baskfield of the Division of Wildlife declared that the hunters were credible witnesses, with ample bear experience.
The best hope is probably 2 or 3 middle aged grizzlies whose gene pool is so limited that reproduction would be impossible. But the difference to the Californian grizzly bear is that Colorado’s version wasn’t a separate subspecies. There’s no extinction, and therefore, true repopulation is possible. In 2019, the Centre For Biological Diversity began a campaign for exactly that.
Then again, the San Juan mountains are a big place – maybe we won’t need a reintroduction. Stay tuned…
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