| 1 | They were a unique subspecies |
In prehistoric times, before the very first Spanish settlers arrived in the 1600s, California was home to an estimated 100,000 grizzly bears. These weren’t your garden variety grizzlies – they were a genetically isolated subspecies native to California. Their Latin scientific name was Ursus arctos californicus, compared to Ursus arctos horribilus for grizzly bears and Ursus arctos middendorffi for the Alaskan Kodiak bear.
While one biologist estimated in 1918 that North America held 86 different brown bear subspecies, this was eventually whittled down to 5-10, and the Californian grizzly was deemed to be one of the illustrious few. Few photographs were ever taken, but the subspecies had subtle differences such as a larger skull than the average grizzly bear, and a heavier average weight of just under 1000 pounds for males. The fur wasn’t fully blond like a Syrian brown bear, but there was a noticeable lighter tinge.
In prehistoric times, the California grizzly would have competed with the sabre toothed tiger and giant sloth, while gorging on a culinary paradise of berries, honey, nuts, roots and shrubs. According to respected conservationist John Muir in 1910, the Californian grizzly ate everything in sight “except granite”. Deer, pigs, sheep, badgers and gophers were all hearty snacks for the Californian grizzly.
Their human competition was approximately 350,000 Native Americans, divided into 500 Californian subgroups. When European settlers arrived, they couldn’t help but notice that many Californian Indians had lacerated scalps, while others wore thick fur and were worshipped as great heroes for their hunting conquests.
| 2 | The wipeout commenced in 1769 |
The first ever description of a Californian grizzly came in 1602, when a Spanish priest described them as “so large that their feet are a good third of a yard long”. 1769 saw the first Californian grizzly shot dead, by members of the Gaspar de Portola expedition. This spot was later named canyon of the bear, or Canada Del Oso, and in 1772, Father Serra of a local Spanish mission sent his men into the very same canyon to hunt. After days of savage slaughter, they returned with 9000 pounds of grizzly bear meat, which they sent to their fellow missions in San Diego and San Gabriel.
This marked the unofficial start of the Californian grizzly bear’s demise. In those early days of exploration, the Spanish government paid colonists to start old fashioned farmsteads called “ranchos”, but bears were everywhere in California, and would pinch sheep and rip apart fields. Grizzly bear hunters earned a booming living, making coin not only from killing the pesky bears, but selling their valuable pelt, meat and oil. The oil was particularly popular for keeping people’s hair smooth.
The 1849 Gold Rush was another accelerator, with floods of prospectors exploring every nook and cranny of the state and shooting any obstacle that stood in their way. Unthinkably today, Californian grizzly bears were dubbed “vermin” by the locals. It was clear that man and grizzly could not live in harmony.
| 3 | They were once a fact of life |
In newspaper cuttings from the time, there are endless stories of maulings and mishaps involving the Californian grizzly. In January 1858, for example, George Favier and four friends were venturing south from Sonora on a promising gold prospecting mission.
One night, Favier left camp to gather brush for fire, but turning around, he suddenly saw 4 gigantic grizzly bears charge into camp and wipe out 3 of his friends almost instantly. The fourth man fled, but didn’t make it far before death came his way.
Suddenly, the bear was charging towards Favier. Now it was his turn! He managed a quick swipe of his gold pick, before being knocked over himself. Springing up again, fuelled by pure adrenaline, he ran to a nearby tree and climbed for his life. The charging bear managed to nip at his feet and legs, but after a final burst of speed, Favier made it up the tree. Horrified, he watched from the branches as the four bears devoured his friends’ corpses.
The shocked Favier remained in the tree for 2 days and 2 nights, with no food or water to drink, before summoning up the willpower to descend. He then began a desperate trek for 100 miles in the direction he believed was northwards. After 2 days, half-dead and still without food or water, he had practically given up when a wooden cabin came into sight. Favier was nursed back to health, barely alive, but alive nevertheless.
| 4 | The tale of grizzly Adams |
James Capen Adams, AKA Grizzly Adams, was undoubtedly the most famous Californian grizzly hunter of the lot. A New York native, he originally dashed to California in 1849 to capitalise on the gold rush, but soon found that bear-napping was more profitable. Fremont, Lady Washington and Samson were three captured grizzlies who travelled all over California with Adams to perform in parades, theatres, and opera houses.
To some extent, Adams treated his bears with respect. Lady Washington became so loyal that she would cuddle up with Adams at night to keep him warm, and allow him to ride on her back. Adams shot many bears, but never for fun: he always used their hide, fur and meat. Adams formed a particularly tight bond with a bear named Benjamin Franklin, who even saved his life on one ill-fated expedition in 1855 when Adams was charged by an enraged female.
When Ben Franklin died in 1858, the newspaper obituaries were full of mourning, with one titled “Death of a Distinguished Native Californian”. During that same attack, Grizzly Adams’ skull was torn open, lacerating his scalp forever, and a silver dollar sized crater was left in his forehead. He struggled on, but didn’t know when to quit: repeated swipes from bears and even a “trained” monkey meant that the wound kept reopening, eventually leaving his brain exposed.
In 1860, Grizzly Adams died, officially from meningitis. Still he plotted from beyond the grave and returned a whole century later, with a hit TV show starring Dan Haggerty from 1977-78.
| 5 | Monarch the showbiz grizzly |
Grizzly Adams wasn’t the only bear man in showbusiness: hustlers from all over California would steal newborn grizzly cubs and teach them to wrestle for show, or even play musical instruments. Bear battles were a popular weekend attraction, with the bears purposefully enraged with a knife, before duelling an equally angry bull in a makeshift wooden stadium.
Ultimately, no kidnapped Californian grizzly was more famous than Monarch. His story started in 1889, when William Randolph Hearst decided to capture a wild bear as a publicity stunt for his newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner. For months, his efforts failed miserably, as bears were already becoming rare in California, but in October, he was tipped off by experienced outdoorsman Allen Kelly about an injured bear stranded on Mount Gleason in Ventura county.
Monarch put up a ferocious battle, swiping against his captors and gnawing on his chains so relentlessly that he broke several teeth and left a gruesome trail of blood. When ripping the cage failed, he tried digging. When digging failed, he tried charging.
Sadly, it was no use. Monarch spent 22 years in a bear pit exhibit in Woodward’s Garden in San Francisco, and his debut in 1889 brought 20,000 onlookers. His only consolation was a female bear who he had 2 cubs with. Monarch weighed 1125 pounds when he was finally euthanised in 1911, in an arthritic state.
Kelly was later mournful, regretting ever capturing Monarch: “the only creature meditating and planning evil on that mountain… was a man with a gun“.
| 6 | The largest bear of all time |
In 1866, James Lovett shot dead a huge Californian grizzly which had been stalking the cattle of Bear Valley for several weeks. He hoisted it onto a wagon, and drove 8 miles to the house of Col. A.E. Maxcy, who placed it on a cattle scale. The weight was a shocking 2200 pounds, which was declared to be the largest Californian grizzly bear of all time. After skinning the corpse, they discovered an entire pound of lead inside the bear’s skull.
If accurate, this weight would blast through the modern day record for brown bear heaviness, which was a 1656 pound Kodiak bear in Alaska. Supposedly, Maxcy kept the bear’s skull as a souvenir on his desk, before selling it to a museum in Georgia or Tennessee in 1900. No trace of this skull has ever been found. However, Lovell did have a 6 year old daughter in 1866 called Elisabeth. In 1932, aged 72, she returned to the old Bear Valley homestead and gave a 3 page account of the bear attack, pointing out the oak tree where the bear had first charged.
This doesn’t prove that it was 2400 pounds, but fellow ranchman Waldo Breedlove Sr had been told that it was 1950 pounds (although he was only born in 1889), while rancher Clyde James heard from his father that it had only been 1000 pounds. We may never know. Was the Californian grizzly the largest brown bear subspecies ever to walk the Earth? Or was the cattle scale simply broken?
| 7 | Wild rumours were everywhere |
The crazy stories didn’t end there. In 1998, “An Illustrated History of Los Angeles Country, California” mentioned how a Mr John Lang gathered 2 local men in 1873, ventured into the mountains, and shot dead a 2350 pound grizzly bear which had massacred several cattle. However, John Lang wrote his own account for a newspaper at the time, describing a mere 1600 pound grizzly bear which he had shot in 1875, not 1873. Exaggerated rumours were everywhere with the Californian grizzly.
Stories abounded of grizzly bears continuing to fight after being shot with 50 or 60 bullets. In the 1850s, a San Francisco trapsman called George Yount boasted to writer F.H. Day that he usually killed 5 or 6 grizzlies per day. Hunters used to walk the streets of California with grizzly bear claws hanging from chains. As early as the 1840s, grizzly bear bounty hunter George Nidever (he hunted bears, he wasn’t one himself) claimed to have shot 200 over his lifetime. California’s governor Romualdo Pacheco boasted to have felled several hundred, including 8 or 10 in a week once, having apparently lost count.
Gradually, these crazy stories lessened, as Californian grizzlies became more scarce. By 1880, they were gone from the counties of Humbolt, Colusa, San Mateo and Mendocino. They vanished from Monterey County by 1885, and by 1900, the Californian grizzly was no more in Ventura Country.
| 8 | Miner narrowly dodges death |
In 1857, a humble miner named Charles Chubbuck was out hunting when he was startled by a passing partridge. He looked up, and what did he see, but a Californian grizzly bear standing on a rock about 12 feet above. Chubbuck raised his rifle quickly, but a sudden swipe knocked it aside. Knowing that bears are unable to run downhill (a classic folklore myth), he turned and descended 20 feet. But suddenly, 2 more bears emerged from the trees to his side. A paw flung from nowhere and dislocated his hip. Chubbuck couldn’t move – his only option was to play dead.
One minute later, Chubbuck felt hot breath, and a huge set of jaws closed around his head. He could feel the blood pouring, followed by a giant bear tongue licking it off his face. The bear climbed on top of Chubbuck until he heard a sickening crack come from his ribs.
But then the 3 bears started to quarrel among themselves, allowing Chubbuck to grab his trusted Bowie knife. When the bear returned, he jammed the blade hilt-deep between the grizzly’s forelegs. The bear yelped, but immediately resumed its assault. Claws ripped off some of his face, a paw scalped him from behind, and Chubbuck was fading out of consciousness. When he revived, he was in such agony that moving was impossible.
For 8 months, Chubbuck couldn’t even sit up in bed. His face bore the scars for the rest of his life, but 49 years later, he finally recounted his tale in a Massachusetts newspaper.
| 9 | When did they go extinct? |
There’s various stories about precisely when the Californian grizzly met its end. One involves a farmer called Jessi Agnew, who resided near Sequoi National Park and had found several of his calves mutilated. He laid a trap in the forest with a large chunk of beef, and after 3 patient days, Agnew and his fellow cattlemen finally found a large grizzly bear ensnared by its left forepaw.
The raging bear tried to fight back, but was swiftly felled by a well-aimed rifle shot. It was the last of a formerly 100,000 strong species. Or was it? Rumours persisted for years afterwards. There was a sighting in 1924 in the Sierra Madre Mountains, but the pursuing hunters failed to locate a bear, or any evidence.
In 1924, workers in Cedar Grove claimed to have seen a mother bear and two cubs ambling by. The most solid later sighting was in October 1926, when a raid on a Tulare County apple orchard seemed to show all the signs of bear activity. Owner Alfred Hengst teamed up with a seasoned hunter called Jacob Rice, and the two set a trap which ensnared the marauding bear once again. They cooked the bear’s meat and extracted 17 gallons of lard, but most importantly, they sent the skull to the University Of California. As reported in Visalia Times Delta on March 5th 1930, scientific analysis confirmed it to be the skull of the grizzly bear.
After 1926, there were no more confirmed sightings of Californian grizzlies. By 1940, they were surely extinct.
| 10 | People want to reintroduce them |
For 10 years now, the movement to bring back the Californian grizzly has been well and truly underway. The US Fish and Wildlife Service received an official petition back in 2014, only to promptly reject it, trigging the formation of the Californian Grizzly Research Network in 2016. The idea isn’t to drop 100 bears onto the streets of Los Angeles via helicopter – the bears would inhabit the mountainous regions and back valleys.
Proponents point out that California has enough wilderness to sustain 500 healthy grizzly bears. Doubters argue that reintroduction is a Disney-level fantasy and that man and bear cannot simply co-exist. Proponents reply that Eastern Europeans and Alaskans manage it with only occasional mishaps. Doubters point out that the Californian grizzly bear is extinct, and that any bears introduced would have to be normal American grizzlies.
Some have proposed a herculean feat of genetic engineering where grizzly bears would be selectively bred to become Californian grizzlies once again. But one problem is that for such a commonly encountered species, scientists know surprisingly little about the Californian grizzly’s nature relative to other subspecies. The attitude was always shoot first and ask questions later, or run first and ask questions never.
No real progress has been made in the reintroduction quest, and in 2019, a federal grizzly bear specialist ran some tests and concluded that any grizzly comeback would fail due to a lack of core habitat. Nevertheless, the story of the Californian grizzly may not be over yet.
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