The most famous Grizzly Man of all time was undoubtedly Timothy Treadwell, who spent 13 summers in Katmai National Park before being eaten in October 2003 and magically reincarnated on cinema screens. But a second, less famous grizzly man was Charlie Russell. This Canadian also “lived among the bears” from 1996 to 2004, but was generally regarded as far more sensible, and chose Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula as his domain rather than Alaska.

Charlie Russell was born in Alberta in 1941, and spent his formative years working on a ranch. Bears were common in the area, and his views on mankind cooperating with nature were forged from an early age, when he discovered that leaving the ranch’s naturally deceased cows for the bears to eat reduced the amount of living ones that they hunted. To Russell, this was like two magic puzzle pieces fitting together, as it also tided the hungry bears over until summer berry season. Everyone benefitted.

In 1960, his father (a well known conservationist) took him to British Columbia to film a documentary on black bears. Young Charlie noticed how they behaved far less aggressively if they left their rifles at home, thus reducing the need for guns in the first place. “I came to see them as peace-loving animals who just wanted to get along“. Russell spent the next 35 years devoted to bear conservation, and in 1994, he was dispatched by the Great Bear Foundation to Russia’s remote Kamchatka peninsula.

Kamchatka is a true wildlife haven, with 52 active volcanoes, one quarter of the world’s salmon stocks, and an estimated 20,000 Kamchatkan brown bears (Eurasia’s largest subspecies). Charlie’s task was to report on poaching, but from 1994 to 2007, he was drawn into an epic, ever spiralling quest.

In 1997, Russell and his fellow bear enthusiast Maureen Enns decided to build a wooden log cabin on the shores of the remote Kambalnoye Lake. By this point, the friendlier reserve officials were calling them nashy Kanadtsy, or “our Canadians”, and in May 1997, when 3 orphaned bear cubs turned up in the squalid zoo of Yelizovo nearby, the zookeeper turned a blind eye and allowed Russell to “steal” them. He couldn’t afford to feed them anyway, so he loaded the three 15 pounds cubs into boxes for Russell, who then transported them to the cabin by helicopter and named them Chico, Rosie, and Biscuit. They were motherless bears, but Russell was determined to train them up and make them fit for the wild.

The only way to make this happen was to train them in the wild. Their training lasted for 6 years from 1997 to 2002. Russell started by taking the noisy cubs on walks around Kambalnoye Lake, where their keen sense of smell led to them to investigate everything. The cubs loved the sweet taste of the flowers growing on the tundra, and first “incident” was when they developed a taste for the rhododendrons outside Russell’s cabin and devoured them. The next lesson was fishing, which the inventive Russell achieved by placing a salmon carcass under a few inches of water. Before long, the young cubs’ natural instincts awakened, and they were diving right in, on the first step to true bear-dom.

By October, the three cubs weighed 150 pounds. They were becoming drowsier, but neither Charlie Russell nor Maureen Ens could stay the winter. This wasn’t a zoo. Russell was serious about preparing them for survival in the wild, like a strict and loving parent should. So instead, they dug out a makeshift hibernation shelter. This location would be a shield for them, but still give them training for the bear world.

This strict philosophy extended to playtime. The word “no” became paramount. Russell would allow no grabbings, knowing they’d be full sized bears soon. He sometimes wrestled them, but forbade this with Maureen. Sometimes, they’d use a light swat on the nose as a punishment, to mimic a mother bear’s action in the wild.

There was constant amusement with the cubs. One time, when Maureen blew her nose, the cubs fled for hundreds of metres, spooked by loud noises as most bears are. Russell said that “The cubs were so much fun to be around and the joy would just sort of seep into your own bones“. Their birch cabin had its risks, as there were bear temptations like a food box, a large compost heap, and an outhouse (which bears somehow love the scent of). Nevertheless, a flimsy electric perimeter fence with only a few wires was more than enough to keep curious adult males away. A short shop BZZZTT! sent them running. Russell discovered that the fence only needed to be knee high to work, as bears always tend to investigate objects with their nose.

Eventually, it was time to make the bears truly wild. The fencing was lifted, and they abruptly stopped feeding. “Neither of us got a wink of sleep that night,” said Russell later, but this was all part of the bear’s training program.

By 1999, their efforts were receiving international attention. Russell installed a satellite at his birch cabin, so that the whole world could receive updates using the newly formed internet. Russell’s goal was to raise money for antipoaching campaigns.

For decades, Russell had been convinced that bears were misunderstood creatures. He believed that they were more social than believed, that they wanted to get on with mankind, but were driven to aggression by incorrect management. His mission was to prove this principle first hand, and over in Kamchatka, one of his closest bear friends was a 5 year old female. Kambalnoye lake, which Russell’s cabin was very close to, was a fish hub where salmon went to spawn and die. There would commonly be carcasses of dead fish floating in the water, and in the years when salmon supplies were poorer, Russell would assist the female bear in her quest for fish.

Russell would spy the lake with his binoculars to locate a carcass, floating belly up, and throw a rock to indicate the location, or the general direction if it was hundreds of meters away. The female would swim towards the splash zone, and if she veered off course, she would look back and Russell would throw another rock to correct her. Then she’d return to Russell with a salmon hanging from her mouth, before the duo began their team effort anew. Russell said “it was like a dream it was so beautiful.“

Another good friend of Russell’s was Brandy the female bear. Their relationship started when she took to eating pine nuts outside their cabin and sleeping on the path leading to lake Kambalnoye. One day, she left her cubs in the care of Russell. She could sense that he was a peaceful guardian rather than a Uzi-wielding poacher, and trust was so high that over 7 years, he became the nanny to 3 of her litters.

In summer 1999, Russell landed his plane by Kambalnoye lake as normal, and prepared for the joyous reunion with his cubs. But he only found Biscuit and Chico – no Rosie. Where was she? The logical explanation was predation by a male bear, and on a bench by the shores of the lake which was once a hub for playing, they found the mauled body of Rosie.

Nevertheless, Russell had always expected this bear project to have bumps in the road. He was sad, but his spirit was still strong. In 2000, Chico wandered off towards the mountains, which Russell hoped was a male bear’s natural migration to new territory. He wondered whether they’d ever see him again. Now only Biscuit remained. Ens and Russell returned every summer until 2003, and even as an adult, Biscuit would rub noses with Russell and press hand and paw together like the good old days.

Based on the way she’d spent summer 2002, Russell knew for a fact that she’d be having cubs in early 2003. Russell and Ens were overjoyed to be “grandparents”. But when they arrived in 2003, a dark chill hung over the area. There was no sign of Biscuit or her cubs. There was no sign of Brandy the mother bear, or her cubs Lime and Lemon. Something terrible had happened, and the goal was clearly to send a message to Russell. Because when they entered their cabin, they saw a sight so horrific they didn’t want to believe it – a single bear gall bladder nailed to the wooden wall.

Ever since 1997, Russell’s Kamchatka quest had been wider than just raising orphans, and extolling man-bear cooperation. He wanted to stop Kamchatka’s epidemic of bear poaching, which started after the Soviet Union collapsed and restless soldiers returned to impoverished Kamchatka, desperate for a way to feed their families. Bears are poached for their paws and skins, but mainly the gall bladder and its bile, which Traditional Chinese Medicine recommends as a cure-all.

China has its own horrifically cruel bear farms, where a needle forcibly removes the bile, but “wild farmed” gall bladders have a higher prestige, meaning that illegal poachers can net a tidy sum. Russell was disgusted, and as he put it, “It was not fair to teach bears that people were nonthreatening if it meant that they could be killed because of their trust“.

So in 1997, Russell brought over a Kolb ultralight aircraft he had constructed himself in Canada, equipped with a 65HV engine. Flying over Kamchatka, he began to see poaching campsites and snowmobile tracks everywhere, leading towards known bear hotspots. One time, Russell saw a large male bear with its paw trapped in a metallic poaching trap. It howled and bellowed for days, and Russell wished that he had carried a gun to put the bear out of its misery.

Russell even contemplated shooting the poachers himself, but he had better ideas. His greatest anti-poaching coup came in August 1997, when Russell and his close ranger friend Igor Revenko were flying the Kolb, and noticed a Soviet Military ATV ploughing up a hillside. Russell had the guts to swoop the Kolb closer, and when Revenko whipped his camera out, the footage later showed 20 Russian poachers, one of whom was Valery Golovin, the director of South Kamchatka Wildlife Sanctuary!

Surprisingly, Golovin was prosecuted in winter 1997. His main argument was insanity, claiming that he’d experienced the longest blackout in human history: “I can’t imagine how all this happened“, he said. The judge wasn’t convinced, and Golovin was stripped of his posts and fined $9.3 million. Even his immediate boss Sergei Alekseev was fired.

To Russell, this was a beaming source of pride – a real, concrete victory against the dark forces of poaching. In 1999, he cobbled together grants from environmentalists and hired 4 of his own rangers to protect the miles surrounding Kurilskoye Lake, building them a special cabin. Unfortunately, they proved ineffective, and so Russell turned to two Russian special forces operatives returning from the blood-soaked invasion of Chechnya. Starting in 2000, they arrested a spree of caviar poachers (using their skills for good now). In Kamchatka, salmon poaching is an even worse problem then bear poaching. The peninsula is home to 25% of the world’s spawning salmon, but poachers make 10 times the salary of legal fishing employees. Most hunting is for caviar, which sells for $20 a kilo. The poachers gut the fish, rip out the eggs, and throw the carcasses back into the water, but Russell was dealing them a mighty blow.

It was another concrete success, but in the post Soviet era of oligarchs and elites, Russell’s persistence had angered someone, somewhere.

Russell’s troubles began when the tax police announced that he was flying an illegal aircraft in the country. The FSB, the secret police successor to the KGB, was also involved. They claimed that he was flying in a border zone of military importance, and before long, the tabloids were heckling Russell as a good-for-nothing American spy (he was actually Canadian). It ended with his plane’s confiscation in 2003, and that was the year when Russell and Ens returned to find a gall bladder nailed to the wall.

Later investigations confirmed their worst fears: 40 dead brown bears were found nearby, including old friends like Brandy. It was a massacre, but worse, it made no economic sense. By 2003, poaching was so common that the market was flooded with gall bladders. The price had fallen from roughly $1800 per bladder to just $60-$90, yet landing marks proved that the poachers had used a helicopter costing $1200 an hour to pilot. It was a message, pure and simple, a warning not to tamper with the shadowy economic interests of unnamed Russians. Poaching didn’t just benefit the poachers – it benefitted the middlemen of the supply chain. Two former rangers were overheard saying “The Canadians got what they deserved”.

As the freshest snow melted, Russell noticed footprints in the older layer of snow by his cabin. He also found garbage bags and shotgun shells – the poachers had used his cabin as a base. His worst fear was that the bears who he had taught to be friendly to humans had become overly trusting of the poachers who had shot them.

There was one consolation for Russell: after triggering a storm of media interest that couldn’t be ignored, the Russian authorities arrested a group of poachers responsible in December 2003.

In 2004, the heartbroken Russell faced a dilemma. His family was gone, but Kamchatka’s bears had been his mission for the last 10 years. While Maureen Enns decided to move on, and ended their relationship, Russell decided to return: “I will not give in, no matter what happens“. His new focus was on continuing the ranger program he had started, and developing the not-for-profit Kamchatka Bear Fund. And there was a nice bonus: he won his Kolb aircraft back!

In 2005, Russell returned to father 5 more orphaned cubs. In 2006, a BBC documentary called Bear Man Of Kamchatka was released, but by 2007, funding had finally dried up. It cost a lot to fly over Kamchatka constantly and operate the ranch. Plus, he was now 65, and his health wasn’t what it was. He retired to Alberta, Canada, but his quest wasn’t over. He was determined to change people’s views on bears. One time in 2017, he was kayaking in a river near his house, when he heard a cry of “bear”. 

A bear had ransacked a picnic table looking for food, sending people scampering to a car, but when Russell calmly told the bear “no”, in a tone of voice honed by years of bear experience, the bear left peacefully. Russell then spoke to a tearful female ranger who told him that they’d shot a bear the previous day in nearly identical circumstances. He told her to get used to it: “You’re going to have to kill a lot more bears if you keep managing them this way“. She admitted they’d have to listen to him.

Still, Russell was disappointed that he hadn’t changed people’s wider bear attitudes. Ultimately, he died at the age of 76, not from the jaws of a predator bear like Treadwell, but in hospital, from complications during surgery, in May 2018. 

The two shared many interests in common, so it’s not surprising that Charlie Russell got to know Timothy Treadwell, the original grizzly man. The two often had long conversations, but Charlie Russell was under no illusions, and warned his friend regularly to be more careful. Russell himself wasn’t a naïve idealist. An electric fence was installed around the birch cabin to keep out hungry predator bears, and Russell always carried bear spray, even firing it on aggressive adult males a handful of times. Treadwell refused to do so as a matter of principal, stating resolutely that he was in the bear’s domain, not man’s.

In 2003, a few months before Treadwell’s death, Russell’s temper finally boiled over on the phone. He warned that Treadwell’s carelessness could undermine the very cause he cared about, that should he be mauled or eaten one day, the resulting media frenzy would paint brown bears as marauding killers all over again. Hunters would see them as a fair game, like in the bad old days of regional extinctions.

When Treadwell was killed by Kaflia Bay in October 2003, Russell happened to be close enough to fly out there. He later said that “I’ve seen bears like the one that killed Timothy. But I was able to stay away from them“. He argued that adoring terms like “bear whisperer” had caused Treadwell to fall into naivety over the years. His predictions for the wider movement came true when Werner Herzog’s documentary portrayed the Treadwell as a psychologically unstable lunatic. Nevertheless, Russell sympathised with Treadwell, and understood his passion for bear-human cooperation.

The post Charlie Russell: The Less Famous “Grizzly Man” appeared first on Bear Informer.

Before Japan officially absorbed the northern island of Hokkaido, the only place in Japan where brown bears live, it was occupied by the Ainu people. This ethnicity worshipped the bear (and still do), to the extent that one Ainu clan called the Kimun Kamui sanikiri were believed to be descended from them.

The legend states that in very ancient times, a husband and wife lived together, until one day, the man succumbed to a sudden illness. It had previously been decreed by Ainu elders that this woman would bear a healthy baby boy.

Months later, she was on the verge of childbirth. Surely she had taken a new husband, inquired villagers. The widow explained that a man dressed in black clothing had appeared in her hut. “O, woman, I have a word to say to you, so please pay attention“, the mysterious figure said. The man announced that he was a god of the mountains, a bear who had taken human form. Her had taken pity on her, and decided to provide her earthly self with a son from his own godly bloodline. When he was born, she would no longer be lonely, and the son would provide her with great riches.

Immediately after this speech, the man left. The widow’s son went on to become a legendary hunter, who amassed great fame, wealth and respect in Hokkaido. Consequently, he had many children, and today, a particularly high proportion of the mountain-dwelling Ainu are believed to be bear people.

The Sami are the native people of northern Sweden, Norway and Finland, a distinct ethnic group who may have evolved in Lapland when encroaching glaciers separated them. Until the 17th century when Christianity forcibly took over, the Sami (formerly called Laplanders) had an intricate shamanic culture, and bears were at the forefront of it.

All animals were considered to have their own indecipherable languages and understand human actions clearly, but bears were viewed as the most powerful beasts of the animal world, whose knowledge men wished to share, while simultaneously staying in good relations. Bears were always asked for forgiveness after being slain, and it was essential that each stage of a hunting ceremony was carried out in order to enable the bear’s majestic rebirth.

Like the Finns, speaking the bear’s true name was taboo among the Finns. Archaeological evidence suggests that Sami bear hunters had their own special language. The Sami people were famous for their intricately carved ceremonial drums, and bears were commonly painted on them using alder sap. The drum’s rim would have a life-sized, normal bear in the Earth realm, while on the skin, a gigantic “heavenly bear” would be painted.

These shaman drums were vital for hunting – one beat would offer clairvoyance as to where a bear was hibernating in the winter snows, and another beat in spring would tell the gathering hunters the odds of success. The western sami meanwhile, believed that bears had sexual intentions towards women, and banned them from hunting ceremonies.

Artio is one of the most mysterious bear deities. What’s confirmed is that in 1832, during the excavation of a new garden for a clergy house in Bern, a mysterious chest was unearthed. It contained 6 figurines – a lar (a guardian deity), and the gods and goddesses Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, and Naria. The sixth figurine was of a woman sitting on a throne facing a large, wise-looking bear with a twisting leafless tree behind it, and the inscription revealed that this was an ancient celtic bear god called Artio.

Soon, connections were made to bear figurines found in Celtic graves across Europe, including figures discovered during the restoration of Ireland’s Armagh Cathedral in 1840. Mentions of Artio have also been found in Daun and Stockstadt in Germany, and Weilerback in Luxembourg.

It’s believed that Artio was worshipped as the goddess of abundance and transformation. She was pictured as a human draped in bear skin, but could transform into a real bear at will. She hibernated during the winter, and awoke during spring to watch over the annual re-advancement of nature. Her name comes from the Gaulish word for bear, Artos.

According to markings on the Naria figurine’s pedestal, the collection was created in the second century AD. It was originally stored in a Roman temple on the river Aar, but locked up in a chest and moved to a secret building for safekeeping, probably to safeguard it from war. The figurines lay hidden and forgotten in its ruins for 1500 years.

In 2015, a collision of worlds took place, as the Ktunaxa First Nation peoples of Canada fought a plan by Glacier Resorts to build a colossal new ski resort. The plan had been simmering away since 1991, and aimed to build chairlifts and pistes in Jumbo Valley, a prime piece of grizzly bear habitat in British Columbia.

Chief Jason Louie pledged to blockade the resort and go to jail, and on October 5th 2015 the Ktuzana took their case to the Supreme court of Canada. Yet the religious freedom argument didn’t pass muster and in 2017, the ski resort was given the green light.

Why the controversy? Jumbo Valley is known to Ktunaxa as Qat-Muk, and is believed to be home to the Great Bear Spirit. Supposedly, Qatmuk is the place where this spirit is born, heals itself, and goes to die, in a neverending cycle

. Through ceremonial dancing, the Ktunaxa are able to contact the Great Bear Spirit for spiritual guidance and protection, as the Qatmak is the place where grizzly bears go to dance themselves. It is the sacred duty of the Ktunaxa to protect the Qat’Muk, and one ceremony involves singing songs and laying down tobacco as a tribute.

Glacier Resorts argued deception, that the Great Bear spirit had only been mentioned in 2010 after 20 years of legal wrangles. Ktunaxa representatives replied that this secrecy was deliberate, that the First Nations peoples have long kept their traditions close to their chest, due to colonialist efforts to stamp them out.

The Viking berserkers were some of the most brutal and insane warriors to ever walk the Earth. They were famed for running into battle with no regard for their own safety, screaming incoherently and foaming at the mouth. They would gnaw the iron rims of their shields, and for a few minutes at the peak of their frenzy, become seemingly immune to fire and steel. One popular theory is that berserkers were high on hallucinogenic fly agaric mushrooms, which they ate through urine after feeding them to reindeer to remove the toxins.

But according to archaeological evidence, there was a widespread belief in Norse culture that berserkers had shamanic powers, drawing their strength directly from the bear. The most hardened berserkers could apparently transform into a half-bear man during the heat of battle.

Berserkers that died in battle were commonly laid on bear skins for their funeral rites. One Viking legend speaks of the beserker Bödvar Bjarki, who transformed into a bear to do battle with the legendary Danish king Hrólfr Kraki, taking out legions of guards with his forepaws.

The very name berserker may originate from bears – Viking scholars have long debated whether it translates to “bare shirt” or “bear shirt”, hinting that they drew their berserker powers from coats made of bear fur. It’s said that the bear skin caps worn by the guards of Buckingham palace and Danish monarchs are remnants of this glorious warrior tradition – perhaps it’s time for a revival?

The ancient, pre-Christian Finnish tribes were banned from even speaking the names of bears, in case a jinx was placed on their head. Bears were believed to have psychic mind reading powers and would sense an approaching hunter’s presence. Instead, Finnish tribes called them honey-hand (mesikämmen), karhu (rough fir), or one of 100 other names Finnish archaeologists have discovered. Bears were the child of forest god Mielikki and her husband Tapio, who guided the bear into becoming the most feared and respected of forest animals, and had the ability to shapeshift into bears themselves.

Winter hibernation was said to be proof of a bear’s magical powers. Consequently, hunting rituals always took place immediately afterwards in spring, followed by an elaborate funeral feast to encourage the bear’s reincarnation in the forest.

Men would drink blood from the bear’s skull to gain its wisdom, and a chosen groom and bride would act out a ceremonial wedding, to ensure future marital success. The bear’s spirit would be reassured that it was an “honoured guest” rather than a victim.

The skull was then placed on a sacred tree called a kallohonka, always facing east, which would later be worshipped as a totem. To avoid angering the bear’s spirit, its bones were buried at the tree’s base, in a fully-fledged funeral ceremony. Its teeth were removed to access their supposed magical properties, and in the iron age, pendants of bear teeth were a common sight around women’s waists; these were believed to improve fertility.

According to Korean legend, bears were involved in the very foundation of the Korean empire. In ancient times, there was a sky-god called Hwanin who had a dissatisfied son called Hwanung. He had grown restless and bored with playing divine ruler in the clouds, and after many heated arguments with his father, Hwanin permitted him to depart for the valleys and mountains of Earth, with 3000 followers in tow.

Hwanung landed on a sandalwood tree on Baekdu Mountain near the border with China, and soon met a tiger and bear who lived in a nearby cave, who began worshipping him. However, these animals strongly desired to be human, and Hwanung promised to fulfil their wishes, on one condition – if they mediated in a cave for 100 days, and ate nothing but divine mugwort and garlic.

On the 20th day, the tiger lost patience, gave up the challenge, and left the cave. But the bear stayed the course, and on day 21, it was transformed into a beautiful woman called Ungnyeo.

Her name translated to “bear-woman”, and she showed her appreciation to her creator Hwanung with gifts and prayers. Soon, however, she was afflicted with loneliness, desperate for a child. Hwanung took pity on his creation and took her hand in marriage, and in the decades to come, their son went on to found ancient Chosun, the first kingdom of Korea, which lasted from 2333 BC- 676 AD.

By the 20th century, Russia had so many bear worshipping ceremonies that the Soviet Union vowed to eradicate them, so that all Russians could worship the bushy beard of Lenin instead. The Nivkh are an ethnic group in far-east Siberia, and their bear ceremony was similar to the Ainu, similar enough that a secret connection may exist.

A bear cub was taken from its mother and raised for 3 years as one of the tribe. In January and February, delegations of allied tribes from all over the Siberian expanses would visit, and the first stage involved mat’ narkh, ritual meals in the forest which would last for 18 days.

Then the bear would be walked around the village by its keeper, while everyone watched on in ceremonial costumes. Under the guidance of a shaman called a ch’am, the bear would be slaughtered by a volley of arrows and sent back to the spirit world. Celebrational games would last for days, each followed by ritual meals involving distinct bear body parts prepared according to traditional recipes. Only adults were permitted to eat the bear’s heart, head and fat from the belly.

The skull was lain in a temple in the bear keeper’s house, alongside previously sacrificed bears. In one last act of the ritual, carefully selected dogs were beheaded, and their skulls placed around the keeper’s house. Bears were considered to be earthly embodiments of the Nivkh’s ancestors, and despite the Soviet pressure, the ceremonies survived until the 1960s.

Even before the ancient Celts, it’s believed that endless generations of cavemen worshipped bears as deities, both cave bears and brown bears. In caves across Europe, the arrangement of bears bones seems far too precise and artistic to be solely from casually deposited hunting remains.

One example is Veternica Cave near Zagreb, where 6 bear skulls were found placed side by side. They were facing the cave’s entrance, and several other skulls had markings and a strange smoothness as though cavemen had polished them ritualistically.

Caverne de Furtins in France also has skulls with deliberate positioning, and the famous Chauvet Cave is on a whole other level. This archaeological cave contains 200 bear skulls. Its walls are covered with bear paintings (alongside bison and wolves) and while many bear bones lie separated in jumbled bone piles, some have clearly been moved. One near complete skeleton sits on a flat, table-like boulder which protrudes 70cm above the cave floor, not far from the now collapsed cave entrance. Perhaps cavemen kneeled in front of this platform?

The debate over the bear cult is fierce. Sceptics argue that water erosion could have created the unusual looking skeleton placements, and that Neanderthal and homo sapiens remains found outside of caves have very few bear-related trinkets. However, given how widespread bear cults were until 1900, the chances that superstitious cavemen never worshipped them must be low. Anything is possible – perhaps they believed that removing a bear from its natural cave habitat was a violation of the divine.

The Tunguz are an ethnic group spread around the mid-east of Siberia, united by speaking Tungusic languages. In 1989, they numbered around 65,000, most of whom are fascinated by the divine nature of bears. The Great Bear is believed to have been the creator of the world, and the one who blessed mankind with fire.

One tale speaks of how the Great Bear hunted down his enemy, a reindeer or moose who had stolen the sun from Earth, and in doing so gave light back to the people. Another Tungusic belief was to never eat a bear’s eyes. Instead, the head would be cut off and the eyes removed carefully, touching them with neither a knife nor fingernails. Then they would be wrapped in grass or birch bark and be placed high up in a forest tree, hoping that the bear’s eyes would be illuminated by the first rays of the rising sun. These eyes were called “ōsīkta”, or stars.

Every year, a Bear Festival would be held with a secret dish called the seven, a mixture of rendered bear fat with finely chopped bear meat. Participants were forced to swallow this seven without making contact with their teeth, otherwise they would go blind.

According to the Tunguz, the moose originated from bears, growing out of its fur. Like with the Nvikh, the Soviets tried and mostly succeeded in crushing these ancient beliefs.

The post 10 Bear Cults And Ancient Beliefs appeared first on Bear Informer.

Glacier Park is one of the most gorgeous environmental havens in the USA. It’s not a true wilderness, seeing as there’s wooden lodges and garbage cans all over the park, but it’s home to 130 lakes, thousands of wild plant species, and hundreds of different animals. The park is located in Montana, on the US-Canadian border, and is well known for bears, both black bears and brown.

Deaths are rare, with the most recent being a horribly unlucky cyclist who turned round a bend in 2016 and crashed right into a mother grizzly and cubs. In fact, after its foundation in 1912, there wasn’t a single grizzly bear attack until one terrible day in August 1967, which changed America’s perception of bears forever.

The stormclouds began to gather one week earlier, when a hungry bear chased a group of Girl Scouts and tried to pinch their lunch. This bear had been a troublemaker since well before August 12th arrived, spending long, intimate hours with the garbage pile outside Kelly’s Camp, a private lodge close to Lake MacDonald. According to Glacier Park ranger David Shea: “we knew there was something not quite right with it“. The park management didn’t think to euthanise the grizzly, whereas according to Shea, it would be a goner nowadays. It was an oversight which was to have fatal consequences.

19 year old Julie Helgesen was a resident of Albert Lea, Minnesota, a summer employee of East Glacier Park Lodge who worked in the laundry. 18 year old Roy Ducat also worked there as a busboy, and eventually the two became a couple. Their adventures took them 20 miles east of the fateful Trout Lake, which became important several hours later.

They started in Logan Pass, before ascending to a spot 1/4 mile away from Granite Park Chalet, a classical wooden chalet perched on a mountainside like a still from the Sound Of Music, with sweeping glacial valleys all around. They erected their tents at 7pm, ate their packed dinners and watched the sun set. The young lovebirds slept in the same sleeping bag, within touching distance of a lodge packed with summer guests.

Unfortunately, they accidentally chose the trail which bears had recently established for their garbage foraging missions. Employees at Granite Park Chalet had begged them not to, according to ranger Shea, but the young couple didn’t listen.

At 4pm, Ducat was awakened when Helgeson whispered to him that a bear was outside their tent. The grizzly flushed them out of their sleeping bags, and minutes later, it had pounced on Helgeson, before suddenly switching focus to Ducat. He was being mauled by an onslaught of bear paws, before his incredible calmness in playing dead paid off and the bear gave up. But now, it switched its focus to Helgeson.

Ducat fled the tent to search for ranger assistance, as Helgesen’s screams echoed around the forest. “Someone help us”, she cried as the bear dragged her off. When Ducat reached Granite Park Chalet with a badly mangled arm, one ranger was overly cautious, worried about endangering more lives. They didn’t initiate the search for Helgeson until 2 hours later, once Ducat was whisked off to hospital and a rifleman had arrived.

It took a while to find her, but after following a trail of blood downhill, Helgeson’s mangled body was discovered, 120 metres away from the tent and face down. The bear had dragged her into the woods. Incredibly, she was alive, but she had lost pints of blood and was in severe shock. The only words she could murmur were “it hurts”. After moving her to Granite Park Chalet at 3:36am, the rangers summoned a rescue helicopter to airlift Helgeson to the hospital 40 miles away in Kalispell. But at 4:12am, minutes before the helicopter arrived, Julie Helgeson died on a makeshift operating table. A doctor declared the original cause of death to be throat and lung punctures.

It was the first death due to grizzly assault in Glacier Park’s history, but the second was to happen unimaginably quickly.

Michelle Koons was another 19 year old girl, a resident of San Diego, and another summer employee of Glacier National Park, this time in the gift shop. On August 12th, she was hiking a steep, 8 mile trail to reach Trout Lake with her fellow employees Paul Dunn, Ray Noseck, Ron Noseck, and Denise Huckle. Fellow hikers warned her about a gnarly, hungry grizzly stalking the nearby area, but Koons wasn’t phased, nor were her friends. After all, Glacier National Park had opened in 1910, and by 1967, there had been no serious incidents involving a brown bear. Michelle had also brought her pet dog Squirt, which was the first error, seeing as dogs were banned in Glacier Park even then.

At 8pm, a hungry, emaciated bear came sniffing into camp as predicted. The 5 friends fled into the woods, and waited patiently while the grizzly stole the fresh fish and hotdogs they were frying. The bear then returned to its log jam hideout, along with one of their backpacks. The 5 friends moved their campsite closer to Trout Lake and snacked on cookies instead. Then they fell asleep by the shore, with their sleeping bags surrounding a central fireplace, which they’d decided to light to keep the bear away.

The night of August 12th to 13th was an unusually stormy one, with forks of lighting striking down to a shattering noise in all corners of the park. At 4:30am, Denise Huckle startled awake. Instead of peace and quiet, she found the same gnarly bear tugging at her sleeping bag.

She was close enough to see the bear’s hungry face in the darkness, and feel its hot, humid breath. She decided to play dead, and miraculously, the bear was fooled and left her. But when Michelle Koons woke up, she couldn’t keep so calm. She started screaming the moment she laid eyes on the bear.

The spooked grizzly grew angrier and angrier, and started taking mad swipes, causing Dunn, Huckle and the Noseck brothers to scramble out of the tent and climb up some nearby trees as fast as possible. But the zipper on Koons’ sleeping bag was stuck. Her friends shouted at her to get moving, but instead, Koons screamed that the bear was ripping her arm off.

The last they heard of Koons were moans of “Oh my God, I’m dead”. Dunn reported later that he’d witnessed the bear dragging Koons away into the woods. Terrified, they remained in their tree sanctuaries until dawn, before daring to climb down.

Bursting into Lake MacDonald cabin at 8am, they found the helping hand of ranger Leonard Landa. The words spilled out in a blur that Landa could barely understand, but he finally got the gist, and interjected that the attack had taken place by Granite Chalet, not Trout Lake. No, this was a second attack, they said. Landa couldn’t believe it. Two attacks in one night – what were the odds?

After phoning headquarters, Landa asked two of the hikers to come with them for guidance. They reached the campsite by 10am, and started yelling for Koons, but ranger Landa had already found a piece of flesh. This led to a trail of blood, and finally the dead body of Michelle Koons, 91 metres away from the campsite.

Not far away, the same thing happened when a sleepy ranger Gildart received a radio call summoning him to Trout Lake. The bear attack happened at Granite Lake, he responded, before hearing the unbelievable news of the second mauling. After reaching Landa, he and Gildart joined forces and loaded Koons into a body bag which a helicopter had dropped off.

By the next morning, August 13th, the park authorities had ordered the shooting of any grizzly bears in the immediate vicinity of Granite Lake Chalet.

Gildart and Landa rose to action immediately. Firstly, they rounded up the remaining hikers and gave them an armed escort out of the park. On August 13th, they killed two aggressive bears which they knew were familiarised with human contact after garbage rustling, but found no evidence that they were the culprits.

Next, they tried dropping cans of fish in Arrow Lake, but after waiting several hours, the bear refused to appear. They retired to Arrow Lake shelter for the night, but when Gildart awakened at 5:30am, he stepped outside for a moment and saw a female grizzly in the faint light of dawn. It was 40 feet away, standing next to a ranger’s office. It was peering out over a lake, but Gildart felt a sharp sense that they were being hunted.

Suddenly, the bear charged. Gildart and Landa let off a volley of bullets, stopping the bear mid-charge, killing it instantly. A forensic expert arrived, who sliced open the bear’s stomach, causing a ball of blond hair to spill out onto the forest floor. It was all the evidence they needed.

Something else that Gildart and Landa noticed was that the slain bear had glass embedded in its gums. Because it couldn’t chew properly, the female bear was agonisingly thin, just 200 pounds. This had obviously forced it into an unusually aggressive state, and soon, it became apparent that poor garbage management was the real villain of the piece.

For a while, the dazzling lightning storm of August 12th was blamed, having spooked the bears and made them hyperaggressive. Raging wildfires that summer were also blamed, pushing the bears into closer contact with people, particularly given that 20 fires had started on August 11th alone. But the glass in the killer bear’s gums was the jolt that people needed.

Until 1967, Glacier Park had garbage control rules that would be astonishingly lax today. Open dumps were common, and visitors openly tossed food to the bears. Why would they be concerned, when bears hadn’t attacked anyone in Glacier Park’s 50 year history? Supposedly, Glacier Park’s bear management plan was only 3 pages long in 1969, compared to a whopping 50 pages in 2019. The park had known for years that feeding grizzlies garbage was a highway to disaster, but action was kicked down the road.

On August 9th 1967, 4 rangers including Shea and Gildart had visited the Granite Park Chalet, and quickly noticed 5 bears feeding on garbage strewn everywhere. Ranger Shea later said: “it was basically an incident waiting to happen. Four days later, it did“.

On the evening before Helgesen’s death, for example, the residents of the Granite Park Chalet had enticed the local grizzly bears to come say hello with old ham joints, pouring out of the chalet after interrupting a group singalong of “row, row, row your boat”. Shea believed that the Chalet was trying to fulfil an advertisement of guaranteed grizzly sightings, and he quickly lodged a written complaint, but nothing happened.

Koons and Helgeson weren’t coming back, but their deaths weren’t in vain. Almost immediately after the attack, the hero rangers Shea and Gildart were dispatched to begin a new mission: picking up garbage. A hard rule was established that anyone bringing food into Glacier National Park had to bring their garbage out with them. Several days later, Gildart left the park by helicopter with 17 burlap sacks full of garbage.

Most importantly, open waste dumps were completely banned, to eliminate the attraction to sniffing, starving bears. Rangers even hunted down individual hikers and ordered them to leave if they were making a mess. Information signposts were nailed in, and bear-proof trash cans became common. The old upturn and gorge method wouldn’t work on these cans. Essentially, Glacier Park adopted a “leave no trace” philosophy.

Ultimately, most agree that the events of August 1967 helped grizzlies in the long run. At first, the cleanliness caused the bears of Glacier Park to starve, as they had been accustomed to free, effortless food for years. Two cubs were shot one year later because they couldn’t keep away from human civilisation – these were the children of one of the innocent bears shot dead on August 13th. Over time though, with iron garbage discipline from rangers, the Glacier Park bears reverted to their natural hunting and scavenging.

For months afterwards, storied appeared in national newspapers portraying grizzly bears as savage, lumbering beasts who cared only about human flesh and nothing else. Some overzealous park officials even called for the grizzly bear’s extinction. Ranger Gildart admits to having been angry at bears for years afterwards, before realising that they were only pushed to savagery by hard circumstances.

Jack Olsen published the definitive account in a three part Sports Illustrated special, before upgrading to a full length book called Night Of The Grizzlies in 1969, the original source of the name. He argued that brown bears were doomed to be pushed back to Canada, and then Alaska, where “all the goodwill and understanding in the world…will not alter his eventual fate“.

A weirder consequence was a new urban legend – that bears are attracted to the scent of menstruating women. One of the victims was indeed menstruating, while the other was carrying tampons. For years, female rangers were even banned from Yellowstone Park while menstruating, and government pamphlets warned hikers of the risk in eye-catching terms. As of 2021 though, there’s no evidence to support the theory, and it’s generally laughed at.

The final word is that Glacier Park boasts a healthy 300 grizzly bears as of 2022. Meanwhile, only 10 grizzly-related deaths have happened there since 1910, out of hundreds of thousands of overall visitors.

The post Night Of The Grizzlies (1967): 10 Facts appeared first on Bear Informer.

The best known bear film of recent years is undoubtedly The Revenant (2015), which claims to be based off the true story of 1820s fur trapper Hugh Glass, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. Anyone who has heard of this film will know that it features a gruesome scene where DiCaprio is mauled by the best trained CGI grizzly bear of all time. His injuries are so severe that his fur trapper colleagues leave him for dead, forcing DiCaprio to crawl across 200 miles of American wilderness and seek bloody revenge.

The shoot was gruelling, with director Alejandro Iñárritu refusing to use green screen for location shots and instead marching the entire crew out into temperatures of -25C for weeks. To get into part, Leonardo DiCaprio claims to have eaten raw bison liver and slept inside an animal carcass. It paid off, as he finally won his first Oscar for best lead actor. But how much of the story is accurate, and what about the bear sections specifically?

The film invented several details such as Hugh Glass having a half Pawnee son, from a marriage to a Native American. In reality, he probably had no children. One almost guaranteed myth is a second grizzly bear arriving and licking the maggots from Glass’ open wounds, probably caused by the story changing hands too many times over the centuries. There are almost no written records, but here’s the real story as best we know it…

The early life of Hugh Glass is almost a complete mystery. Compared to Grizzly Adams, for example, we don’t even know where Hugh Glass was born, with two popular theories being Scotland and Philadelphia – perhaps both at some point on the timeline. Crazy tales also exist that Hugh Glass spent two years as the captive of notorious pirate Jean Lafitte. He supposedly escaped by jumping ship near Galveston, Texas and swimming to shore, after which he fell into the clutches of the Pawnee tribe. He only escaped being burnt alive when he offered the village elder a handful of vermilion, after which the Pawnees taught him every fur trapper skill he knew.

The official story starts when Hugh Glass signs up to the St Louis hunting company in 1823, run by William Henry Ashley and Major Andrew Henry. In May, he left on an expedition set to last the entire summer, led by Major Henry and starting with 27 men.

At nearly 40 or just over 40, Glass was among the oldest trappers, and had mild loner tendencies, often walking by himself. However, he was respected as wise and experienced by his fellows, such as 19 year old Jim Bridger, who was only on his second trapping season. Two slightly older fur trappers were John S. Fitzgerald and Moses Harris. The party sailed down the Missouri river searching for valuable beaver streams, but the year was 1823, and Glass knew that they were sailing into a lion’s den of ever-spiralling Native American warfare.

The first trouble for Glass’ company came on June 2nd. As they sailed down the Missouri river, a war party of Arikara (also known as Ree) attacked and killed 17 of their party, forcing them from their boats. Glass himself took a nasty shot to the thigh. As the dying men were nursed back to health, Glass focussed on young John Gardner, who relayed his dying wishes to him.

In one of the few pieces of writing ever discovered by Glass, he wrote a letter to Gardner’s parents, starting by saying “My painful duty it is to tell you of the deth of y[ou]r son” and finishing with “a young man of our company made a powerful prayer wh[ich] moved us all greatly and I am persuaded John died in peace…’. The articulate letter proved that Glass was literate and was educated somewhere in his murky past.

From then on, it was constant vigilance. Friendly tribes like the Mandans appeared to be turning against the Europeans, and one night these warriors slaughtered two more of the party. Major Henry cursed that US army forces had promised to punish the Arikara for the June 2nd attack, but done nothing about it. Glass and his trapper party were forced to avoid the river and march through the wild Grand River valley. Major Henry ordered the party to stay in tight formation and only allowed 2 hunters to leave the pack at once. One fateful night in mid August, it was Hugh Glass’ turn.

Precisely what happened during the legendary bear attack is a mystery. Whether Glass fought back, played dead, tried to climb a tree or called for help will never be known. Glass might have been jumped from the undergrowth, or he might have stayed calm for the first minute only to suddenly be charged from 20 metres away. Nevertheless, the common story is that he stumbled upon a mother with cubs, a she-grizzly with 3 inch claws. After a life or death struggle, the bear was felled with one bullet, then two, and then a dozen.

When Major Henry and company dragged Glass clear, he was a ragged and torn mess of a man. He throat was torn at the centre, and with each choking breath Glass took, a bubble of blood would grow and pop. Everything was shredded, his chest, his face, his arm, his scalp. He couldn’t stand. They had no idea that an epic story of survival which would echo through the centuries was beginning before their very eyes.

Glass was alive, but for how much longer? At first, Major Henry and company tried to help Glass. They tore strips from their clothing, bandaged his wounds, and settled down to sleep, assuming Glass would be dead in the morning. But when the sun rose, he was still kicking. So they crafted a makeshift stretcher out of branches and carried Glass for 2 days, covering only minimal distance, a story which could probably cover pages if only we had more details.

At the fork of the Grand River in modern day South Dakota, under a canopy of grove trees near a small stream, Major Henry decided that it was time to face the facts. They were smack bang in the heart of Indian country and Glass was fading in and out of consciousness. He was a feverish wreck and if they maintained their sluggish pace, Henry would probably lose more men to arrows. He announced to the trappers that they would leave Glass by the stream, so that he could recover and follow under his own power, but the implication was grim: they were leaving him for dead.

Henry then made a tantalising promise: a hefty financial bonus for anyone who would stay and bury Glass according to Christian traditions, equivalent to several months of wages. Allen and Moses Harris had no desire to sit around in Arikawa country singing songs, but younger John Bridger, with a sister to support, reluctantly volunteered, as did John G Fitzgerald.

As Major Henry and company faded into the distance, shrinking into dots, Fitzgerald looked at his quarry. Glass was wheezing, flicking in and out of consciousness, clinging to life. The duo slept for two nights, but to Fitzgerald’s dismay, Glass was sure taking his time about dying. If watches were invented in 1823, then Fitzgerald would have been checking his every minute. Every hour, catching up with Major Henry would become harder. More bears could be out there prowling, hungry for flesh. That was when the betrayal happened.

As the pale Hugh Glass lay with a cold sweat on his forehead, surrounded by flies, Fitzgerald turned to Bridger and suggested that his death was inevitable and that they might as well leave now. The younger, more compassionate Bridger was reluctant, but saw sense after Fitzgerald dangled the threat of Indian night raids over his head. The fear of the unknown was too strong, but the duo had a problem. They’d been left with strict instructions to afford Glass a proper Christian burial, and consequently, their precious bonuses were at stake. All evidence had to be cleared, and Fitzgerald cleverly reasoned that a dead man would never be buried with his valuable equipment in the Grand River wildlands.

And so, as Hugh Glass lay half-dead, in a feverish dream world, Fitzgerald and the reluctant Bridger stripped him of everything he had. Glass’ protectors took his knife, his flint, his steel, his powder, leaving only his blood-stained clothes. To add insult to injury, Fitzgerald picked up Glass’ trusted rifle, a prized possession of his, eyeing it with admiration.

The duo moved the soon-to-be corpse to within touching distance of drinking water. With a last glance back, Fitzgerald and Bridger abandoned Glass to the wilderness. What they didn’t notice was the spark of undying determination and survival in the man’s eye.

Somehow, as fever raged and blood poured from his wounds, Glass’s warped mind registered what had happened. He summoned up hidden reserves of energy from deep inside himself, and continued to cling to life. Driven purely by will and the sense of ultimate betrayal, his first move was to tentatively grab some buffaloberries from a bush, and force them down his mangled throat with the help of water.

His next opportunity came when a rattlesnake slithered past, which Glass quickly hunted with a clubbing from a nearby rock. He skinned the serpent and divided the meat into thin enough slices to swallow. Slowly, the lucid moments began to outweigh the dream-like fog, and Glass realised that he had to get moving. He stood up, and fell back down again. His legs were crippled. So Glass crawled, using his one good arm and one good leg. He followed the river downstream, aiming for the lofty goal of Fort Kiowa, a French fur post. At first, one yard felt like an accomplishment, before his body conked out. But Glass couldn’t die – he had to get his rifle back first.

Like a zombie bite victim, Glass slowly became more like a bear himself. When he crawled upon a buffalo carcass, he cracked open the bones to eat the sweet marrow inside. He stole eggs from birds nests, and hid in the bushes while a wolf pack circled and hunted a calf. Waiting for his opportunity, he flushed the barking wolves away and scavenged the heart, guts and liver which they had ignored.

Glass was getting stronger, but the fur post was 250 miles away. Meanwhile, the savage wounds on his back were now infested with maggots (and a bear didn’t turn up and lick it clean). Yet his legs were stronger, and one day, Glass proudly rose to his feet again. He was through the worst, but for all he knew, another bear mauling or scalping by Indians was in his future. The sense of betrayal burned. Fitzgerald was out there somewhere.

Glass next had a stroke of luck, meeting a group of Sioux by the Missouri river who took pity on him. The friendly natives cleaned his back wound, and soon, Glass had triumphantly reached his goal of Fort Sioux. There he met a rival French hunting party which was heading to the Mandan villages to re-establish a trade route.

Unbelievably, the half-dead Glass signed up. He was handed a new rifle, which was nice and all, but deep down, he wanted his old rifle back, and he knew where it was. The French were headed close to Fort Henry, the ultimate goal of Major Henry’s company, so Glass opted to tag along. Yet in mid-October 1923, only two men stepped off the boat and reached the friendly Mandan villages: interpreter Toussaint Charbonneau and Hugh Glass, the ultimate survivor. A murderous Arika party had massacred the rest, while Glass was ashore on a mini hunting sirjoin and Charbonneau explored further ahead. 

Call it luck, call it finely honed instinct, but these waves of Indian assaults were only a distraction for Glass. After trudging along the Missouri river’s banks for dozens of miles, Fort Henry finally came into sight. Glass tasted revenge, but after crossing to the opposite shore using a makeshift raft of two logs tied together, he found the doors shut, the rooms cold and the beds empty. Glass discovered clues suggesting that Major Henry had travelled south down the Yellowstone river, and off he went again.

It wasn’t until January 1824 that Glass finally caught up with Major Henry and company. He had travelled over 1000 miles when he marched his bear-torn, corpse-like body into the gates of an all-new fur trappers’ fort. There he discovered his former colleagues celebrating the new year in style and comfort, far away from the rugged world of death that Glass had just ground his way through.

At first, their eyes popped out of their sockets, but when Hugh Glass identified himself, disbelief turned to rapturous celebration and a thousand questions. Yet one man’s expression became progressively darker – 19 year old Jim Bridger. As the other men realised the implication of what the stony-faced Glass was saying, their moods darkened as well. Bridger seemed so ashamed that Glass’ months old thoughts of blasting his head off with a rifle were forgotten. He was young, and Glass decided to forgive him, but Fitzgerald was another story.

A final showdown beckoned, but to Glass’ dismay, the clever, rifle-snatching John G Fitzgerald was nowhere to be seen. Major Henry explained that Glass’ abandoner had enlisted in the army and had left the party in mid-November alongside Moses Harris. The next revelation was a real punch to the gut – Fitzgerald had sailed south down the Missouri river just as Glass had been sailing in the opposite direction.

After a period of recovery, Glass set out for Fort Atkinson on February 28th, teaming up with two trappers called Dutton and Marsh. On the way, he met up with “friendly” Pawnee Indians and set down in their tent, but Glass noticed a glint in the man’s eye. These weren’t Pawnees, they were Rickarees! Glass bellowed a warning, and only just escaped to a rocky sanctuary while his companions Moore and Chapman were slaughtered.

Dutton and Marsh reached Fort Atkinson and reported Glass’ demise, but in early June 1824, Glass finally arrived and proved every man and his dog wrong yet again.

Finally, the story ends, but it ended with a whimper. As predicted, Fitzgerald was at Fort Atkinson. Despite the sympathies of the local troops, who donated a fund to him, the US army wouldn’t allow Hugh Glass to shoot one of its soldiers dead. Glass never got the confrontation he wanted, but settled for the return of his trusty rifle and a dirty black mark on his betrayer’s reputation. His 10 month odyssey was finally over.

By 1825, the legend of Hugh Glass had already taken on a life of its own, and a largely fictionalised column of his adventures had appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Glass himself, meanwhile, continued to work as a hunter by the mouth of the Yellowstone River as an employee of Fort Union, as proven by several surviving paper business records.

In 1833, he and two other trappers were crossing the iced-up Yellowstone river when a war party of 30 Arikaras charged and surrounded them. There were no trees to climb, no deer paths to slip away into, and this time Glass was unable to escape his doom. The triumphant Indians rode away with Glass’ cherished rifle and his death was soon reported in The Milwaukee Journal. Even these details are slightly blurry, as they were merely relayed by a fellow employee stationed at Fort Union.

Glass’ luck had finally run out, but he had lived for an extra 9 years since Fitzgerald and Bridgers had left him to die. Not bad for a guy whose back was temporarily the home of a family of maggots. One of the biggest differences was that Glass’ real story took place in summer, and not winter as the icy blizzards of The Revenant suggest. Fitzgerald was made into an even nastier villain by murdering Glass’ non-existent son, and one facepalming detail was Fitzgerald leaving to enlist in the Texas rangers. Small problem – Texas wasn’t part of the US yet!

The post Hugh Glass: The True Story Of “The Revenant” appeared first on Bear Informer.

Everyone knows that Treadwell’s 13 year bear odyssey ended with him being eaten, and later, biologists revealed that the weather conditions were freakishly cool in 2003, causing the berry crop to fail along the Katmai coast. Yet at the same time, the salmon run was average, and possibly above normal.

This combination had dangerous consequences. Matthias Breiter was camped by a river approximately 5 miles away from Treadwell, where he noticed that instead of the usual 15 bears fishing for salmon at once, one day saw 60 show up. This led to vicious conflicts between the bears and sent them into an aggression spiral.

In mid-September, the salmon run petered out by Breiter’s camp, and the hungry, berry-less bear brigade migrated to Kaflia Bay, where Treadwell was camped 300 metres away from the main feeding spot. When salmon schools are plentiful, bears will often take a bite or two and toss the rest away, but this year, the grizzlies devoured every scrap and carcass.

One of the last pieces of footage taken by Treadwell showed a thin, brutish looking grizzly heading back into the river for a dead piece of salmon. Werner Herzog speculated that this was Treadwell’s eventual killer.

The late date in October was also a factor, as by then, most grizzlies have normally journeyed inland to their deep mountainous lairs. The few stragglers by the coast were inevitably starving and desperate.

Some youtube commenters speculate that Timothy Treadwell was gay, but no concrete evidence has ever emerged. Instead, Jewel Palovak became his girlfriend in 1989, after they met at a medieval-themed restaurant called Gulliver’s in Marina del Rey.

Rather than the ranting narcissist portrayed in Grizzly Man, Jewel said that they were a typical Californian couple, surfing, eating at restaurants, and going on day trips to the countryside. The couple broke up, but stayed close friends, and during the Grizzly Man years, Treadwell embarked on a string of looser relationships. “It’s my bear work they’re attracted to” said Treadwell, saying that he never got laid before 1989.

It was a similar pattern to a mountaineer obsessed with Everest: he could return to civilisation, spend time with his frustrated girlfriends, before they realised during tear-filled arguments that his heart was with the bears. He was never able to commit, nor did he want to.

When he hooked up with Amie Huguenard, he was under no illusions, warning her that “I’m really not the settling-down type. It’s just the way I am, and I won’t change“. He insisted that he didn’t want any mini-Treadwells running around.

Despite craving commitment, Huguenard admitted that “he is who is is“, and she made plans to leave him in October 2003, shortly before the pair died. According to Treadwell’s diary, she believed that the Grizzly Man was hellbent on destruction.

Treadwell spent 12 years battling it out in the Alaskan wilderness before finally entering public consciousness. The greatest leap forward was undoubtedly his appearance on the David Letterman show on February 20th 2001. Beforehand, he sat in the greenroom alongside Samuel L Jackson and when his name was called, he strutted onto the set in a black coat and with his gold locks swaying like a movie star 20 years into his career.

As he sat down, Letterman showed him a photo of the gnarliest looking male bear from Treadwell’s collection, who he’d dubbed “The Big Red Machine”. Letterman asked him if he was destined to become bear food. The audience laughed. Treadwell replied “this is dangerous work” and that respecting the bear hierarchy was vital, but also said that grizzlies were harmless “party animals”. His goal on the show was to promote his 1997 book Among Grizzlies, and on January 8th 2002 his appearance was so popular that he returned to Letterman for round 2.

The clip of Letterman appeared in the first 10 minutes of Grizzly Man, but weirdly, it was omitted from the DVD release, as warned by a disclaimer stating that the film had been changed from its theatrical version. Removing Letterman was the sole change, and in its place was an NBC interview where Timothy Treadwell vowed to never shoot a bear with a gun.

Later on, the Letterman appearance seemed to make him paranoid. “Ah Timothy, I’m getting a bad feeling about you, I saw you on David Letterman” he says in a bitter mocking voice, in his infamous Hallo Bay rant video. 

Part of the appeal of Timothy Treadwell is the enduring mystery that surrounds his youth. The story he concocted in his 1997 book Among Grizzlies seems almost too perfect to be true. He claimed that his lifelong love of nature was kicked off when he and his friend Ricky saved a jar of frogs from the clutches of a cruel school bully, who proceeded to beat him to a pulp, which is inside the realm of possibility, but feels too Disneyfied. In his words: “an ecowarrior was born“.

Cut to the 1980s in Long Beach, California, and while working as a bartender and waiter, he claimed to be a poor English orphan who was cast out onto the street by his parents. He perfected a Cockney accent and went to the lengths of emblazoning a Union Jack on his surfboard. Fellow surfers and the English owner of a bar Treadwell once worked in confessed to have been fooled.

At first, people took pity on him, and the brothers of his friend Karyn Kline took him in. But slowly it dawned on them that the story was lies, and Treadwell was turfed out onto the streets again.

The Australian story was so pervasive that when Booklist reviewed Treadwell’s memoir in 1997, they called him an “Australian-born bear lover”. Treadwell’s family was forced to rebuff the fascination of Australian reporters who wanted to claim a down under hero for their own.

The 1980s was one of Treadwell’s murkiest periods, but by his own account in Among Grizzlies, he spent the decade as a strung out heroin addict. According to his father, the seeds were planted after Timothy left for college and his acting career went nowhere. Instead, the depressed young man sat around drinking alcohol in vast quantities.

One time, he landed face first in the mud after he leapt from a third story balcony during an LSD trip gone wrong. When he stood up, he had left a perfect imprint of his face, complete with glasses marks. Treadwell described himself as “an overactive street punk without any skills, prospects, or hopes“. He racked up two criminal convictions: one for assault in Long Beach, another for illegally disarming a firearm in Beverly Hills.

His old friend Karyn Kline from Long Beach described how “Tim was always in fights. He finally left when he heard several people were out to get him”. Treadwell claimed to have slept with an M16 under his pillow.

In 1989, the frenzied Treadwell almost died after taking a speedball, a heart-pounding combination of cocaine and heroin. Treadwell went to rehab, and in his darkest hour, he realised that only caring for Alaska’s bears could keep him on the straight and narrow. When his lifelong confidant Jewel Palovak met him in 1989 in Malibu, California, she saw no evidence of drug addiction, and he stayed clean until his death in 2003.

According to Treadwell’s autobiography, he was once invited to a private party with some low-level drug dealers, including the devious Turk, who jeeringly instructed Treadwell to sell his body for the lines of glittering coke on their table. In a sudden rage, Treadwell jumped and kicked his tennis shoes into Turk’s ugly face. His friends grabbed Treadwell and rammed him headfirst through a sheetrock wall.

Treadwell was momentarily dazed, admiring the well sculpted kitchen in front of his eyes, but snapped back to focus when blows rained down on his trapped lower body, still in the previous room. He pulled his torso free, grabbed a chair, and flung it in a circular motion so that each part of the chair caught one of the drug dealers in a separate spot. It also caught the chandelier, and in the confusion of jewels and glass shards flying everywhere, the table was upended, spilling hundreds of grams worth of cocaine onto the carpet.

At this point, the enraged Randy grabbed a .357 magnum. Treadwell gulped and dashed through the front door, and across the manicured lawn. He wasn’t fast enough, and with his hands up in the street, he screamed “enjoy your life in prison” while the pursuing Randy pointed a gun at his face. Before he could shoot, lights flicked on in the neighbouring windows. The seething Randy returned his magnum to his waistband.

Some have called this a tall tale, but who knows Treadwell’s life better than himself?

With 13 years of bear experience, we’ll never know everything that happened to Treadwell on his Alaskan adventures, but there’s plenty of wacky adventures spread around.

Mickey was one of Treadwell’s favourite bears, who he once captured duelling with Sgt Brown for the mating rights to Saturn, the “Michelle Pfeiffer of bears”, with Hollywood league cinematography skills. When Mickey was injured, he spent several weeks recovering right next to Treadwell’s tent, who claimed that he seemed to enjoy his company.

Given that a wolf and bear made headlines in 2013 for their close friendship, this is perfectly possible. Treadwell once kissed a bear on the nose after it licked his fingers, and like Charlie Russel in Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula, mother bears would leave their cubs with him while they left to hunt for fish, like a babysitter.

Another episode was when Treadwell contracted giardiasis, AKA beaver fever, caused by drinking water contaminated with beaver waste. Treadwell lay in his tent for days with a 104F fever and plagued by hallucinations. Jewel Palovak was shocked to receive a call from the babbling Treadwell demanding to know why she had left when “I saw you just walking today“. Palovak hadn’t been to Alaska all year.

She implored him to leave, but instead, his friend Bill Simms airlifted drugs in by float plane. When Treadwell returned, he was gaunt, his body missing 30 pounds.

On Timothy Treadwell’s IMDB page, the most prominent of his 7 credits is understandably Grizzly Man, being the main star despite never interacting with its production members. Yet one film is missing – Brother Bear, the 2D animated film from Disney.

Released in 2003, it featured songs by Phil Collins and told the story of Kenai the Inuit warrior, who kills a bear and is transformed into one himself as punishment, and makes friends with a small cub. It seemed very true to the Disneyfied Tim Treadwell vision, and that’s not surprising considering that he appears in the credits under “support staff”. 

According to Jewel Palovak, Treadwell’s confidant and will executor, Treadwell flew down to Orlando in order to help the animators produce realistic bear movements on screen, using real life footage as an example. True diehard fans of the grizzly man can wait for the credits to roll and spot his name after a few minutes – people have reported shock at seeing Timothy Treadwell pop up. People joked about how Grizzly Man was the polar opposite of the sweet and sugary Brother Bear, and that while Brother Bear was about a man tapped inside a bear’s body, Treadwell really did end up inside a bear’s body.

This wasn’t his only Hollywood connection, as Leonardo DiCaprio reportedly donated $25,000 to Treadwell’s charity Grizzly People. “I am a strong advocate of Timothy Treadwell because he risks his life to protect animals and he is reaching the next generation by teaching children how to preserve the planet” he said in 2003. Pierce Brosnan was another rumoured patron, but Jewel Palovak denied this.

For fans: wait until the end of the credits, under the large section “Very special thanks to the following support staff“. 

Treadwell once light-heartedly said that he hoped whoever found his half-eaten corpse would throw the body into the woods, to prevent the culprit from being shot dead. Ultimately, the Treadwell story ended on October 5th 2003, and the last of his 1000 hour archive of Alaska footage was taken that very same day (excluding the accidental death audio).

It shows a misty, drizzly Alaska, with what Treadwell describes as “50mph winds, soon over 70”. Unlike the sunny wide open vistas of Hallo Bay where Treadwell filmed some of his signature rants, there’s an eerie claustrophobic quality to this last video, with camera lens smudged with raindrops.

As Treadwell stands in the bushes in his camouflage gear, he seems hesitant, as though using his intuitive bear sense built over 13 years, he can sense that something is coming. He was leaving Alaska with “the bears safely heading for their dens, the work successful“, he says. He was only 95% correct, but that wasn’t enough.

Treadwell repeats a similar theme again and again: “It’s the only thing I know, it’s the only thing I want to know“. He looks around, fiddles with a swaying branch briefly, and those were the last words Timothy Treadwell ever deliberately recorded. Werner Herzog used this clip in the last 3 minutes of Grizzly Man.

One question which is mentioned surprisingly little about Treadwell (unsurprisingly given his grizzly-cuddling activities) is how he acquired food. Did he fish for salmon like his grizzly comrades, or pick berries from bushes? According to Jewel Palovak, Treadwell packed all his own food, with monthly resupplies by a floatplane.

Treadwell’s philosophy was to never hurt the bears by removing food from their environment. He tried to avoid cooking so that the scents wouldn’t attract predator bears, but was a sucker for Mac n Cheese.

Palovak joked that Treadwell’s diet wasn’t particularly balanced. Peanut butter and jelly was high on the menu, as were veggie meals ready-to-eat (MRE), but also lots of candy and crisps. His beverage of choice was Coke, and during the early years, disaster almost struck when a hungry grizzly poked its nose into his tent and stole 50 power bars from a theoretically bear-proof container.

Bill Sims was a hunting guide in Katmai national park, and met Treadwell early on, who he thought was a loopy yet endearing character. Somehow, he got roped into packing Treadwell’s lunches for him, and one day, when visiting Sims, he offered to cook fresh halibut for Treadwell in his tent. “If you don’t mind, I’ll eat it here,” replied Treadwell before wolfing down the fish silently in bear-like fashion.

However, Treadwell wasn’t a total slob. In April each year, he would kick off a high intensity training regimen involving long runs around his California neighbourhood.

The post Grizzly Man (Timothy Treadwell): 10 Less Known Facts appeared first on Bear Informer.

The story of the bear whisperer began on April 29th 1957, when Timothy Dexter was born in New York as the 3rd of 5 children. By his teenage years, he was a troubled child, partying hard and once getting so drunk that he smashed up the family car. By adulthood, he had adopted his mother’s maiden name to become Timothy Treadwell, giving an official explanation that he liked the tip-of-your-tongue alliteration of it. He moved to Long Beach in south California and drifted through a series of restaurant and bartending jobs, while nursing acting ambitions.

According to his father, Timothy slid downhill when he missed out on the part of Woody Boyd in the sitcom Cheers to Woody Harrelson. He began to make bizarre claims, such as being a British orphan who grew up in Australia, even faking an Australian accent.

Rock bottom arrived in the late 1980s, when Treadwell overdosed on cocaine and heroin. Narrowly avoiding death, he sought help from a Vietnam veteran called Terry that he had grown close to, who strongly recommended a visit to the pristine wilderness of Alaska. Terry probably believed that an excursion into nature would clear the troubled young man’s head, but here, Treadwell found his calling. In 1989, he devoted his life to the protection of bears. In his book Among Grizzlies, he attributed his recovery from drug and alcohol addiction solely to his relationship with bears.

Timothy Treadwell claimed to be on a one man mission to protect the grizzly bear population from cruel poachers and interfering governments. To mingle with his bear soulmates, he chose the Katmai coast of Alaska, famous for its heavy brown bear population. He shifted his camp around, starting with the “big green” in Hallo Bay during mid summer. Flanked by mountains, this massive, grassy open space is a famous bear hub, so rich in grassy sedges and salmon that 5 to 6 bears can usually be seen at once. Treadwall called it “the sanctuary”, and captured much of his best bear footage here, including the legendary pronouncements that formed the opening scene of the 2005 documentary Grizzly Man: “I will not die at their claws and paws. I will fight. I’ll be strong. I’ll be one of them. I will be the master. Still a kind warrior!“. Treadwell ranted against the park rangers who supposedly only flew over the park twice a year, claiming to be a persecuted, unjustly mocked man who only wanted to protect animals and educate kids.

In autumn, he transported his camp to Kaflia Bay, an area of thick wilderness home to the so called “grizzly maze”. This was a series of well-trodden paths, made by years of grizzly bears returning to their old feeding sites. The chances of encountering bears here were nearly 100%. Treadwell wisely chose the feeding season, where he could spend weeks every year watching bears getting fat on salmon by the pristine Alaskan waters.

In the early 2000s, Amie Huguenard read his book Among Grizzlies and became an admirer. After contacting the bear whisperer, she became his girlfriend too, and in 2003, she spent her first full season with him. With deadly consequences…

Every year from 1990 to 2003, Timothy Treadwell returned to Alaska to spend weeks living among his brown bear brothers and sisters. His passion for bears led him to film hundreds of hours worth of footage, and even found an organisation called Grizzly People. He claimed to have a special connection with bears, and gave each one names. Two his favourites were called Rowdy and Ed, an old grumpy bear which refused to make friends was dubbed Ollie, and other names include Mr. Grinch, Hatchet, Downey, Tabitha, Aunt Melissa, Demon, and  Sargent Brown.

As Treadwell returned to Alaska’s Kaflia bay year after year and the bears did likewise, they began to recognise him. Treadwell would sit amongst the bears with a big smile on his face while they postured and gorged on salmon. The mothers even allowed Treadwell to play with her cubs by the water, which he captured vivid footage of.

Treadwell foresaw a future when mankind and animals could live in harmony. In 2001, Treadwell appeared on the David Letterman show and declared that brown bears were “mainly harmless party animals”.

Some say it’s pure luck that Treadwell escaped harm for 13 years straight. Others say that he was actually far shrewder and more cautious than his flamboyant movie star ramblings suggested. A friend of Treadwell’s called Louisa Willcox claimed that “he also had a magic with the bears. There isn’t anything else to explain it with. He was a bear whisperer“.

From 1994 to 2003, Tim Treadwell gained six citations for rule-breaking, including altercations with other visitors, wildlife harassment, and failing to move his camp every 5 days. Park records showed that Treadwell was issued a citation in 1998 for storing an ice chest filled with food in his camp. One time, he was ordered by park rangers to remove a portable generator from his camp.

Treadwell never set up an electric fence around his camp, whereas bear researchers always put up a portable electric fence. In Katmai national park, guns are forbidden, but Timothy Treadwell wouldn’t even carry the perfectly legal bear spray. In his book Among Grizzlies, he claimed to have sprayed one bear in the face in previous years, but felt so regretful about the bear’s agony that he had never brought a can since.

One time, Treadwell was summoned to a coffeehouse with Katmai park superintendent Deb Liggett, who threatened to petition the US magistrate to legally ban him from Katmai if he kept violating the rules.

When he stumbled across the path of guided tours by rangers, he was said to mimic the bears’ behaviour, watching from a distance, then fleeing behind a bush. Treadwell dove ever deeper into his escape from civilisation, becoming more like the bears he admired, becoming grizzly in spirit. In the early years, attempts to communicate with the “bear whisperer” went unreciprocated, and Grizzly Man shows him interpreting friendly messages scrawled on logs for him (“see you next year”) with a paranoid angle. That said, when talking to touring groups of schoolkids, he was said to become gentle and childlike.

2003 would be the first time that Amie Huguenard spent the majority of the season with her boyfriend in Alaska. The duo established their normal camp at “the sanctuary” in Hallo Bay in late June, before Amie returned to California for two weeks. In late September, Amie returned just in time for Treadwell’s departure to the grizzly maze by Kaflia bay, airlifted by his loyal friend Willie Fulton. Before Willie flew away on September 29th 2003, Treadwell handed him a letter addressed to Bill Sims, owner of the Newhalen Lodge near Katmai park, which mentioned that “a few bears at his camp were more aggressive than usual”. In his own diary, Treadwell wrote that Amie would not be returning next winter, believing that he was hell-bent on destruction. Nevertheless, after establishing their campsite next to a busy salmon stream, Treadwell and Aime stayed at Kaflia bay a week longer than planned, as Treadwell couldn’t bear to leave without meeting a favourite female who hadn’t arrived yet.

This decision may have been his undoing, as later in October, the schools of salmon in the rivers get thinner and thinner. The remaining bears are forced to compete for food, inflating their aggression levels. Furthermore, food was particularly scarce during the entire fall of 2003. In Amie’s diary, she wrote that she was frightened by the presence of bears and wished to leave Katmai National Park as quickly as possible.

On October 5th, Treadwell had rung Willie Fulton to request extraction, telling him to land his float plane on the beach the next day and pick them up. At 2.00PM on October 6th, Fulton touched down on Kaflia Bay beach and stepped out into a rainy and foggy Alaskan morning, with poor visibility.

Almost immediately, he knew that the atmosphere was wrong. Futon believed that he could see Treadwell shaking out a tarp in the distance, but when he yelled, no response came back. So Fulton started up a well-trodden path through the bushes, heading directly towards the campsite by the salmon river.

About 3 quarters of the way up, his instincts all screamed at him at once to turn back. Returning to his float plane, he turned around to witness one of the meanest, gnarliest bears he had ever laid eyes on, walking down the very path he had just absconded: “just the meanest looking thing”. He had witnessed this same gnarly bear from above on previous air flights.

Fulton then took off, and flew over the campsite 15-20 times to spook the bear away, but on one of those flights, he observed the same bear feeding from the distinctive shape of a human ribcage.

Within 3 hours, backup had arrived at Kaflia bay. Ranger Gilliland, ranger Ellis, and ranger Dalrymple questioned Fulton by the lake, who wasn’t 100% sure, but 99% sure that something was wrong. All 4 started up the dreaded hillside path once more, and as they emerged on the crest, they witnessed the same, grizzled, gnarly bear that Fulton had encountered, standing 20 feet anyway.

Suddenly, the bear was charging, and when a chorus of bellowing shouts failed to halt its progress, ranger Ellis stood and fired his 40 cal. handgun 11 times. Rangers Dalrymple and Gilliland were carrying 12 gauge shotguns, and got 5 blasts in apiece. 12 feet away, the bear dropped to the floor, before dying within 10 seconds. As the rangers tentatively approached, Fulton growled “I want to look that bear in the eyes”, before insisting that this was the bear who had stalked him hours earlier.

By now, they were confident that something had happened to Treadwell and Aime. They found both tents collapsed, and noticed a pair of fingers protruding from the rubble. Soon a couple more bears approached, which the foursome managed to deter by shouting “get out!”. Then, close to the tents, the found Timothy Treadwell. His head was intact, with a frozen grimace. But it was connected only to a small piece of spine, and nearby were his right arm and hand, complete with wristwatch.

The fingers, meanwhile, turned out to belong to Amie. In death, her face was unblemished as though sleeping, but like Timothy, her body was mostly gone. Both Treadwell and Amie’s shoes were tucked away neatly.

Another artefact was discovered in this search. It was a poisoned chalice – a videocamera – and investigation by the Alaskan State Troopers revealed that the last 6 minutes of film captured the bear attack. The camera lens cap had been on, so only the audio was available. While making Grizzly Man, Werner Herzog was given permission by Jewel Palovak to listen to it. Detailed descriptions have emerged, and the first sound of the recording is Amie sounding surprised and asking “if he’s still out there”. After a gap, Treadwell suddenly screams “get out here! I’m being killed out here”. A tent unzips, before Amie implores him to play dead.

Amidst this, there is a constant background soundtrack of rain beating against the tent. The bear evidently leaves soon after, as Timothy and Amie begin debating whether it will come back. But evidently, it did: Tim’s next cries are “hit the bear”. The sound of a frying pan rings out, before Treadwell moans: “Amie get away, get away, go away”. He has clearly accepted his fate, hoping to save his girlfriend.

She apparently stayed behind, however, as her screams only grow louder and more intense, before the audio cuts off. Tim’s screams are the opposite, fading away gradually as though being dragged away from the tent and into the undergrowth. Throughout the six minute recording, the bear is mostly silent, making only occasional grunts and growls.

Two days later, on October 8th, an autopsy of the shot bear revealed human remains in its stomach, alongside torn pieces of clothing.

Grizzly Man is full of wacky moments like when Treadwell zooms in on an immobile bumblebee fixed on a plant. “Isn’t this so sad? A bumble-bee expired while it was doing the pollen thing. It’s beautiful” he cries in mourning. Suddenly, the bee moves again: “Wait! The bee just moved! Is it . . . is it just SLEEPING?”. He repeatedly talks to grizzly bears in a child-like voice and repeats “I love you, I love you” to them under his breath, as though the bears were avowed readers of the Oxford dictionary.

Yet contemporaries of Treadwell testify that he had a practical streak as well. He was wary of certain bears, including one called Demon that hung around Kaflia bay, confiding in ranger Lynn Rodgers that “a guy could get killed out there”. He also mistrusted a bear called Ollie, “the big old grumpy bear”. He had tried to make friends with this grumpy bear, only to be rejected, and Willie Fulton later dubbed Ollie “a dirty rotten bear, that Tim didn’t like anyway”. Ollie was even speculated to be the gnarly bear that killed Treadwell, although the exact identity of Bear 173 is debated to this day. Quincy is another name thrown about.

John Waters of Katmai Coastal Bear Tours was a man who met Treadwell most Alaskan summers, finding him difficult at times, as though he was intruding on Treadwell’s personal space. Yet he declared that sans Vitaly Nikolayenko, another grizzly man who was coincidentally killed just weeks later in 2003, Treadwell probably had the best “bear sense” and experience of any man alive.

Why the camera was turned on is a mystery we will never know. Did Timothy Treadwell achieve one small victory in death, thinking that if death is imminent, then it might as well be caught on film, as the ultimate extension of his 13 year documentary? Or did Amie press the button accidentally?

One thing’s for sure – those “Treadwell attack audio recording” videos on youtube are fake as can be. One claims to be a 1m 51s “leak” of the original. It appears that some ambitious youtubers have read the “script” for the original, and spliced together their own version from their own performances and pre-existing media. In fact, a laughing sound engineer appeared on one forum, suggesting that the bear noises were from the most basic FX effects pack.

How do we know they are fake? Because Werner Herzog has confirmed it. Another flaw is supposedly that the filmmakers introduced too many cartoonish bear roars.

In Grizzly Man, Walter Herzog’s reaction to the tape was filmed, with the audio itself edited out. The grim reactions on his face say it all, and as soon as he removed the headphones, he urged Jewel Palovak (a friend who Treadwell left his entire estate to) to destroy the tape. Otherwise, he said, it would be “the white elephant in your room all your life”. He declared that he wasn’t making a “snuff movie” and wouldn’t include the audio in his documentary even if Jewel had given him permission.

Today, the audio of the attack lies in a secure white vault, untouched for years. Jewel Palovak followed Werner’s stern advice, and has never listened to it.

The post The Story Of Timothy Treadwell, AKA Grizzly Man appeared first on Bear Informer.

Before we delve into the mysterious world of long extinct bear species, you first need to understand the bear situation today. All surviving bear species are grouped into the wide family of Ursidae, which is itself divided into Ailuropodinae for giant pandas, Tremarctinae for the spectacled bear, and ursinae for all other bear species, the latter being collectively dubbed the “real bears”.

Within ursinae, there are six living species. Can you guess them all? Some are obvious, like the polar bear, brown bear and American black bear, but the remaining three are sloth bears, sun bears, and Asiatic black bears.

Despite the shaggy, blue-tinged coat of the Tibetan blue bear, or the lighter yellow coat of the Syrian brown bear, both are considered to be the same species as the marauding grizzlies of Yellowstone. “Brown bear” encompasses 20 subspecies around the world, including grizzlies, Kodiak bears, east Siberian brown bears, and recently extinct ones such as the Atlas bear and Californian grizzly.

Yet confusingly, the only two black bears to exist in the world, the American species and the Asiatic black bear, are distinct enough to be recognised as two separate species, rather than subspecies. Then there’s the polar bear, which keeps things simple for the layman with no subspecies whatsoever.

The official name of the overall brown bear species is ursus arctos. Within that we have such characters as ursus arctos horribilis (grizzly), ursus arctos middendorffi (kodiaks), and ursus arctos syrianus (Syrian brown bears).

The fossils show that brown bears appeared in Eurasia sometime over the last 1 million years, so which bear was the immediate ancestor? It’s fair to say that a squirrel didn’t mutate into an 800 pound grizzly overnight. While nobody is completely certain, the main candidate is the Etruscan bear, or Ursus etruscus.

This bear species lived from 5.3 million years ago to just over 300,000, and its heartland was Europe, with no fossils ever discovered in America. This isn’t a mystery bear; there’s no debate over the Etruscan bear’s existence, as remains are abundant all over Italy, Spain, France, and even modern day Palestine.

Skeletal reconstructions show that ursus etruscus looked similar to the modern brown bear, but slightly smaller, as though one stage away from the finished article. A complete skull was unearthed in Val d’Arno in northern Italy, and the front incisors were just as brutally sharp as a modern bear’s. The jaw had an extra layer of premolar teeth, but according to microwear patterns, the Etruscan bear’s diet was probably just as meat-heavy as today.

According to fossils, ursus etruscus became larger over time, from the size of an Asiatic black bear 3MYA to only slightly below a brown bear 1MYA. The oldest known remains were found in Vassiloudi, Greece, at 5.3 to 1.8 million years old, while the most recent showed up in Asturias, Spain, dated to 1.8 million to 100,000 years ago. The exact dates for this bear ancestor are a bit of a blur.

Moving further back in time, we have ursus minimus, AKA the Auvergne bear. This is the widely theorised ancestor of the Etruscan bear, and it lived approximately 5.3 to 1.8 million years ago.

Once again, its fossils are almost entirely found in Europe, but being an extra rung down on the evolutionary ladder, ursus minimus looked closer to a modern day black bear than a brown bear. So similar, in fact, that some people believe that Asiatic black bears are a secret surviving population! The more accepted theory is that ursus minimus was the last common ancestor of black bears and brown bears, the point where the two species diverged for good. In fact, ursus minimus may be the ancestor of all modern bear species except for panda bears and spectacled bears.

Some believe that ursus minimus was slightly more carnivorous, but its molar teeth had all the flatness of modern bears, designed for chewing foliage like berries and roots. Ignoring weird offshoots like the plant-loving cave bear, it seems that the diet of the brown bear’s forefathers didn’t change much for millions of years. The main changes were size and appearance.

Like ursus etruscus, this ancient bear gradually became larger and larger, from the oldest known fossil in Stavropol’skaya, Russia (5.3-3.4mya), to the most recent in Sezene, France (3.4-1.8mya). One thing we’ll probably never know is the Auvergne bear’s (or Etruscan bear’s) fur colour – skeletons can only tell us so much.

We now leap back an entire 15 million years, to one of the commonest bear ancestors in the fossil records. Outside of obvious candidates like the woolly mammoth and giant sloth, this might be one of the coolest, most distinctive looking prehistoric mammals. Colloquially, it would be dubbed a wolf-bear-cat, because that’s exactly what it looks like.

In reality, it was (or is, there were no biologists then) called the dawn bear, or Ursavus elmensis. It lived around 20 million years ago and was the size of a fox, 45 to 85cm long when excluding the tail. Some biologists view it as the first “true bear”. This was still a tree-dwelling predator, but its carnassial, meat-shredding teeth were now smaller, and its molars had developed the flatter surfaces of modern bears used for grinding vegetation.

The dawn bear was part of the wider Ursavus family, which originated in Asia before spiralling into multiple diverse and wacky species. For example, ursavus elmensis spawned U. primaevus and U brevirhinus, before U.primaevus spawned U. ehrenbergi and U. depereti, bears which continually grew larger. Ursavus had dozens of members over the ages, but ultimately, they all went extinct.

At 20 million years old, the dawn bear was one of the earliest Ursavus species. In the end though, it’s the only one whose lineage is confirmed to survive, as the forefather of all surviving bear species.

So what happened in the millions of years between dawn bears and ursus minimus making its first appearance around 5MYA? Nobody is 100% sure, because the period is one of the murkiest in the whole timeline of bear evolution. Biologists barely understand the evolution of human beings from our savage (or maybe wise and thoughtful) ape ancestors, and past the mark of 5 million years, the story of bear evolution suddenly descends into a fog.

A common theory today is that the forefather of ursus minimus was a member of the protursus family, a long extinct bear genus, but compared to the Etruscan bear, archaeologists have unearthed almost no protursus fossils. Somehow, they identified protursus as an all-new bear family from a single tooth found near Barcelona in 1976, and declared it to be more primitive than ursus (the modern group), but more advanced than ursavus.

Protursus simpsoni is an oft-mentioned candidate for the brown bear’s evolutionary forefather, but that’s only because it’s the sole confirmed protursus species! Slowly, more fossils appeared, and p.simpsoni emerged as a proto bear the size of a small dog, with some classic bear characteristics starting to emerge: heavier limbs, square molar teeth, and a shorter tail.

The fact is, however, that dozen of long extinct bear species lived during this murky period. 15 million years is a long time. Ursus minimus and ursus etruscus are more recent, and very well accepted, but protursus is on very shaky ground as a brown bear ancestor. The fossils of the real predecessor to ursus minimus might still be out there, buried in rock sediment in an obscure Mediterranean cave somewhere.

Another clue was a species called ursavus tedfordi, identified back in 2006 when a rare complete skull was unearthed in China. Dated back to 8MYA, it bore the closest resemblance to modern brown bears yet of an ursavus skull. At the same time, the skull had some peculiarities which modern brown bears lack.

The scientists concluded that it represented an offshoot, but from which species? This mysterious species might be the missing ancestor of ursus minimus and brown bears, rather than Protursus. Officially, the ursavus clan went extinct around 5MYA, so it fits the timeline well. Amazingly, the name has nothing to do with teddy bears: it was named after experienced bear researcher JH Tedford.

Tedfordi is also believed to be the ancestor of the Indarctos clan, the oldest of which is Indarctos arctoides (12.5 to 7.1mya). There’s also Indarctos atticus, which lived from 9.5 to 5.3 million years go, and had forelimbs strangely similar to the modern brown bear. Coincidence? As you can see, everything is still a big mess from 20-5 million years ago.

Before the dawn bear arrived 23 million years ago, we reach the earliest stages of bear evolution, unless you want to travel really far back to the era of dinosaurs and primitive mammals. Parictis was a genus of small, doglike bear animals, with 6 species inside the genus, all mostly found in North America. The fossils are mostly fragments, but the oldest ones date back 38 million years with the youngest dating back 33 million years (although these dates aren’t set in stone). These proto bears were tiny, with one skull measuring only 3 inches, but biologists have identified several similarities in shape to modern brown bears.

What about the age old question – are bears related to dogs? They are, but only distantly. They’re part of the wider order of carinova, but the bear family’s closest living relative, all 8 species of them, is the pinnipeds. The seals, the otters, and the blubbery, tusked walruses. If you stare hard enough, you can see some resemblance in the skulls of bears and seals today.

The fateful diverge took place approximately 50 million years ago, and the seals and cousins were preceded by the Amphicynodontinae family, which had a familiar long body, dwelt on land, but was slowly becoming semi-aquatic, like modern day otters.

In the 1990s, Amphicynodontinae was mistakenly grouped as a primitive bear species, showing just how tight the relationship is. As for dogs, the last common ancestor with bears lived around 60 million years ago.

As for polar bears, the popular theory is that they diverged once brown bears had already evolved, wandering too far north and becoming trapped by encroaching glaciers. They originally enjoyed a limitless buffet of seal, as similarly to Antarctica today, the seals had no terrestrial predators to worry about. But as the seals were forced to adapt, the bears were forced to evolve long snouts and white fur to make them more efficient predators. Polar bears were finally born.

For years, the spotlight was fixed on the ABC Islands of Alaska, which is a strange place for bear genetics, as the brown bears have a normal appearance and diet, yet an unusually close genetic profile to polar bears. Could polar bears have diverged in Alaska? It seemed logical, but then a theory emerged that the ABC Island bears were actually descendants of hybrids, caused by existing polar bears migrating south again and breeding with the locals.

The big stumbling block is that polar bears live on sea ice, and that their fossils tend to plummet into the ocean. Scratch that, they always fall into the ocean. The oldest polar bear fossils date back only 130,000 years, a jaw bone found in Prince Charles Forland in 2004. Some believe that rather than polar bears evolving from brown bears, the two were separate branches of a common ancestor, possibly ursus etruscus.

Polar bears are one evolutionary riddle which nobody is close to solving.

The oldest confirmed fossils of brown bears date back 500,000 years and were found in China, and its forefathers ursus minimus and etruscus were also Eurasian bears. So when did the American grizzly bears of Yellowstone Park or Canada enter the equation?

During the last glacial period, Alaska and Russia were connected by the land bridge of Beringia. Siberian bears crossed this bridge at least 100,000 years ago, the date when the earliest bear fossils in Alaska show up, but for years, the oldest confirmed fossils in Canada and the US were only 13,000 years old. The theory was that ancient bears were blocked by thick, impenetrable ice sheets, and stuck to the comparatively warmer coastline of Alaska instead.

Recently though, the timeline changed, as scientists discovered a 25,000 year old fossil in modern day Alberta, Canada. This created a mystery, because if the glaciers weren’t a problem, then why did brown bears wait another 12,000 years before invading the modern day United States and Mexico? One theory is the giant short-faced bear, which went extinct 15,000 years ago. It’s not proven, but this 2400 pound monster could have outcompeted the brown bear for territory.

It’s also theorised that brown bears crossed the Beringia bridge in 3 or 4 separate waves. One came from the Kamchatka brown bear of Siberia’s far east, and evolved into modern day Kodiak bears, while the others were East Siberian brown bears, who morphed into inland grizzlies. There’s many mysteries about bear evolution to unravel yet.

Of the surviving bear species, panda bears were the first to break off, with the last common ancestor with brown bears living 20 million years ago. The American black bears which constantly steal your pizza probably evolved from ursus minimus, the black bear’s last common ancestor with brown bears.

It’s possible that ursus minimus crossed the Alaskan land bridge and then started evolving, or it may have commenced evolution before crossing. What’s confirmed is that a proto American black bear existed between the two called ursus abtrusus.

Then there’s cave bears, which appeared when a lineage broke off from Etruscan bears 1.8 million years ago and became ursus deningeri, the cave bear’s immediate ancestor. Also called Deninger’s bear, this is a recent yet barely known subspecies. It also lived in caves, died out around 100,000 years ago, and had a heavily plant-based diet compared to brown bears.

Several fossils were unearthed in the Cueva Mayor cave in Spain from 1990 to 1994, and its lower jaw and mandibular ramus had subtle differences in shape to a cave bear, including being smaller. Yet the longer, higher skull was already appearing, compared to the rounded skull of a modern brown bear. By 1 million years ago, the cave bear (ursus spalaeus) emerged as the finished article. U. spalaeus was the last of its lineage, dying out an estimated 24,000 years ago (75,000 years after U. deningeri), due to humans occupying its caves, and its more restricted plant-based diet.

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Grizzly Adams was born in Medway, Massachusetts on October 22nd 1812, to the original Adams family (not the TV one!) that included the 2nd US president John Adams and the 6th US president John Quincy Adams. Surprisingly, his real name wasn’t Grizzly, but John Boyden Adams. He grew up in a rural household as the 2nd of 7 siblings, and by the age of 21, his talent for handling animals was already shining through. Young John was employed as the caretaker for a troupe of travelling animals, including large exotic mammals imported from Africa.

One day, however, John was savaged by a royal Indian Bengal tiger. He almost died and was confined to his bed for months, which temporarily pushed him into the safer career route of shoe cobbler, which he had apprenticed in as a teenager. The young grizzly Adams lived a quiet life in Boston for a while, marrying a young woman called Cylene Drury on April 12th 1836, and having 3 children with her.

But in 1849, Adams reached a crossroads, although he didn’t realise it yet. With the Californian gold rush in full swing, Adams imported $8000 worth of footwear to New York City, to sell to the thousands of excited miners who were constantly passing through. $8000 was a giant sum of money in those days, but tragedy struck when the entire shoe stock was burnt up in the infamous St Louis Wharf fire, at the halfway house port in Missouri. Shortly afterwards, John’s father Eleazer committed suicide, possibly because he had invested in young John’s scheme.

Despondent, young (ish) John turned his eye westwards himself. He promised his wife that he would send money home regularly, and bade her and his children farewell. He would join the Californian gold rush himself. He would become Grizzly Adams.

Adams’ first mistake was to take the harsh southern route to California, passing through the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona. He almost succumbed to fatal illnesses twice before arriving in the rich golden landscape of California in late 1849.

Money-making schemes started flowing through Grizzly’s head instantly, and before 1850 dawned, he was squatting on an 800 acre plot of land near Stockton, which he quickly stocked with cattle. He invested in a plan to dam the Tuolumne River in order the mine the riverbed below for gold, staked several mining claims near Sonora, and operated a saloon and cavern near Woods’ Creek.

Grizzly certainly didn’t lose points for effort, but his luck was dire, as a sudden deluge of rain in the mountains washed away the half-completed dam. He was informed one day that his cattle had been stolen, and worse, the real landowners cottoned on to the fact that he was squatting there. Grizzly was whacked with a lawsuit in 1851 for not sharing his water with fellow miners, and despite facing bankruptcy, Adams continued on a wild property-buying spree. Unfortunately, the land he offered to the bank as collateral turned out to have been mortgaged already.

In 1852, Adams blew up in court, ranting against the injustice of the legal system against the common man trying to make a living. He stormed out, and when his ranch near French Creek was confiscated by creditors late in 1852, Adams headed for the mountains.

Grizzly had nothing to show for his Californian project except for two oxen, a wagon, a Colt revolver, several rifles and bowie knives, clothes, blankets and some cooking utensils. He put these items on a creaky old wooden ox cart and headed northwards into the Sierra Nevada. Adams was sick of people and civilisation. He trekked for 200 long miles, stopping on the outskirts of Yosemite valley. For the next two years, he would live life as a mountain man.

Grizzly immediately felt at home in the wilderness: “I seemed to be a part of the vast landscape, a kind of demigod in the glorious and magnificent creation“. Befriending a group of Miwok Indians, Adams constructed a shelter and base near modern Pinecrest. Adams was now 40 years old, with long grey hair and a snowy white beard, but he was arguably entering the peak of his career. Over the next 30 months, Adams soon became an expert not only in killing and hiding animals, but also in crafting harnesses, pack-saddles, buckskin clothing, and snowshoes. He sold these goods to passing immigrants from the east, along with fellow hunters and nearby settlements. It was in this mountain retreat that Adams first became fascinated with the Californian grizzly, which was far larger and mightier than the black bears back east.

Gradually, Grizzly Adams began to be hired as hunting guide. He always set out from his Sierra Nevada base, but his explorations took him as far as the Canadian border, Mojave desert, and Salt Lake City. By 1854, there was barely a square meter of California that hadn’t felt his footstep. Slowly, the legend of Grizzly Adams grew. He was often told of secret mountain trails by the wise local Indians, who he treated with respect, unlike other mountain men who gave themselves the title of “Indian killer”.

In Spring 1854, Grizzly Adams was guiding a Sonoran merchant named Solon through the recently explored Yosemite valley, which the Indians knew as Ahwahnee (deep-grassy place). Picking their way through gnarly Native trails, the two spent three days hunting and skinning game, until one day, Adams sniffed out a grizzly bear den “by the headwaters of the Merced river”.

He watched the den patiently for three days, and when a gigantic mother grizzly wandered out absentmindedly, he heard the clear yapping of cubs behind her. Training a bear cub had long been a secret desire of Grizzly Adams, and using the bush as a camouflage to scuttle forward, he aimed carefully and fired 6 revolver shots into the grizzly mother’s chest.

She toppled over backwards, and was panting and moaning when Adams delivered the finishing blow with a slash to the throat. Adams entered the den and retrieved the cubs, but he had a problem – their eyes were still glued shut. Clearly, they were still feeding on their mother’s milk, and a mixture of sugar, flour, and water he offered them was ignored.

Despite her protestations, Adams took his gun and shot all but one of his greyhound’s cubs, to make room for bear cubs at the dinner table. Solon named his cub General Jackson, while Adams named his cub Ben Franklin. This bear would became Grizzly Adams’ faithful sidekick over the years ahead.

Another of Grizzly’s famous catches was a gigantic 1500 pound bear named Samson. This was believed to have been a record at the time, except for unverified boasts from local townspeople of slaying 1800, 2000, or even 2500 pound-ers.

By now, Adams’ collection of animals was growing, with badgers, wolves, elk and antelope also joining his Noah-like flock. Even in his mountain isolation, he had received word of the roaring success of animal fighting shows down in Los Angeles. And so, Adams and some Native pals moved his collection to Hooperville near Maripova, a town with a wooden pen which was perfect for chaining animals to. He even hired a band and a bartender, and the Mariposa Chronicle helped him out on March 10th 1854, stating that “‘Wild Yankee’ is making the ‘most extensive preparations’ for the entertainment of his friends next Sunday at Hooperville“”.

The show debuted on March 12th, starting with a large grizzly named Tom Thumb who fought three smaller grizzlies, and continuing with Jenny Lind the grizzly, who fought off a 6-strong wolf pack. The bears were also encouraged to wrestle and perform tricks, and the best performing animal received a prize.

The show was a roaring success, as was a second Hooverville show on March 26th, and a third best-selling show just west of Mariposa in early April. This was Grizzly Adams’ first taste of his later showbiz success, but he wasn’t ready to give up the mountain man life quite yet.

Legend states that during winter 1853, Grizzly Adams’ brother William tracked him down to his mountainous Sierra Nevada cabin. Adams was astonished at the figure in the doorway, and the two embraced, but William was now a wealthy gold prospector. He implored his brother to come home, but Grizzly refused to return to his wife emptyhanded. Instead, William proposed a 50/50 business deal, where Adams would capture animals for circuses on the east coast, and William wound finance the ships to set sail from Oregon.

The only problem is that according to records, Adams didn’t have a brother called William, but nevertheless, when Grizzly Adams wrapped up his first bear shows in April 1854, he departed for Portland right away. He had recruited a hunter called William Sykes, and within 2 weeks, the party had reached the wilderness of Oregon, guided along secret trails by two of Adams’ Native friends. Adams spotted several large grizzly bear tracks, and before long, he had dispatched a gigantic mother grizzly with one bullet to her chest and another to her brain. It took forever to lasso the two cubs and tie them to a tree, and one cub only calmed down when Adams beat her with a cudgel.

Then he changed tactics: “I patted her shaggy coat; and she gradually assumed a milder aspect“. He named this cub Lady Washington, and the two would grow to be best friends. She would cuddle up to Adams to keep him warm over freezing nights, carry loads on her back, pull a sled, and even let Adams ride on her back.

When Adams finally reached Portland, Oregon, he loaded his animal posse onto the boats as agreed, but kept the bears most precious to him, including Ben Franklin and Lady Washington.

Throughout 1854 and 1855, Grizzly Adams continued to live the mountain man’s life, but by summer 1856, he was officially a resident of 143 Clay Street.

Hardy though he was, Adams had suffered a growing list of mishaps which forced him to shift focus towards bear shows for his income. In 1855, he was travelling with his faithful 1 year old cub Ben Franklin, when a ferocious she-bear suddenly charged, with her 3 cubs watching on in the background. The bear swatted the rifle out of Adams’ hands in the blink of an eye, knocking him to the floor and sinking its teeth into his head. Adams was saved only by his quick thinking in climbing a nearby tree. White with fear, Adams watched from the branches as the she-bear bit Ben Franklin’s head, destroyed one of his eyes, and shook him around like a rag doll. “It was a terrible sight to see this monster combat“, said a report by the San Francisco Bulletin.

The she-bear was spooked enough to flee with her cubs, but in a separate attack in the Sierra Nevada, Adams suffered severe wounds to his scalp, which left a coin-sized hole in his skull just about the forehead.

This attack would lead to his demise, but nevertheless, Adams still had great days ahead of him in summer 1856. After retrieving his animals from Howards’ ranch near Stockton, where he had stored them for a while, Grizzly Adams made a grand entrance to San Francisco, parading his bears and pet lion through the streets while amazed onlookers watched on. Who was this mountain man who had appeared from nowhere? Were bears friendlier than people had once believed? These were the days before Wikipedia, and nobody knew.

Grizzly Adams then proceeded to open the “Mountaineer’s Museum” on Clay Street, San Francisco. This museum was a world first, boasting 10 bears, a mountain lion, several eagles, and several elks, not to mention pelicans, eagles and a slithery Californian condor. Adams nailed up a huge wooden sign and weekend visitors started to flock instantly, paying 25 cents for admission. Adams’ beloved Lady Washington and Ben Franklin wore heavy leather collars connected to 5 foot chains in the basement, themselves connected to unbreakable bolts in the floor.

Adams would personally guide the locals around the museum, and demonstrate all his mountain man skills by climbing onto Ben Franklin’s back. Visitors would wow as the chained bear struggled to stand up and throw him off, standing on its hind legs and swatting with its paws in the dusty basement. The museum also housed three excitable cubs which Adams would feed bowls of corn meal and milk as amused spectators watched on.

During this period, Adams would still return to the Sierra Nevada mountains periodically to befriend new animals – he had a reputation to keep up, after all. Adams’ bears were now so perfectly trained that they would sit calmly on the street while Adams dined in a restaurant.

By 1857, the museum had caught the attention of newspaper writer Theodore H. Hittell, who later interviewed Adams in great detail and released The Adventures of James Capen Adams in 1860. Thanks to the newspaper’s glowing reports, Adams had enough cash pouring in by summer 1857 to move the bears from the cramped basement to a much larger building, where he renamed his attraction the Pacific Museum.

Grizzly Adams was now a bona fide celebrity, rubbing shoulders with figures such as future civil war general William Herman and exotic dancer Lola Montez, who kept a pet grizzly bear herself. He was even famous back in New York – some consider Grizzly Adams to have been the first coast-to-coast US celebrity, a concept which seems laughably quaint today.

His activities were ever varied. Sometimes, the bear menagerie would pop up as sideshows in circuses, like Lee’s circus in 1856, while on other days they performed in San Francisco’s most prestigious theatres. Bear-bull fights were a common weekend treat in 1850s California. Families would watch from makeshift wooden stands as a bull with its horns sawed off charged a giant bear in an arena, and met its demise as a crushing paw blow broke its back. Other times, the bull would escape the area, and many of the bear combatants were caught by Grizzly Adams. It was common for San Franciscans to see Adams walk his two beloved bears down the boulevard in the evenings like a pair of pet dogs.

For some reason, John was now going by the name of his brother James Capen Adams, but his current nickname was “Wild Yankee”, which gradually morphed into the familiar Grizzly Adams of today.

Sadly, tragedy struck late in 1858, when Adams’ beloved Ben Franklin passed away, either from the injuries of 1855 or a poor adaption to city life. Adams was despondent, and in the Evening Bulletin, Franklin was given a tearful obituary worthy of a king, titled “Death of a distinguished Californian native”.

By 1859, history had started to repeat itself. The bear museum required massive operational overheads, including animal feed and wages for helpers, and ultimately, the bank was forced to confiscate the building, with Adams just whishing his menageries away in time.

Adams also knew that his time on Earth was short. His scalp wound from 1855 had been ripped open again during a wrestling bout with his least controllable bear, General Fremont. The brain tissue was left exposed so that “its workings were plainly visible” – pulsations of the brain could be seen after every heartbeat.

Adams’ main priority was now leaving enough money for his beloved wife back in Boston to survive on. In 1859, Adams sold his properties in California, and loaded his remaining animals and bears onto an eastward-bound ship. The voyage took three long months, and after reaching New York, Grizzly joined forces with legendary circus owner PT Barnum, to display his California Menagerie. But disaster struck again, when a monkey he was training bit into his still-raw scalp wound.

Half-dead already, Adams sold his beloved bears to Barnum for a tidy profit. Still, the legendary mountain man begged the astonished Barnum to be allowed to perform for another 10 weeks for a $500 bonus. Adams let his wife accompany him on this final tour, and on the final day, Adams could barely stand up on stage.

Nevertheless, like the tough old mountain man he was, he completed the contract. He returned to the family home in Massachusetts, and even then, Grizzly refused to be confined to his bed. He took the horse and cart to town one day, when suddenly, a bump in the road split the wound in his scalp open once again, sending a fountain of blood splatting into the celling. He was carried into a nearby drugstore, and on October 25th 1860, Grizzly Adams finally died. His family and friend PT Barnum were deeply grieved, but nevertheless, after 11 long years of grizzliness, Adams died a success. He had finally succeeded in his long mission to scrape together a comfortable sum of money for his wife.

Starting in 1976, Adams rose from the dead, starring in the popular TV series The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams, where he was played by Dan Haggerty. His beloved Ben Franklin also got in on the resurrection act – he was played by Bozo the bear (1961-1999).

The post John “Grizzly” Adams: The True Full Story appeared first on Bear Informer.

Japan is not normally famous for bears, but 106 years ago, one of the most nightmarish brown bear incidents of all time took place on the northern island of Hokkaido. For 1 month in late 1915, a small Japanese settlement was locked in a bubble away from the outside world where nothing existed apart terrified villagers and a bloodthirsty brown bear somewhere in the woods.

The area had recently been settled, and wild animals were still abundant. So members of the Ikeda household weren’t unduly worried in mid-November when a bear turned up at their house 11 kilometres from the coast and spooked their horse. This was a member of the Ussuri brown bear subspecies, the only subspecies in Japan, and it left the homestead after stealing some recently harvested corn.

But on November 20th 1915, the bear came back for more, using its amazing memory for food sources. It was now what modern day rangers would call a “nuisance bear”. Fearing for his horse, the head of the Ikeda household recruited his second son Kametarō and a pair of winter hunters who the Japanese called Matagi. Sure enough, the bear was persistent and reappeared on the homestead 10 days later. The hunters aimed, and one of their shots was true, but the bullet wasn’t enough to kill the bear. It fled, and following its paw prints in the snow, they seemed to lead to Mount Onishika. Bloodstains proved that it was wounded, but a snowstorm forced the posse back.

These villagers weren’t fools. They were well aware that the bear would return to raid human settlements, and on December 9th 1915, at 10:30m, their nightmares manifested in reality. Abe Mayu was inside the Ota home, guarding a baby called Hasumi Mikio while her husband was working on the farm. Suddenly, she was face to face with a brown bear. The bear attacked baby Hasumi and killed him. Mayu fought back by throwing pieces of firewood while looking for an escape, but it wasn’t enough. The bear knocked her over, mauled her, and dragged her into the woods, whether alive or already dead – nobody knows.

Many details of the Sankebetsu bear incident have blurred over the years, but it’s said that the Ota house kitchen resembled a slaughterhouse, filled with pools of blood. A search party of 30 men was organised. Meanwhile, Miyoke Yasutarō, head of the Miyoke household, left the village on an errand. The search party entered the woods, and there was no long search – they found the bloodthirsty bear after 150 metres of travel. 5 men unloaded their rifles, and one managed an accurate shot, enraging the bear, but forcing it to flee. The bullet wound wasn’t to the skull, and it was clear that the bear would survive.

Mayu’s body was quickly discovered, following the trail from a bloodstained Sakhalin fir tree. All that remained was her head and legs. It was clear that the brown bear had stashed the corpse as a future meal, to hide it from rival scavengers.

With the bear now having a taste for human flesh, the village was in a state of near panic, and the settlers stepped up their defences. Legions of armed men stood guard at the Ota household, and another 50 gathered at the neighbouring Miyakae household 300 metres away, in case the bear’s superior sense of smell drew it there. As predicted, the ferocious bear appeared at 8pm at the Ota household. One man took a shot, but missed, and the bear seemed to sense the situation, as it fled into the woods.

Then the most costly mistake happened. Hearing about the recent action while they were having dinner, the 50 guards at the Miouke household stood up and departed for the Ota household with their guns raised, leaving just one guard in place. Women and children of the settlement had gathered inside by the hearth fire, and Miyouke’s wife Yayo was cooking dinner with her fourth son Umekichi strapped to her back. Then she noticed a rumbling sound outside.

Without warning, the bear exploded through a window and into the heart of the house, having fled the Ota household and sniffed out another food supply. In the panic, the cookpot overturned and doused the fire, and somehow, the oil lamp went out too. The house was plunged into darkness.

Yayo tried to flee, but tripped up when her second son Yūjirō tried to hang onto her legs. The bear turned its attention to her fourth son Umekicki, who was quickly bitten by its massive jaw. The sole remaining guard was Odo, who unwittingly saved Yayo when he ran for the door, attracting the bear’s attention. He received a claw to the back after attempting to hide behind some furniture.

Meanwhile, Yayo scooped up her second and fourth sons and fled, but her third son Kinzō couldn’t escape. The bear mauled him to death, before killing Haruyoshi, third son of the Saito family, and biting the 3rd Saito son Iwao.

The pregnant wife of Saitō Ishigorō had failed to escape, and according to village eyewitnesses, she pled with the gigantic bear to attack her head and not her belly. The bear refused to listen.

Outside, Yayo and her sons met the mob of guardsmen, who had returned to the Miyouke homestead after realising that the bear was nowhere near the river they were following. She told them about the brutal attack inside, seriously injured herself.

Believing everyone to be dead, one of the guards proposed setting the whole house alight and finishing the bear off for good, but Yayo forbade this. The sounds of the bear’s rampage could still be heard, but there was no proof that everyone inside was dead, including Yayo’s family.

Instead, one group of rangers sneaked round the house and made a loud racket to draw out the bear, while the other 10 waited with their rifles. Right on schedule, the bear poked its head out the front door, but the guards’ positioning was all wrong. The men at the back were bunched up, and one guard stood directly in front of them, blocking their line of fire.

In the melee of shouting and reorganisation, the bear managed to slip way into the blackness of the night. The men lit fires and finally entered the home, to a scene of chaos and death. Two children called Rikizō and Hisano were found injured but alive, and taken to the Tsuji family house by the river to recover, where they ultimately survived.

Not far away, Miyouke Yasutarō had no idea of the events that were unfolding in his house, but he knew that the bear was on the loose.

And so, Miyouke entered the house of legendary bear hunter Yamamoto Heikichi. This man’s exploits were famous throughout the settlements, and he told Miyouke that the bear was almost certainly Kesagake, meaning “the diagonal slash from the shoulder”, a monster which had mauled three women already. The villagers would have a deadly task on their hands.

But when Miyouke asked for his help in slaying the bloodthirsty bear, Heikichi shook his head and said that those days were gone. He had retired from bear hunting. Plus, he had pawned all his hunting equipment for money to buy alcohol! He refused the pleas of Miyouke to come out of retirement for one last hurrah.

The dejected Miyouke was forced to stay overnight in Onishika (modern day Obirachō). By December 11th, he and Saitō Ishigorō had returned to Sankebetsu. Upon reaching the village hall, they were told the horrific news about their sons and Ishigorō’s pregnant wife. Worse, their faint hopes that the bear had also died were dashed. The village was in a grimmer situation than when they’d left.

That night, Miyouke and Ishigorō joined a new squad of men. They waited at Miyouke’s household, but on the night of December 11th, the bear was not sighted. By December 12th, the Hokkaido government office had learned of the marauding bear, and requested a crack sniper squad to be organised. The police department of Habora (a town which still exists) duly summoned experienced gunmen, and the guns themselves, from surrounding towns. The sniper squad headed to Semtes, and when Miyouke saw them approach the village, he was surprised to find that Heichiki was among them. The legendary bear hunter had apparently wrestled with his conscious and gone back on his decision.

Controversially, the snipers believed that the bear would return to collect its kill, and proposed moving the corpses back into the Miyouke household as deliberate bait for the bear. The Miyouke, Saito and Oto families were outraged, but the plan did go ahead. As the snipers waited patiently in the blackness of night, they saw a dark black shape appear at the front door, as though inspecting the inside of the house. But the bear ran to the forest before the snipers could shoot, and it didn’t reappear on the night of December 12th.

As December 13th dawned, the team had a realisation: they’d chosen the wrong house! The Oto house was found ransacked. The bear had clearly noticed the ample food supplies during its attack on December 10th, as the Oto family’s winter stockpile was destroyed. The bear had also ransacked 8 other houses without anyone noticing. Miraculously, nobody else was killed.

The hunting party had now swelled to 60 men, and they decided to take the fight to the bear in its mountain habitat. As they set out, Chief Inspector Suga of the Habora police was said to have cheered them on for motivation. Into the woods they went, and the bear’s territory seemed to be larger than ever now, stretching downstream to the frozen river. Legend states that Superintendent Suga decided to build an “ice bridge” as a last line of defence. He positioned snipers on his side of the river and waited.

That night, a dark shape appeared on the opposite side of the shore near the tree stumps. Cautiously, Suga called out to it, and when he received no response, he ordered his men to open fire. The shape vanished amid a volley of bullets, and the men were initially disappointed, but Suga swore that he had heard a yelp or grunt. He was right – the next morning, they crossed the ice bridge and found a paw print intermingled with blood stains.

The bear had taken yet another bullet – could it have staggered off, laid down and died somewhere? Nobody found a corpse in the woods near the river, and the hunt was back on.

It was now December 14th. Nobody knew it, but the final confrontation with the bloodthirsty bear of Sankebetsu would take place later that day.

Because all signs suggested that snowstorms were about to sweep in, the 60 strong hunting squad decided to press ahead and kill the bear while they could. Alongside a guide called Ikeda Kamejirō, bear hunter Yamamoto Heichiki volunteered to set out alone. He was familiar with Kesgake’s behaviour, and sure enough, the duo found the bear resting by an old Japanese oak tree.

Heichiki approached to within 20 metres. Then, he did what he’d sworn to never do again. He raised his gun, and fired a single bullet through the bear’s heart. He fired a second shot into the bear’s head, and after at least 9 kills, Kesagake the bear was finally defeated. It slumped to the ground, and when measured, it weighed 749 pounds and stood 2.7 metres tall, which would be beyond the upper range of a male Yellowstone grizzly. During the necropsy, body parts of the victims were found in its stomach. It was the final confirmation that the nightmare was over.

Kesagake the bloodthirsty bear of Sankebetsu was gone, but his legacy lingered for decades to come. His fur and skull were kept, but were somehow lost over the decades, maybe to reappear one day.

Close by lies the Sankebetsu Brown Bear Incident Reconstruction Location, featuring a replica house with early 1900s architecture, and a plaque explaining the story. Most importantly, there is a dark brown, life sized reconstruction of Kesagake himself, looming over a wooden fence and just waiting to come to life if a bolt of lightning struck him. The teeth are brutally sharp, the eyes are yellow, and the sculpture does justice to his bloodthirsty nature – he’s definitely no Yogi bear.

3 years later, the second son of Yayo, Umekichi, died of injuries from the head bite. His mother managed to recover, as did Odo the guard, but 1 year later, he fell into a river and died, hinting at a curse. Meanwhile, 7 year old Ōkawa Haruyoshi, son of the village mayor, vowed to kill 10 bears for every 1 villager the bear had massacred. At the age of 62, he had killed 102 bears, and hung up his rifle like Heichiki before him.

The bear was gone, but it was too late for the village. People drifted away until it was left as a shell, a haunted ghost town. The nearby Hokkaidō Road 1049 became known as bear road, but the cute, smiling bear illustrations found all along it are only a sinister hint as to what really happened.

The post The Sankebetsu Bear Nightmare Of 1915 (Japan) appeared first on Bear Informer.