After the Grizzly. Peter S. Alagona

      FIGURE 4. Adams, the Hunter, and His Bears, by Edward Vischer, 1873. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

      “Grizzly” Adams arrived in California from Massachusetts in 1849, and from 1852 to 1856 he hunted and trapped bears in the Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountains. Adams killed dozens of grizzlies. But he domesticated and cared for many others, including a feisty, fifteen-hundred-pound behemoth named Old Sampson, and his more sedate longtime companion, Ben Franklin, whom he walked on a leash and fitted with a packsaddle. Adams became famous for parading his menagerie through downtown San Francisco, and in 1856 he founded the Pacific Museum on the corner of Clay and Kearney Streets in the heart of that city. The establishment was more of a circus than a museum, and Adams was more of a clown than a curator. In the building’s cramped quarters, he staged bizarre evening shows that included bears as well as elk, deer, lions, tigers, snakes, roadrunners, monkeys, and “numberless small animals,” all choreographed to a “fine brass band” (see figure 4).²⁶

      As Monarch’s capture demonstrated, grizzlies did not succumb to death or the indignities of captivity without a spirited fight, and California soon contained scores of men who had proved their masculine virtue at the expense of death or disfiguring injuries. “If you kill a bear,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine declared in 1861, “it is a triumph worthy [of] enjoying; if you get killed yourself, some of the newspapers will give you a friendly notice; if you get crippled for life, you carry about you a patent of courage which may be useful in case you go into politics. . . . Besides, it has its effect upon the ladies. A ‘chawed up’ man is very much admired all over the world.” Adams died in 1860, at the age of forty-eight, from medical complications following a series of massive, bear-inflicted head wounds, several of which he received from the animals in his care.²⁷

      California’s macho bear hunters were not the only people attempting to define the state’s grizzlies. Another perspective, popular among Victorian moralists, portrayed grizzlies as benign creatures, righteous citizens, and even good parents. As early as 1850, U.S. Naval Chaplain Walter Colton wrote that the grizzly’s child-rearing skills shone “like a good deed in a naughty world.” Joaquin Miller, one of the most colorful characters in the late-nineteenth-century American West, had little in common with Chaplain Colton. He reportedly contracted scurvy while working as a cook at a mining camp and spent time in jail for stealing a horse before being elected a judge in Grant County, Oregon. But he agreed with Colton’s assessment of the grizzly’s character. In 1900 he published a book called True Bear Stories, much of which was undoubtedly false, in which he described the grizzly as “a good-natured lover of his family.”²⁸

      The heyday for California’s chaparral bears lasted little more than half a century—halted not only by hunting, capture, and commodification but also by the transformation of the state’s rural landscapes into spaces of capitalist agricultural production where bears simply were not welcome. In the decades following the gold rush of 1849, the state’s new Anglo-American elite succeeded in dispossessing the Californios of their lands and began converting the state’s valley grasslands and wetlands into orchards and wheat fields. Ranching continued in the foothills and mountains, but the great drought of 1863–64 devastated California’s overstocked rangelands and killed at least half of the state’s cattle. Sheep weathered the drought better than cows but were more vulnerable to attack by large carnivores, and the woolgrowers, with their newfound political clout, took the lead in predator elimination.

      No one knows how many domestic animals the grizzlies killed, but many clearly became habituated to livestock, and this earned them a place on the agricultural blacklist, along with numerous other species. Cattlemen awarded bounties for the scalps of special offenders, and hunters could profit several times from a single kill. After a hunter collected his reward, he would dismember the animal and sell off its oil, meat, hide, internal organs, and claws. This created a strong incentive for grizzly hunting. According to the naturalist Henry W. Henshaw, few species had “suffered more from persistent and relentless warfare waged by man than this formidable bear. . . . The number of bears is each year diminished, till in many sections where formerly they were very abundant they have entirely disappeared.”²⁹

      Despite these landscape transformations and eradication campaigns, grizzlies remained common in some areas for decades. Sightings continued through the 1860s in the San Francisco Bay Area, from Carmel to Santa Cruz, Palo Alto, San Jose, and Livermore, where Grizzly Adams had lived in his wilderness cabin. In the 1870s, grizzlies were still abundant near Yosemite Valley and in the vast belt of chaparral-covered mountains that stretched across Southern California from Point Conception in Santa Barbara County to Fort Tejon in Kern County and the Peninsular Ranges east of San Diego. As late as the 1880s, grizzlies frequented the Arroyo Seco outside Pasadena, now home to the Rose Bowl, where they indulged in the unhealthy habit of raiding apiaries owned by beekeepers armed with poison and guns.³⁰

      The number of recorded encounters between humans and grizzly bears declined during the final decades of the nineteenth century. Grizzlies were shot in Santa Cruz County near Ben Lomond in 1886, in Ventura County near Mount Piños in 1898, and in Orange County at the head of Trabuco Canyon in 1908. A man named Cornelius B. Johnson killed Southern California’s last known grizzly near the town of Sunland, in the San Fernando Valley north of Burbank, in October 1916. Johnson used some stale beef from a local butcher shop as bait for a Newhouse No. 5 bear trap, which he set out near some vineyards and weighed down with a fifty-pound drag log. He discovered the animal, a full day after it had become ensnared, half a mile into the foothills and nearly five hundred feet higher in elevation. The 254-pound bear had dragged the trap and log up the canyon until the whole tangled mess of bear and iron and wood got stuck in the brush. By the time Johnson found the exhausted sow, she was waiting to die.³¹

      No one knows how long the last California grizzlies survived in the wild. In 1924, reports appeared of a massive, speckled, cinnamon-colored bear prowling the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada near Horse Corral Meadow in Sequoia National Park. Witnesses said it had a hump on its shoulders, which is one of the features that most easily distinguishes grizzlies from black bears. A local rancher named Jesse Agnew claimed to have killed another grizzly in the same area just a couple years earlier. Agnew’s story received the support of C. Hart Merriam, the chief of the U.S. Biological Survey, who examined a tooth from the bear and proclaimed it a grizzly. The last reported sighting came in 1925, from a cattleman named Hengst, near the headwaters of Cliff Creek deep in the park, but no specimens, photographs, or other physical evidence ever emerged. And then the sightings stopped. It had taken just seventy-five years of statehood for Californians to exterminate their most spectacular land animal.³²

      A SYMBOL OF STATEHOOD AND BEYOND

      The California grizzly may have gone extinct, but it did not disappear. In 1890 the historian and naturalist Charles Howard Shinn envisioned a future when the bear, having “impressed himself irrevocably upon the imagination,” would achieve immortality. Farms and cities would replace wilderness, and the grizzly would fade away from the countryside. In its passing, however, the species would take its place alongside the American pioneer and other cherished anachronisms in a new chapter of national folklore—a “noble myth” of westward expansion, comparable in its grandeur to the epics of medieval England and ancient Greece. It was impossible to say exactly what this heroic legend would contain, because it would remain incomplete until the final California grizzly had vanished from its last mountain redoubt. For Shinn, the grizzly’s