Pod Insights Gunfighters Ep. 15: The Most Dangerous Beast? Or the God of the West? | The American West About this episode Grizzly bears emerged in North America nearly two-hundred thousand years ago and became the Lord Beast of the American West. Native people regarded them as formidable animal gods. Europeans and Americans thought of them as wildlands monsters that needed to be eliminated. Saved before they disappeared, today grizzly bears are surviving, spreading, and distinguish the Mountain West from all other regions in the Lower 48.
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1:06 Speaker 02 Whether the grizzly strikes us as the West's most dangerous creature or as its wilderness avatar deity, the great bear's fate has seen it reduced outside Alaska from 56,000 in 1800 to fewer than 2,000 today. But the big bears survive, and their presence distinguishes the West from every other region. I'm Dan Florries, and this is The American West. Brought to you by Velvet Buck Wine, where the hunt meets the harvest. A portion of each bottle goes to support backcountry hunters and anglers. Limited supply available at velvetbuckvineyards.com. Enjoy responsibly.
2:03 Speaker 02 The Most Dangerous Beast? Or God of the West? In 1874, on a steamer heading up the Missouri River in Montana Territory, Western artist William de la Montaigne Carey witnessed a scene one morning that afterwards, he replayed in his mind for the rest of his life. From the boat deck through good, sharp field glasses, Carey and his companions for several minutes watched a drama unfold that transfixed them with a chill Carey could not shake off. It created a memory that never let go of him. Here's how he wrote the scene:
2:45 Speaker 02 "About a mile off, an immense grizzly bear was making for a cottonwood miles away. And behind the bear came two men superbly mounted, armed to the teeth. We could see distinctly the horses straining every muscle to overtake the bear, who was equally anxious and making every effort to escape his pursuers." On the American Serengeti of the last century, this was a sight of sights, and as an artist of the West, Carey well knew it. What he was seeing ranked with Western spectacles like buffalo champagnes, prairie wildfires, or cavalry or Indian charges, and for the same reason,
3:29 Speaker 02 all implied furious activity with mortal outcomes at stake. But what required buffalo in mass numbers to affect a grizzly bear, even one running for its very life, could evoke solitaire? And that was what transfixed Carey and his companions. In the American West, the grizzly was the counterpart to the lion or leopard of the Maasai Mara, or the striped tiger of the steamy jungles of the Bengal. The largest and most powerful creature of the landmass, fully capable of killing humans, fully capable, under certain unusual conditions, of consuming humans too.
4:11 Speaker 02 We obviously feel a certain primal dread for any animal that might configure us as a meal, probably especially so, an animal like a bear that's so much more human-like in its attack than big cats or sharks. Even at a distance, William Carey must have experienced an adrenaline rush from that kind of genetic memory. But clearly, he also felt a sympathy for the bear as it crashed across the prairie, fleeing its pursuers. The artist was one of a legion of 19th-century disciples of James Fenimore Cooper, and with two friends, he had made a first trip up the Missouri River in 1861.
4:52 Speaker 02 Returning home with sketches and some paintings, he'd gone on to become a magazine and newspaper illustrator in New York, working for magazines like Scribner's and Harper's Weekly. It was their assignments that sent him into the northern plains again in 1874. The grizzly encounter was one of the high points of his trip, and he ended up executing a beautiful oil painting of what he believed happened at the end of that chase. Variously titled "Cattlemen Tracing Grizzly to a Den" or "Mother Bear Guarding Cubs", it became the prized piece of the artist's exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 1917.
5:37 Speaker 02 No less than famed Western writer/conservationist George Bird Grinnell penned the accompanying text for that exhibit. By 1917, Grinnell wrote, "Far from being the aggressive giant carnivores of the early wilderness West, grizzlies have become the shyest of game and are well-nigh extinct." Somehow, in barely more than a century, the West's most imposing creature stood at the brink of extinction. On the Great Plains, the setting where the reading world had first heard about Ursus arctos horribilis, by 1917, the giant bears were entirely extirpated.
6:22 Speaker 02 How we react to other animals is in part primate hardwiring. Despite our pretensions, we are still animals out of Africa. The thump in the dark, the start to full waking, the pounding heart can transport us back to our origins in a fraction of a second. In a study done by neuroscientists in 2011, among a large sample of patients, they found we 21st century humans still retain a pronounced selectivity for imagery of animals in the amygdala of the human brain. Amygdala are almond-shaped masses of gray nuclei inside each of our cerebral lobes.
7:05 Speaker 02 They're centers for emotional behavior and motivation. And what the science demonstrated was that our right hemisphere amygdala evolved and yet engages in a neural specialization for processing visual information about animals. So there's that part of our reaction to creatures like grizzly bears. But much of what we think when bear comes to mind emerges from the tangled mess of software programs that is culture. What we've heard, what we've read, what we've inferred, what others have implied, for some of us, what we've experienced.
7:45 Speaker 02 All these and other ways of absorbing information go into creating a construction in our minds like bear. When an Idaho governor publicly opposed recovering grizzly bears in the Bitterroot Mountains at the turn of the 21st century because he said he didn't want massive flesh-eating carnivores in Idaho, he was imagining a bear defined as much by human culture as biology. So the truth is that many kinds of bears look back at us, a maddening but fascinating aspect of the world. Those are the bears in the mirror, the bears humans see when we look at grizzlies through the lenses of our minds and cultures.
8:31 Speaker 02 "Non-human nature," writer D. H. Lawrence once said, "is the outward and visible expression of the mystery that confronts us when we look into the depths of our own being." As another writer who sought to understand our relationship with nature, the remarkable Paul Sheppard, author of "The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game," put it in one of his last books, "By disdaining the beast in us, we grow away from the world instead of into it." That line stands as almost a summary of how we reacted to grizzly bears.
9:11 Speaker 02 Lewis and Clark's journey and bear experiences indicated some 56,000 grizzlies inhabited the Lower 48 when they trekked across the West. Starting with them, across much of Western history, we tried to disappear that 50,000-plus bears just as fast as we could. Despite a scattering of encounters with grizzly bears as early as the 1600s, for two centuries after Europeans settled the continent, grizzly bears were little known to folk knowledge and only existed as rumors in the scientific grasp of North America.
9:51 Speaker 02 The first known description of grizzlies we have by a European was left by Spanish explorer Sebastian Visceno in the year 1602. Sailing along California's central coast, in the bay where Monterey and Carmel and Pebble Beach Golf Course would one day stand, two centuries before the Lewis and Clark expedition would bring white bears to the attention of Enlightenment science, Visceno watched grizzlies clamoring with astonishing nimbleness over the carcass of a whale washed up on a Monterey Bay beach. Almost a century later, in 1690 and far, far inland, a Hudson's Bay Indian trader
10:33 Speaker 02 named Henry Kelsey was traveling overland on the grassy, yellow plains of Saskatchewan when his party encountered a grizzly. This was not a view from the safety of a sailing vessel, but face-to-face on the ground, and Kelsey's first reaction was to shoot. He thus became the first European of record to kill a grizzly bear, an event pregnant with portents for the future of bears and of the Great Plains. Kelsey's act greatly alarmed his Indian companions, who warned him that he had struck down a god. Paleontology, archaeology, and the historical record have convincingly established that
11:16 Speaker 02 the entire western half of North America, including California, the river corridors spilling from the Rockies out across the plains, and the island mountain ranges of the southwest, were all grizzly country then. Visceno's sightings were on the Pacific coast. Kelsey and Lewis and Clark saw all their grizzlies on the high plains. The bears were in those locations because of their food sources. Grizzlies in the interior were primarily plains animals because of the vast opportunities 30 million buffalo provided. In other words, when you were in buffalo country in the early West, you were in grizzly country too.
12:00 Speaker 02 One of the stories from early American forays into the West that has long fascinated me, a story that passed by word of mouth back to places like my home state of Louisiana, took place on the southern high plains in 1821 on what was christened White Bear Creek, now known as the Purgatory River, on the plains southeast of Pike's Peak in Colorado.
12:26 Speaker 02 A group of Missouri and Louisiana traders had worked their way up the Arkansas River to trade with the Comanches, and when the cold snaps of November hit, they moved towards the mountains to seek winter quarters. For many of the semi-illiterate southern traders involved, this was their first inkling that the West held anything like a grizzly bear. I find this account, flavorly preserved and creatively spelled, too, in the journal of a trader named Jacob Fowler, chillingly authentic, and also tragic for both man and bear. This is how Fowler told this remarkable story in the daily journal he kept.
13:07 Speaker 02 "13 November 1821, Tuesday. Went to the highest of the mounds near our camp and took the bearing of the supposed mountain which stood at north 80 west. We then proceeded on two and a half miles to a small crick, crossed it, and ascended a gradual rise for about three miles to the highest ground in the neighborhood, where we had a full view of the mountains. This must be the place where, in 1807, Zebulon Montgomery Pike first discovered the mountains. Here I took the bearing of two that were the highest, crossed the crick, and camped in a grove of bushes and timber about two miles up it from the river.
13:52 Speaker 02 We made 11 miles west this day. We stopped here about one o'clock and sent back for one horse that was not able to keep up. We here found some grapes among the brush. While some were hunting and others cooking, some picking grapes, a gun was fired, and the cry of a white bear was raised. We were all armed in an instant, and each man run his own course to look for the desperate animal. The brush in which we were camped contained from 10 to 20 acres into which the bear had run for shelter, finding himself surrounded on all sides. Through this, Colonel Glenn, with four others, attempted to run, but the bear being in the woods...
14:35 Speaker 02 Their way and lay close in the brush undiscovered till they were within a few feet of it when it sprung up and caught Lewis Dawson and pulled him down in an instant. Colonel Glenn's gun misfire or he would ever leave the man, but a large dog which belongs to the party attackeded the bear with such fury that it left the man and pursued her a few steps, in which time the man got up and run a few steps, but was overtaken by the bear. When the Colonel made a second attempt to shoot, his gun misfire again, and the dog as before relieved the man who run as before, but was soon again in the grasp of the bear, who seemed intent on his destruction.
15:20 Speaker 02 The Colonel now became alarmed lest the bear would pursue him and run up a stooping tree and after him the wounded man, and was followed by the bear, and thus they were all three of one tree. But the bear caught Dawson by one leg and drew him backwards down the tree. I was myself down the crick below the brush and heard the dreadful screams of the man and the clutches of the bear, the yelping of the dog, and the hollowing of the men to run in, run in, the man will be killed. But before I got to the place of action, the bear was killed, and I met the wounded man with Robert Fowler and one or two more assisting him to camp where his wounds were examined.
16:04 Speaker 02 It appears his head was in the bear's mouth at least twice, and that when the monster gave the crush that was to mash the man's head, it being too large for the span of his mouth, the head slipped out, only the teeth cutting the skin to the bone wherever they touched it. So that the skin of the head was cut from about the ears to the top in several directions, all of which wounds were sewed up as well as could be done by men in our situation having no surgeon or surgical instruments. The man still retained his understanding, but said, "I am killed that I heard my skull break." But we were willing to believe he was mistaken, as he spoke cheerfully on the subject, till
16:47 Speaker 02 in the afternoon of the second day, when he began to be restless and somewhat delirious, and on examining a hole in the upper part of his right temple, which we believed only skin deep, we found the brains working out. We then supposed that he did hear his skull break. He lived till a little before day on the third day after being wounded, all which time we lay at camp and buried him as well as our means would admit. Immediately after the fatal accident, and having done all we could for the wounded man, we turned our attention to the bear and found him a large, fat animal. We skinned him, but found the smell of a polecat so strong that we could not eat the
17:32 Speaker 02 meat. On examining his mouth, we found that three of his teeth were broken off near the gums, which we suppose was the cause of his not killing the man at the first bite, and the one tooth not broke to be the cause of the hole in the right temple which killed the man at last. Two things strike me about this story every time I read it. One is how unlucky a mature, veteran male bear was to have a party of armed traders stumble cluelessly into thick brush along a creek festooned with ripe grapes on which
18:13 Speaker 02 the bear was no doubt gorging to prepare for hibernation. And second, this was a familiar, consistent reaction from big predators. Once the grizzly's lair was invaded, the bear focused specifically on one man and ignored the rest of the party. Fowler mentions hearing a single shot at the outset of the melee. Given how many times Lewis and Clark describe a grizzly going straight for the member of their party who shot it, I'm convinced Dawson must have shot this bear, and from that point on, he was its single-minded focus of revenge.
18:56 Speaker 02 African lions are known to do the very same thing.
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21:29 Speaker 02 Stories such as this one, and the Hugh Glass story from the northern plains, circulating through the frontier towns, were instrumental in casting all grizzlies as wrathful monsters to be hunted down and shot to death at every opportunity. Back in 1991, the writers Tim Clark and Denise Casey compiled a volume they titled Tales of the Grizzly: Thirty-Nine Stories of Grizzly Bear Encounters in the Wilderness, which chronicled grizzly-human encounters in the northern Rocky Mountains from 1804 through 1929. They charted five distinct periods in the evolution of the American relationship with grizzly bears. First, a Native American period, when bears were mythic figures, teachers of medicines,
22:13 Speaker 02 helpers, a species whose physiological similarity to humans offered the possibility for transmigration in both directions. A relationship with nature, Clark and Casey assert, that would have been almost incomprehensible to most modern Americans. Number two, there was an exploration fur trade period, exemplified by the grizzly encounters of Lewis and Clark, Hugh Glass, and Jacob Fowler, which created the initial impressions of grizzlies as "the horrible bear," the wilderness fiend that offered Americans a reminder of the dangers of uncontrolled, chaotic nature that the country must civilize. Periods three and four in this chronology are the periods of conquest and settlement,
22:58 Speaker 02 when homesteaders resolved that it was a Christian duty to eradicate grizzlies and other formidable wildlife in order to liberate wilderness for God and civilization. During this phase, tens of thousands of grizzly bears were shot on sight, and not just to wipe them off the plains for the arrival of the livestock industry. Settlers killed 423 grizzlies in the North Cascade Mountains alone, just between 1846 and 1851. Then, in the early 20th century, the Great American War on Grizzly Bears featured an alliance between livestock interests and the U.S. Biological Survey, whose hunters made
23:39 Speaker 02 official the war on wolves, coyotes, lions, and bears, in the process creating an early federal subsidy for the ranching industry in the West.
23:51 Speaker 02 That same progressive era witnessed the official rise of sport hunting and its replacement of market hunting, which now had a black eye. Sport hunters took to heart President Theodore Roosevelt's advice that "the most thrilling moments of an American hunter's life are those in which, with every sense on the alert and with nerves strung to the highest point, he is following alone the fresh and bloody footprints of an angered grizzly." For hunters, eliminating bad animals like predators made sense not just in terms of growing the numbers of huntable elk and deer. Going after grizzlies also had become the ultimate nostalgic capture of the vanishing
24:36 Speaker 02 frontier, the hunter's version of a Frederick Remington or Charlie Russell painting. As Roosevelt put it tellingly, "No other triumph of American hunting can compare with the victory to be thus gained." Which, in an age when some western states are thinking anew about grizzly bear hunts, if and when grizzly bears are no longer on the endangered species list and their management is given to the states, makes the following story worth telling. The Earl of Dunraven, his full name was Wyndham Thomas Wyndham Quinn, fourth Earl
25:15 Speaker 02 of Dunraven, spent much of his life in elite English circles, but he yearned to hunt grizzlies. Born to privilege, Dunraven had fellow aristocrats and politicians as friends. He also consorted with painters and actors, even scientists. His circle made up the audience at the famous evolution debate at Oxford in 1860, when Robert Fitzroy, formerly the captain of the HMS Beagle, stood up and, waving his Bible, exclaimed of Darwin, "Had I known then what I know now, I would not have taken him aboard." While Darwin and evolution were the talk of the scientific world,
25:59 Speaker 02 the American West and its animals provided a classic elitist recreational escape for Dunraven. Hunting first in Colorado and Nebraska, Dunraven was soon drawn north by eye-popping stories of wildlife in primeval abundance in Montana. Eventually, he found the Butler Brothers in the Paradise Valley and hired them as guides. Colonials in East Africa claimed one couldn't go native without taking on a lion, which in America Dunraven translated into a grizzly bear hunt. Word was, if left alone, a grizzly rarely engaged humans. But if attacked, the bears tended to respond in kind and with unparalleled vigor.
26:45 Speaker 02 Dunraven's guides dutifully put him on to a grizzly. But when he fired and the enraged animal world to locate its tormentor, the nobleman's bravado collapsed. "I never heard any beast roar like it before, and I hope I never may again," he shakily wrote in his journal. "It was the most awful noise you can imagine." The nobleman's dreamed-of bout with America's king of beasts didn't go quite as he had imagined. As the wounded bear searched for him and bellowed its final, blood-drenched breaths, "I lay on the ground as flat by God as a flapjack," he admitted.
27:28 Speaker 02 As grizzly numbers dropped drastically in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, an interesting phenomenon emerged in the way Americans began to perceive animals like grizzly bears and gray wolves. As animal numbers dwindled, or as the persecution amplified, ranchers, sportsmen, and bureau hunters began to individualize particular animals and give them their own personalities and names. Once so numerous out on the plains, grizzlies, elk, and other classic Great Plains species had now fled to the mountains. So these last bears are always secreted away up in the peaks.
28:10 Speaker 02 Among grizzlies, there was the Wyoming bear known as Bigfoot Wallace. There was a notorious California grizzly of the Sierra Nevada called Clubfoot, a Colorado grizzly named Old Moze, a grizzly in Idaho known as Old Ephraim, and a Gray Bull River bear Wyoming ranchers named Wob, whose life story in much fictionalized form the nature writer Ernest Thompson Seton told in his 1900 book, The Biography of a Grizzly. This individualization of grizzlies was an interesting development. It rested on a sentiment clearly widespread in America at the turn of the century, which
28:51 Speaker 02 had its sources in Darwinian thought as popularized by the natural history writers of the day. Seton, Jack London, Enos Mills, and John Muir were all struggling to erase the tennyson imagery of a Darwinian world as nature read in tooth and claw. The literary devices they used, the personification of animals, an emphasis on animal individuality, cooperation, intelligence, and reasoning, and the device of telling their stories from the point of view of the animals themselves, as in London's Call of the Wild or James Oliver Kerwood's The Grizzly King, were designed to affect a more favorable regard for animals.
29:36 Speaker 02 Humanitarian animal reformers at the turn of the century even discussed the possibility that animals might have souls, a specialty religion reserved only for humans. As H.W. Boynton, a critic following these trends, summarized, "The message for a world distressed by the implications of Darwinism seemed to be, if we are only a little higher than the dog, we may as well make the dog out to be as fine a fellow as possible." Despite the sympathetic but dubious view of grizzlies Seton presented in his The Biography of a Grizzly, with so many other bears killed and his mountains filling with ranchers and
30:18 Speaker 02 tourists, aging bear Matisse Wob takes his own life. Or in Kerwood's The Grizzly King, where the wounded but peace-loving grizzly lets his hunter antagonist walk away unharmed, the nature writers of the age weren't entirely wrong. A century later, we know that other animals are certainly individuals, that almost all higher species hand down culture, another practice we once thought ours alone. Equally to the point of the grizzly's history since the time of Lewis and Clark, the real wab met a rather different end than Seton gave him.
30:58 Speaker 02 He was shot by a rancher, the fourth grizzly the hunter had killed that day. Which is what we did everywhere. Ranchers, sport hunters, and paid federal hunters steadily extirpated grizzlies across the West. For many of the shooters, a rite of masculinity. A story in Harper's Magazine in 1861 claimed that "the ladies much admired a chawed-up man." These largest of our carnivores struck many as too dangerous to exist in an America modeled on Europe. Everyone tended to agree that the huge bears needed to go from all settled country.
31:40 Speaker 02 Naturalist Elliot Cowes, who collected a grizzly in the San Francisco mountains of Arizona and also had extensive experience farther north, believed grizzlies were originally most numerous of all in the Southwest. "The southern Rocky Mountains and the ranges of California seemed to be particularly the home of the huge grizzly," he wrote, "which becomes less numerous farther north." There were good reasons for that. Grizzlies in California, where the bears fed on foods from a profusion of habitats, included carrion washed ashore on the Pacific coast. And they did not hibernate. As elsewhere in the Southwest, their numbers shot up dramatically
32:24 Speaker 02 with the carrion possibilities from Spanish-introduced cattle and horses. An early American pioneer in today's Napa-Sonoma wine country, George Yount, wrote of grizzlies there that "it was not unusual to see fifty or sixty within 24 hours." That kind of presence terrified people not used to wild America. The grizzly's sheer size also terrified, especially in California, where the bears grew as large as Kodiak bears in Alaska. But as carrion eaters, the big bears by the 20th century were dying by the thousands from eating poisoned baits sat out in the general war on predators.
33:08 Speaker 02 By then settlers had driven grizzlies off the Great Plains and from the open country of California. From a vast population of grizzlies that only 75 years before had numbered more than 10,000, the final one of California's totem animals died near Sequoia National Park in 1922. The last grizzly to die in Texas in 1890 was killed by a group on a Christian outing in the Davis Mountains. The last grizzly in Utah fell in 1923, and the last bears in Oregon and New Mexico in 1931. Arizona's last grizzly died in 1935.
33:50 Speaker 02 A hunter shot the last of Washington's original grizzlies in the North Cascades in 1967. As for Colorado, a state that supposedly produced a killing machine of a bear, ranchers claim the grizzly called Old Mo's killed 800 cattle and five humans in the state. Colorado still hosted bears in its San Juan Mountains well past the 1950s. What made it possible for grizzlies to continue to live in the Lower 48 were our grand public lands. But in 1950, a national census estimated that from a population of 56,000 bears at
34:30 Speaker 02 the time of Lewis and Clark, only 750 grizzly bears remained alive in the lower contiguous states. Those were in two distinct places that unfortunately for grizzly genetics were 200 miles of settled country apart, in and around Glacier National Park in northwest Montana and in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem in northwest Wyoming.
34:56 Speaker 02 For the past quarter century, we have been doing our best to get bears into the Bitter Roots, where they might link the populations in Glacier and Yellowstone, and into the North Cascades again. Grizzly populations have been growing in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and along the Rocky Mountain Front, and with bears once again making their way out onto the Great Plains homeland, in the 2020s grizzly bear populations are approaching 2,000 bears. Old West Indian villages, full of dogs that once kept grizzlies at bay, have pointed towards one solution for modern human coexistence with bears.
35:38 Speaker 02 If grizzlies come off the endangered species list, it might be that hunting seasons are another. I'll confess that my own fantasy for the future is seeing plains grizzlies out in the American Prairie Reserve, where they're going to add an exclamatory flourish to rewilding our continental Serengeti. But it's still not easy for bears to settle in any of those places. A few years ago, a group of us spent five days backpacking into the Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana. The Bob is a place where the blocky limestone ridges of Montana's Rocky Mountain Front drop away to the plains, yellow grasslands that roll away as they always have done,
36:22 Speaker 02 nearly 500 miles east. There had been days of rain before we got into the mountains, and within a couple of miles of the trailhead, we began to notice not only wolf tracks on the trail, but as well the prints of a gigantic grizzly bear, splayed out in the mud like impact craters on a distant planet. What particularly caught our attention as we hiked in was that the bear tracks were headed out towards the plains.
36:49 Speaker 02 A week after we got out of the mountains, back in Missoula, the local paper carried a headline that shocked all of us. Later, on the very day we had hiked out to our cars, a forest service ranger had found an immense male grizzly, shot dead and left to rot less than a mile onto the plains. It was not just any bear. Biologists and rangers had known this particular bear for well over a decade. They had named him Maximus because of his extraordinary size. He'd stood seven and a half feet tall and weighed 800 pounds. Biologists were certain at the time that he was the biggest grizzly in Montana.
37:31 Speaker 02 But what most characterized this bear was his remarkably good behavior. He was a grizzly that had never gotten in any trouble, had left stock alone, had retreated into the woods when hikers passed and ignored their camps. But he was heading onto the prairie, the grizzly's Elysian Fields for millions of years. That presumably got him shot. A respectful wild grizzly, who knew how to live among us, deserved a better fate.
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40:34 Speaker 04 So Dan, we, Sydney and I were out deer hunting last year and we're out on a piece of property, piece of state land adjacent to the American Prairie. And she killed a buck and we had the dogs with us. So we brought the dogs out while we were cutting the buck apart. And all of a sudden they start barking and barking at something in the trees. And my, my, my mind immediately said, well, thank God we're not in grizzly country. Cause whatever, whatever that is, we don't really need to worry about it. And then my mind sort of before I was even doing it consciously, my mind just corrected itself. And it said, no, we're in grizzly country.
41:17 Speaker 04 Maybe 20 years ago, we, we might not have been in grizzly country. In 2024, it's grizzly country again. And if you go back 150 years, it's definitely grizzly country. So.
41:32 Speaker 04 I'm kind of curious, like grizzly bears, for whatever reason, we sort of placed them in these two very distinct landscapes in Montana, but the historical record shows that grizzly country is much larger than you'd initially assume.
41:50 Speaker 02 I think one of the exciting parts of the grizzly story in the West is the fact that they were an open country species. And the reason that's exciting to me is because, you know, like most of us, I have grown up knowing, okay, so what distinguishes the Northern Rockies from the rest of the West is that it still has grizzly bears, but the bears are all secreted away in the mountains. They're in Glacier, they're on the Yellowstone
42:25 Speaker 02 Plateau, they're up in the Bob Marshall country. But it's fun to know that grizzlies originally were way out onto the Great Plains. I mean, all of those encounters that Lewis and Clark had with all of their bears, their 37 or 38 bears they encountered, I mean, they were all out on the high plains. And that was the case up until really probably the 1870s or 1880s. I mean, George Armstrong Custer killed a grizzly bear out on the plains, too.
43:04 Speaker 02 And so it's exciting to think that while we drove them back into the recesses of the mountains, that today they're starting to return. I mean, and I have had conversations with people here just in the last few weeks that make me know pretty convincingly that there are bears well out onto the Montana plains now, getting out into the Badlands country and getting close to American Prairie. Lands. And so it's that's, that's an exciting thing to me to see a species as charismatic,
43:50 Speaker 02 as, you know, as moving because of the danger that their presence implies as grizzly bears be out in the bigger world again, out in their original range.
44:04 Speaker 04 Yeah, and I think this sort of pairs nicely with another thread in this, in this chapter, where you're talking about the, the program to reintroduce or the, the attempt to reintroduce grizzly bears into the Bitterroot. And if you talk to anybody in sort of the greater Missoula area these days, there are grizzlies that make their way through the Bitterroot and the biologists are convinced that they're going to end up there anyway, without a relocation program, like a, you know, a resident population. And so it's one of these stories where I think in some ways, like when you think about wolves, reintroduction is very controversial, but the wolves are moving there on their
44:49 Speaker 04 own. And in the grizzly bear story, reintroduction is so unthinkable for a lot of people that the bears are actually being left to do it on their own.
45:00 Speaker 02 Yeah, so when I was living in the, in the Bitterroot, which of course I did for
45:07 Speaker 02 more than 15 years, there were at least three different times, at least three different times that I was aware of, where bears appeared. And I was on the Sapphire Mountain side of the valley, on the east side of the valley, and bears, that's where the bears were coming in. They were coming in from that side, from the sapphires and getting down into the edges of the valley itself. I mean, there probably no doubt were bears over on the Bitterroot side too, doing the same thing. But I think we were, we seemed to be most aware of the ones that were occasionally coming down into the east side of the valley. So they were colonizing. I mean, they're going to do the same. There's no question. They're going
45:49 Speaker 02 to do the same thing that, that the bears are doing, going out onto the Great Plains now. They're going to do it on their own. But when we actually attempted, and we got within about two or three months of actually releasing, doing hard releases of grizzlies over on the Bitterroot side of the valley in about 2001 or so. When that was happening, I still very much remember that at least a third of the automobiles in Ravalli County, Montana, had no grizzly introduction bumper stickers on the back of their muddy pickups and their old Volvos and things.
46:32 Speaker 02 There was a very definite kind of incomprehension that having managed to make the Bitterroot Valley grizzly bear free at some point in our history, that we actually were considering the idea of reintroducing grizzlies to that part of the world. And I, you know, there's no question that living with grizzlies is a different thing. It's a different thing than living with wolves. Grizzly bears are unpredictable and you have to kind of be aware all the time when you're in grizzly country that you have to make noise and you have to make sure that you don't come up on them and surprise them and you have to be on the lookout, in particular,
47:15 Speaker 02 of course, for sows with cubs. And so it's a, it raises the level of, of kind of awareness of being in the world to a degree that I think a lot of modern people don't want to do. I found it exciting. I mean, the grizzly bears that I encountered, I mean, it was, it was always an exciting thing and I was always really careful about how I did it. But I can understand that, you know, there are people who are pretty freaked out about the idea of having grizzlies around again.
47:53 Speaker 04 Yeah, and that's another point that comes up in this, in this chapter is there's this psychology of, of grizzly bears and people. And one of the things that, when Steve and I were working on the Mountain Man audiobook...
48:11 Speaker 04 And you read their account, you read journals, or you read memoirs, or you read letters, the grizzly is this looming figure at every turn. And then you start to read more deeply and try to figure out, well, who was actually attacked by a grizzly? How many? And there's only a handful. I think like, I'm trying to remember if it was three or eight mountain men that were actually killed by grizzly bears. It's single digits, but you can't read an account without, if you took them at their, at face value, the grizzly bear was lurking around every corner. And, and you know, they're only surviving these grizzly encounters by the grace of God.
48:55 Speaker 02 Yeah, I know. It feels like that when you read those accounts and they're certainly, you know, and it's like anything, I mean, we do the same thing today with, with murder statistics in cities. All you need is one example, and everybody is kind of freaked out for months after that. And I think the grizzly encounters in the West were a little bit like that. They were actually few and far between. And one of the things that has always intrigued me is by reading closely into these accounts and people's encounters with bears, is that if you didn't happen upon them and surprise them, you almost had
49:38 Speaker 02 to intentionally provoke a grizzly bear to get it to do something that was dangerous to humans. I mean, there are so many instances, for example, in the Lewis and Clark journals, which I talked about in an earlier episode of the podcast, where, I mean, the bears were just, you know, grazing on spring grass and paying no attention to these guys going by, but they had a kind of, you know, an inability to pass up the opportunity to go out and shoot one. And one of the things that I tried to make clear from the stories that I read, particularly that Jacob Fowler story, and the Earl of Dunravon story too, that I tell in this particular episode, is the bears were kind of in this situation
50:23 Speaker 02 where, and as I say, in the, in the script for this particular episode, I've seen this, have read about it, and also even seen video of it, among lions in Africa. They will very quickly recognize who among a group of humans has attacked them. And that's who they go after. They will ignore everybody else and go specifically after the person who had fired a shot at them or, you know, more egregiously hit them.
50:58 Speaker 04 Mm hmm.
50:58 Speaker 02 And man, when that happens, the bears are just kind of single minded in their focus. It's one of the things that has always just kind of given me a little bit of chill about that Jacob Fowler story that I tell in this one is, I mean, there were like 35 people in that party and that bear was determined to get one guy, the guy that it sounds pretty definitively as if he's the one who saw the bear first and shot it. And the bear paid no attention to anybody else, just went after him.
51:27 Speaker 04 Yeah.
51:27 Speaker 02 And got him.
51:29 Speaker 04 And I think that, to me, that sort of connects with this idea of bears being like very individual animals with specific personalities. And you get into that when you look at much later in the era when
51:45 Speaker 02 Yeah.
51:46 Speaker 04 there's surviving grizzlies on these landscapes, but people very easily give them names and assign them personalities and assign them all these characteristics in a way that it's almost unimaginable for us to do with like a whitetail deer or something like that.
52:03 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think, you know, I think we have difficulty doing the Bambi thing.
52:11 Speaker 04 Mm hmm.
52:12 Speaker 02 Um, it's pretty evident though, and I'll have occasion to talk about this a couple of more times in other episodes of the podcast, it's pretty evident that we did this, this with bears, we did it with wolves. I mean, particularly when you get down to the last animals that are out there. And that's when people began to assign particular individual qualities to these animals. I mean, it may be that it's more difficult to do to a herd animal like a bison or animals that exist in large numbers like deer than it is to these big Carnivores, which you start out with, first of all, there are fewer of them than
52:53 Speaker 02 there are ungulates, and particularly, I think it becomes easier to give them individual names when the numbers begin to, to drop. But yeah, that's a, you know, and I, I will say from conversations I've had with, with contemporary biologists, that there is an inclination to go in the direction these days of beginning to look at animals individually, rather than just as a kind of a lumpen species. That's the sort of wildlife management strategy we've had in place for more than a century. But there are quite a number of biologists I've talked to who are thinking in terms these days of, of animals as individuals who have their own life experiences. And, you know, and that's something we've kind
53:34 Speaker 02 of, I think, a lot of people have pushed back on since the days of Ernest Thompson Seton and Jack London and the so-called nature faker controversy.
53:45 Speaker 04 But maybe we've gone too far.
53:47 Speaker 02 I think we've probably gone too far. And, and I think that, I mean, we have no difficulty whatsoever in recognizing our companion animals, our dogs, for example, as individuals. And I think it's not so big a step for us to, to assume that that's the same thing that is in play with, you know, I mean, Rick McIntyre is writing the biographies of individual wolves in Yellowstone these days. And I think it's probably a step in a good direction.
54:18 Speaker 04 Well, then, thanks. It's always good to chat.
54:21 Speaker 02 You bet, Randall. Thank you, man.
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