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Post by brobear on Jun 4, 2020 12:58:24 GMT -5
Grizzlies and Grizzled Old Men continued... James Capen Adams was born in Medway, Mississippi, and didn't arrive in California until the autumn of 1849 during the gold rush. Mining wasn't in his blood, though, so he turned to the one thing that did interest him: wild animals. Leaving behind the teeming cities and gold mining towns, Adams headed for the mountains with a team of oxen pulling an old wagon, two rifles, and a pistol, along with several bowie knives. Besides being an excellent shot, Adams possessed a variety of skills that served him well in the wilderness. He became an expert at constructing log cabin traps for bears and also made the steel cages to transport them back to civilization for bear/bull fights or for export . During his first trip afield, he killed several grizzlies, often administering the coup de grace with his bowie knife. Adams was soon doing a brisk trade in the export of pelts and wild animals, and it was his uncanny ability to bring back alive a large collection of lethal predators that furnished Adams with his first taste of notoriety and acclaim. A flurry of activity always surrounded Adams when, dressed in buckskin and beaver hat, he strolled triumphantly through San Francisco's wharf district on his way to the docks with a great menagerie of wild animals drawn behind him in wagons.
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Post by brobear on Jun 4, 2020 12:58:49 GMT -5
Continued... In the summer of 1853, while on a hunt in Eastern Washington Territory ( probably present-day Montana ), Adams killed a sow grizzly with two cubs. The men chased down and captured the orphaned young. Adams chained the female cub to a tree and muzzled her, then set about "training" her. After trying kindly advances without success, Adams became incensed when the cub swatted his offered hand. He then proceeded to beat her relentlessly until she was reduced to an exhausted, whimpering ball of fur. When he reached out to touch her, she did not protest, instead trembled in fear. Soon he was stroking her lovingly and feeding her by hand. He named her Lady Washington. Before long the bear was allowed to roam around camp on a tether and eventually learned to follow Adams without a tether. On one of her first hunting trips with Adams, Lady Washington assisted him in routing a wild grizzly. Amazingly, Lady Washington was also taught, after a series of beatings, to carry small packs on her back. The California Menagerie, as it came to be called, caused quite a stir that fall when Adams strolled through the streets of Portland, Oregon, leading every sort of wild animal imaginable, along with Lady Washington, now weighing 300 pounds, walking placidly beside him with a bundle of hides on her back. Much to his pleasure, he was referred to thereafter as "Grizzly" Adams.
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Post by brobear on Jun 4, 2020 12:59:13 GMT -5
Continued... In the early spring of 1854, Grizzly Adams and a Mr. Solon of Sonora traveled through Yosemite Valley and discovered a grizzly den. Adams shot the bear and heard whimpering inside. He crawled into the den and came out with two tiny cubs, sightless and probably only a week old. Adams named the cubs General Jackson and Ben Franklin. A greyhound in the party was nursing a litter of pups, so Adams had the grizzly cubs suckle on the dog. Later that year, Adams took a trip east of the Sierra Nevada through Nevada and Utah seeking wild animals to kill and trap. While he was camped in the mountains, Lady Washington was visited several nights by a Rocky Mountain grizzly. Though tempted to kill the interloper, Adams held off as long as Lady Washington showed no indication of leaving with the big male. His hunch paid off, for the next year Lady Washington gave birth to a single cub that Adams named Fremont.
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Post by brobear on Jun 4, 2020 12:59:48 GMT -5
Continued... Leaving mother and cub behind, Adams returned to the Sierra Nevada on a hunting trip. While he was passing through a chaparral thicket, a huge female grizzly with three cubs sprang upon Adams, knocked his gun away, and threw him to the ground. Ben Franklin attacked the female at the throat, causing the bigger bear to turn on him. This gave Adams time to grab his rifle and kill the sow, but both Ben and Adams carried wicked scars of the fight for the rest of their lives. Actually, the capture and domestication of grizzly cubs was not unheard of in those days. To capture and try to domesticate a full-grown grizzly, on the other hand, was considered suicidal. This dubious honor frll to Grizzly Adams in the winter of 1855.
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Post by brobear on Jun 4, 2020 13:00:11 GMT -5
Continued...
Adams built a large log cabin trap along the Mercedes River in Northern California. Months after first baiting the trap, Adams was awakened in the middle of the night by the unearthly bellowing of a bear. With pine torches, Adams and two Indian boys approached the trap and found a huge grizzly "taking chips out of the pine logs faster than I could with an axe." To distract the bear from tearing through the logs, Adams thrust a torch into its face, then prodded it back with sharp sticks and hot rods. Adams camped on top of the log cabin trap for eight days to keep the huge brute from escaping. He finally left the boys to watch over the bear and hastened for Stockton to fetch a steel cage.
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Post by brobear on Jun 4, 2020 13:00:34 GMT -5
Continued... Adams was forced, at the risk of life and limb, to pass a heavy chain through the steel bars of the cage, then into the trap. After a day of trying, Adams finally got the chain around the bear's head. Then with the oxen pulling mightily on the chain and the men "burning, punching and pulling" finally forced the furiously battling bear into the steel cage. Only after Adams was assured that he'd be able to get the berserk grizzly out alive did he name the bear Samson, alluding to the strong man of biblical times. Grizzly Adams had proven his bravery with wild animals, but even he knew his limits with Samson. He was eventually able to display the huge bear, but always with a heavy chain fastened around his neck. Regardless, visitors took one look at the menacing stare of the enormous bear and gave him a wide birth.
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Post by brobear on Jun 4, 2020 13:01:00 GMT -5
Continued... Anxious to show off his captured animals, Adams opened a live museum on Clay Street in San Francisco. He proved to be a natural showman and his sizeable menagerie of wild birds and animals began to draw large audiences nightly. Theodore Hittell, a young reporter for the Daily Evening Edition in San Francisco, wrote:
Descending the stairway, I found a most remarkable spectacle. The basement was a large one but with a low ceiling, and dark, dingy in appearance. In the middle, chained to the floor, were two large grizzly bears, named Ben Franklin and Lady Washington. They paced restlessly in circles. Not far off were several other younger grizzlies and black bears also chained. Near the front of the room was an open stall in which were haltered several mature elks. Further back were cages with lions and several other California animals. At the rear, in a very large iron cage, was the monster grizzly, Samson. He was an immense creature weighing some three-quarters of a ton, and from his look and actions, as well as the care taken to rail him from the spectators, it was evidenced that he should not be approached too closely.
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Post by brobear on Jun 4, 2020 13:01:24 GMT -5
Continued... On February 1, 1977, NBC aired an hour-long nature-based adventure program titled "The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams." Starring Dan Haggerty as the famous James Capen "Grizzly" Adams, the first episode portrayed Adams as a gentle man seeking the solitude of wilderness who befriended an orphaned grizzly cub ( Ben ). Together this unlikely team of man and bear went about solving life's problems. Their most amazing accomplishment was the bridging of the language barrier. When Haggerty spoke to Ben, this amazing bear somehow understood him and responded with head wags and nods, or occasional bawls and grunts. The series was long on sentiment and short on historical accuracy, for the real Grizzly Adams did things a bit differently. Desiring a young grizzly to train, Adams located a den, stuck his gun barrel against the groggy mother's head, and blew her brains out, at which point he yanked two bawling cubs out of the hole and proceeded to "train" them. The real Grizzly Adams accomplished his training by using clubs, chains, and whips to beat the young bears into quivering balls of submission.
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Post by brobear on Jun 4, 2020 13:01:52 GMT -5
Continued... William Wright was born in 1856 on a hardscrabble farm in New Hampshire, where the drudgery of work was a constant. After dinner the family would gather around the woodstove and listen to his father read. One evening, William's dad began to read from a book titled The Adventures of James Capan Adams, Mountaineer and Grizzly Bear Hunter of California. William and his brothers pestered their father to read the book over and over again; and though the boys could not yet read, they virtually wore out the book while studying its sketches and illustrations. When William was about six years old, the P.T.Barnum Circus came to town, and in its menagerie was one of the bears that Grizzly Adams had captured. William Wright reminisced years later in his book The Grizzly Bear, "That bear was the only thing I can recall from that circus. I dreamed, boy-like, of emulating Adams, and I openly declared my resolve. Strangely, I never changed my mind even as I grew older." Though his apprenticeship as a blacksmith and a machinist almost took him to Australia, Wright at the last minute switched plans and took a train west, hopping off in Spokane, Washington. William Wright, at long last, had arrived in grizzly country.
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Post by brobear on Jun 4, 2020 13:02:21 GMT -5
Continued...
But the fledgling grizzly-bear hunter had a lot to learn. Unfortunately, he listened to and believed much of the misinformation about the great grizzled bear that still stalked some of the forests around Spokane. The most prevalent myth was that one needed only walk to the head of a draw and allow his scent to blow down it. Any grizzly bear, upon catching a whiff of human in the area, would make straight for the man with the intention of attacking him. Wright quickly discovered that not only was this information false, the opposite was true. The grizzly strove mightily to go the other way, rather than face a man with a gun.
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Post by brobear on Jun 4, 2020 13:03:52 GMT -5
Continued... After moving to Missoula, Montana, Wright began roaming the wild Bitterroot Mountains that separate Idaho from Montana. On the Idaho side he came upon a cascading, boulder-strewn stream teaming with spawning salmon, and there in the mud were fresh beat tracks. Wright wrote:
As I waited along the stream, I was not uncomfortable at first, but as the sun dipped behind the ridge, I began to tremble but still did not want to give up the hunt. Then my teeth began to chatter and I decided that I would wait five more minutes and then leave.
When I stood to leave, I looked upstream and saw a grizzly very much like the old bear I had studied in the circus many years before. The brute was headed straight for me. I hunkered down and waited until he was so close that escape would be impossible. As I raised my rifle, it seemed certain that my dream of a lifetime was to come true. When some firty yards off, he turned a little to go around a bush and presented a perfect shot. I raised up, aimed carefully just on the point of the shoulder close to the neck, and pulled the trigger. It never entered my thoughts but that the bear would drop in its tracks. One can, therefore, imagine my surprise when he gave a roar like a mad bull and came my way on the jump. My rifle jammed ... it looked like I would shortly have all the grizzly down on me I ever wanted. Terrified, I dropped my gun and dove over the stream bank and hid under it. The water was ice cold and I was almost frozen before I jumped in, but now had no regrets. After a half hour of no grizzly charging over the bank after me, I eased out of the water and, though terrified, eased my way toward my rifle. When I finally got a fresh load in it, I again felt brave and began to search for the bear. To my amazement, the brute had expired no more than twenty yards from where he had been shot.
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Post by brobear on Jun 4, 2020 13:04:08 GMT -5
Continued... The old grizzly was everything Wright had ever wanted, but he soon found that the Lochsa River was not only full of salmon, it was also full of bears. William Wright, true to his word, loved bears. He loved then to death. Like a man possessed, he embarked on an orgy of unrestrained killing. A short time after his first Idaho bear kill, Wright discovered winding along the river a major bear trail that held a 14-inch-long track. He became obsessed with finding the big bear responsible for that track. Wright continued killing grizzlies with regularity. In Wright's memoir it becomes apparent that the senseless murder of these baby bears began to eat at him. The massive, gluttonous blood drenching that he had at one time gleefully recounted eventually began to wear on his mind. The memories of baby bears bawling for their dead mothers inspired a fairly momentous decision. William Wright, who claims to have killed more than fifty grizzlies, put down his gun and began to approach the grizzly bear in a far different - and more humane way.
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Post by brobear on Jun 4, 2020 13:04:35 GMT -5
Grizzlies and Grizzled Old Men continued... Theodore Roosevelt may have been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but there was no silver lining in his lungs. The first son of affluent New Yorkers, Teedie, as he was called as a child, suffered from acute asthma. During those precarious days of Teedies early life, if anyone had predicted the boy would one day become an impressive physical specimen, a fearless adventurer and outdoorsman, the father of modern conservation, and one of the most popular presidents of the United States, Mr. Roosevelt would have laughed them to scorn. A more realistic goal at that time would have been to see his son live through the night. But live he did, though for several years Teedie was confined to life indoors, where he usually gravitated to his father's library, which contained all the classic books of the literary world, plus an ample assortment of adventure novels and books by famous explorers. Roosevelt during this time most likely read The Journals of Lewis & Clark and John Hittell's biography of Grizzly Adams.
As he grew older, Teedie's severe asthma miraculously abated, and he began to venture outdoors more and more until, by the age of ten, he was spending every daylight hour exploring the nearby forests and streams. Much to his mother's dismay, Teedie often brought bugs, spiders, mice, rats, snakes, and other objectionable "specimens" into the Roosevelt house.
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Post by brobear on Jun 4, 2020 13:05:01 GMT -5
Roosevelt killed a large bull elk one late afternoon, and while he was hiking out in the dwindling light of dusk, he made a disturbing discovery. He later wrote: "I came upon the huge half-human footprints of a great grizzly, which must have passed by within minutes. It gave me an eerie feeling in the silent, lonely woods, to see for the first time the unmistakable proofs that I was in the home of the lord of the wilderness."
When Roosevelt returned the next day with Merrifield, they discovered that the bear had been feeding on the elk carcass. They waited in ambush all day, but the animal didn't appear. After sunset, as they were preparing to leave, they heard branches snapping in the nearby forest. The grizzly was coming to the carcass. Unfortunately, it was dark before the bear began pulling and tearing at the dead elk, and Roosevelt dared not risk a shot.
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Post by brobear on Jun 4, 2020 13:05:25 GMT -5
Continued... The next morning, Merrifield, a good tracker, took up the bear's tracks. The men followed the bear into a dark forest littered with downed trees. As Merrifield passed by a huge pine log, he dropped to one knee. Roosevelt eased forward with rifle raised. Suddenly, the huge grizzly stood up, and Roosevelt took steady aim at the bear's head and pulled the trigger. The bear dropped in its tracks. Roosevelt estimated the grizzly's weight at over 1,000 pounds and later claimed it was the biggest grizzly bear he ever killed or saw, dead or alive. Though Roosevelt did not specifically target the grizzly for preservation, he most assuredly included the great bear in his wish list of endangered wildlife to be spared extinction. And while it is true that he hunted the great bear, he also called the grizzly the lord of the wilderness - the one animal who, much like himself, would give as much as it got when provoked. During those dark years for wildlife conservation from 1900 to 1960, Yellowstone and Glacier were the great bear's only sanctuaty, and without them the grizzly may well have become extinct. Roosevelt made sure that didn't happen.
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Post by brobear on Jun 4, 2020 13:05:58 GMT -5
Continued... On a late summer afternoon in 1924, a Salish Indian hunting party of two dozen men and women with children rode their horses up a steep mountain trail in western Montana's Swan Range, south of Glacier National Park. The group's leader, Philip Pierre, clad in traditional brown buckskin shirt and leggings, urged his Appaloosa stallion up the rocky path. Deep wrinkles creased his burnished face, and graying hair pulled back in a tight braid attested to his age, but among the Salish there was no equal to his strength and prowess as a hunter. The whites had brought his people nothing but misery and hardship, and the heat of anger flared within him for an instant; but he remembered that the boy, named Bud Cheff, had taken a keen interest in the old ways. He fashioned bows and arrows from creekside willows and hunted small game with the Indian boys. And he pestered the Salish elders about stories of the old days, especially about Sumka, the great bear that roamed the high mountains above the Flathead Indian Reservation. A white Indian.... The thought intrigued Pierre and brought the hint of a wry smile to his cracked lips.
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Post by brobear on Jun 4, 2020 13:06:21 GMT -5
Continued... Pierre led the way, slipping effortlessly through the shadows, but he kept a long, sinewy hand on the boy's skinny shoulder to make sure he did not stray. Pierre knew what lay ahead. He eased forward until amber-gold sunshine splashed upon his face at the edge of the meadow. He grasped the boy's arm to keep him from running, then brought him forward. Young Bud Cheff's eyes bugged out. He gasped and cowered back. Just two rock throws away, three silver-tipped grizzly bears rooted and pawed at the meadow grass, their teeth snapping and lips smacking noisily as they devoured hordes of ladybug larvae among the wildflowers. Cheff turned to the Indian leader and whispered urgently, "Will you shoot them?" Pierre shook his head, but Cheff persisted. "Won't they kill us if they see us?" A faint smile creased Pierre's leathery face. This would be the little white Indian's first lesson. He pointed a crooked finger at the bearsand said, "You no bother'um Sumka, Sumka no bother'um you."
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Post by brobear on Jun 4, 2020 13:06:43 GMT -5
Continued... Seventy-seven years later, I sat across the kitchen table from Bud Cheff in his rustic ranch house nestled among massive ponderosa pine trees at the base of the Mission Mountains. I felt thoroughly humbled and awed to be in the presence of a man whose life spanned an implausible stretch of time: from a time when the last free-roaming Indians clung to the old ways to our present high-tech cyber generation. I had grown to admire the historic Native-American ways by reading books. Now I sat in the presence of a man who'd walked the Indian path, who'd been taken in as one of their own, and whose tongue still tumbled out an occasional Salish word. As a testament to the bridge that Cheff had built between Indians and white men by using trust and respect, the Salish speak of him today with the reverence and respect afforded a tribal leader. Though Cheff and I found common ground in our admiration for the Native American culture, our passions also included the grizzly bear. Cheff had formed a kinship with the great bear by learning from the Indians how to live peacefully with this massive, lumbering beast they called Sumka. Through the years, Cheff's influence has spread to both Native-American and white society with a gospel of respect and understanding for the great bear and a spirit of restraint when man and beast cross paths.
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Post by brobear on Jun 4, 2020 13:07:10 GMT -5
Continued... Bud Moore... I was the ranger at the Powell Ranger District when the grizzly officially became extinct in the Lochsa. That was back in the 1950s, and in those days the idea of bringing back the grizzly was as foreign as putting a man on the moon. The philosophy among Forest Service land managers concerning the grizzly was: "When they're gone, they're gone." Something died in me when I made my annual wildlife report and added a zero next to the grizzly bear. I really wasn't interested in being in a place where the grizzly was absent. It wasn't the same. It didn't have the same feel. The grizzly was gone. What a tragedy. Not only that, but the Lochsa was being roaded up with logging and recreation roads. Then we had this big spruce budworm epidemic. The worms were harming young spruce trees, so the Forest Service sprayed those areas with DDT. We killed the budworms alright, but we killed all the other insects too, and the birds that fed on them, and the frogs and the fish in the waters where the DDT ended up. Six years later, Rachel Carson would write her epic book, Silent Spring, which sounded the alarm about the effects on the food chain of pesticides and other chemicals. For me, it was time to leave. It just wasn't the same anymore.
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Post by brobear on Jun 4, 2020 13:07:58 GMT -5
Continued... Today, the vast 16.1-million-acre Bitterroot ecosystem harbors stately ponderosa pines towering 200 feet above the forest floor. There are alpine meadows and breathtakingly beautiful snow-capped peaks. Royal bull elk grace the high country, and bighorn sheep and mountain goats cling to rugged peaks above. There are whitetail deer and mule deer, coyotes, and now even wolves. There are lots of black bears. But there are no grizzlies. Howard Copenhaver's name, like that of Bud Cheff and Bud Moore, is little known in today's high-profile world of eco-bear warriors, but to wildlife biologists and bear experts, his contributions to the ultimate success of the grizzly bear are considered priceless. Howard literally stood in the gap for the grizzly at a time when hate and fear, and bullets and strychnine, threatened to extinguish its spirit from the land.
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