by Paul R. Spitzzeri
The grizzly bear is California’s official state animal, yet the last reported sighting of Ursus arctos californicus was a century ago at Sequoia National Park as aggressive hunting, as is so often the case, wiped out what was estimated to be a population of around 10,000 animals in the late 1840s. Earlier this year, to make the centennial of that last known view of a California grizzly, State Senator John Laird, a former secretary of the California Natural Resources Agency and representative of the 17th District along the coast in Monterey, San Benito and Santa Cruz counties, offered a resolution to make 2024 the “Year of the California Grizzly Bear.”
The highlighted object from the Museum’s collection for this “At Our Leisure” post is an engraving titled “Grizzly Bear Hunting in Southern California” which appeared in the 21 August 1858 issue of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, which was published from 1855 to 1922. The paper struggled during the depression years from 1857 until the onset of the Civil War and its coverage of the sectarian conflict helped its success, which was largely built on its remarkable engravings and lithographs.
The image here came with an article that discussed bear hunting, though we only have the page with the image, not the portion of the paper that actually described the hunt in which the author, whose name is also not known because it was presumably on another page, took part. We can, however, provide references in Los Angeles newspapers from that period and through the mid-1870s, by which time the local grizzly and other bear populations were significantly reduced due to that voracious desire for hunting them and other wild animals (birds, deer, rabbits and so forth.)
What is distinctive about the engraving, though, is that it shows Spanish-speaking Californios utilizing their superior equestrian skills (they were widely recognized as among the best in the world) and remarkable reata (rope) abilities to capture a grizzly. Typically, though, these animals were not killed as part of the hunt as they were taken alive to be matched up in a fight with a bull—you can imagine what this would entail, especially as both animals were left unfed prior to the battle—in what was usually called “bear-and-bull baiting.” In England, “bear baiting” involved tying them to a stake and letting rabid dogs at them and this was outlawed in 1835.
Given the relatively sparse number of people in pre-American California, such activities did not seem to affect the number of grizzlies in the wild, but the explosion of the Golden State’s population from the Gold Rush afterward, including the rapid growth of hunting and the increasing firepower of rifles, meant that, somewhat akin to buffalo hunting in the midwestern plains and other creatures throughout the country and the world, the grizzly bear was doomed to a quick extinction.
An early reference the local media to grizzly bears (though locally Bear Valley, where Big Bear Lake is now, was famed for its population long before) came in the Los Angeles Star, the first newspaper in town when it was launched in May 1851, in its 18 August 1855 edition. The article concerned a fatal attack that took place at the Tejon Indian Reservation, then situated in Los Angeles County (becoming part of Kern County about a decade later) with a Cañada de los Osos (Bear Canyon) southeast of there near modern Castac Lake. William S. Keene, a 24-year old was felling timber for use at the reservation and, on some free time, went antelope hunting with a friend.
The two were separated and the companion then “found him about three hours after the Bear left him. shockingly mangled—one side of his face literally being torn away, and his thigh and groin dreadfully lacerated.” Keene was attended to as best as could be done under the circumstances and taken 20 miles back to the reservation, where he lived for about two weeks before expiring from his injuries.
In 1854, the Army established Fort Tejon in that area, both for protection of the native people of the reservation as well as to check raids from indigenous people throughout southern California and other parts of the Southwest. The 5 September 1857 edition of the Star made brief reference to a report from the fort that “Lieut. Magruder, commanding the post, and his officers, are well, and anticipating a good time hunting grizzlies, which have been making rather free with the bovine department of the commissariat.”
In other words, it was necessary to hunt bears because of their predations on the cattle raised for the fort. Incidentally, William T. Magruder, stationed at Tejon from 1856-1868, was a Union officer in the Civil War, but switched sides and joined the Confederate Army—he was killed at Gettysburg during the famous Pickett’s Charge on 3 July 1863. Another sidenote was the report of a “very severe shock of an earthquake” not quite a week before—in January the last “Big One” we’ve had in southern California took place along the San Andreas Fault, estimated to be a 7.9 shaker on the Richter scale.
Two months later, a lengthy report by a correspondent only identified as “H” and who might have been surveyor Henry Hancock, a Mexican-American War Army volunteer, was sent to the Star and appeared in its 21 November edition. The account noted that Magruder and two others headed out “in pursuit of their grizzlyships” and then followed with the next morning’s news that:
About seven A.M., we were saluted with an Indian war whoop, and in came Lieut. Magruder with the glorious intelligence that two mighty bears had fallen; they were noble fellows, one weighing about 700 pounds, and the other 500 pounds. You may rest assured there was a general rejoicing in camp; they had also killed a fine buck. After breakfast, a party was made up to bring in their bearships. And a question was proposed by our worthy friend the sutler, to wit: ‘To bear, or not to bear, that is the question.”
The group headed out and then returned around dusk “with the bear fat and a few choice cuts of the ‘crittur,’ and the bear paws; and here let me pause a moment to speak of those paws.” The writer observed that he’d experienced many delicacies in his time, “but never did I taste anything more exquisitely delicious than the bear’s paws” and it as related how they were sequestered a foot under the camp fire overnight and then “skinned and served up.”
Each paw was deemed to weigh two pounds with the bottoms comprised of “one mass of delicious marrow—only more delicate.” With that meal and brandy supplied by merchant Francis Mellus of Los Angeles, “we were completely satisfied with ‘all the world and the rest of mankind.'” There were further attempts at bear hunting, though without success; however, a buck and pigeons were bagged and “of which we made an excellent dinner.” The party then headed back to Fort Tejon and “H” concluded “thus ended the bear hunt, and a trip that I shall always revert to with pleasure.”
As for the publisher of the Star, Henry Hamilton, he added in a separate article, under the title of “That ‘Bar’ Hunt,” that, not being able to go on the expedition, he was “deprived of the luxury of partaking of the delicious ‘bear-steaks and chops,” but was not “forgotten in the distribution of the trophies of the chase.” Namely, “the gallant gentleman who made old grizzly turn up the tips of his toes, we are indebted for an ample supply of genuine bears’ oil,” which would not evidently be of much use to the publisher, but Hamilton “made a distribution of ‘the grease’ to certain gents who delight in ‘ambrosial locks,” that is, used the material for their hair.
Nothing of substance was found in local papers in reference to the creatures for over a decade, though the next located report was substantially closer to the Angel City, as the Los Angeles News of 28 April 1869 noted that constable Robert A. Hester and another man recently “were fishing in the Aroya [sic] Seco” and “came in contact with two genuine grizzly bears.” Armed with rods not rifles, Hester and his companion “thought prudence the better part of valor, and retired from the position occupied by the bruin.”
The 19 July 1870 edition of the News noted that a hay hauler named Atkinson left the Mojave Desert and headed down Cajon Pass where on “reaching the summit, he was confronted by two grizzly bears.” The animals purportedly went after Atkinson’s horses, which “became frightened and started down the hill at a break neck pace,” while he, being without weapons, resorted to shouting at the bears “which finally frightened them and they desisted from pursuit.” Atkinson asserted that they were youngsters, perhaps up to three years of age, while able to calm his steeds and he returned home with a slight loss of his cargo.
Returning to Tejon, part of Kern County for the last several years, the Star of 3 August 1870 (Hamilton, a rabid Confederate supporter during the late war, was forced to shut his paper down in 1864 amid a disloyalty arrest and financial troubles, but returned in 1868 and ran it for four more years) reported that “the bruin family seems to be very numerous in the mountains” around the shuttered fort, which was decommissioned in 1864, and noted that rancher John F. Cuddy “killed on his lands, no less than nineteen members of the family, including some which might have been the great progenitors of all the grizzlies.”
The 12 October edition of the paper reported that another fishing expedition, led by “our esteemed fellow-citizen, [Dr.] J.B. Winston,” a former Army surgeon and once owner of the pioneer Bella Union Hotel in Los Angeles “and a party of gentlemen” returned from the trip to the headwaters of the San Gabriel River, presumably around Crystal Lake with “four hundred speckled trout, one deer, the sight of a grizzly, and restoration of bodily health and energy.”
The year 1871 brought several more references to grizzlies, with the Star of 20 May reporting that John Searles, a 33-year old blacksmith residing in Soledad Township near modern Santa Clarita, recently got into a battle with a “famous grizzly” known as Club Foot, with it stated that the bear recovered from an injury inflicted upon it, while Searles was healing from wounds he received and intended “go for him again, and get him sure.”
The 3 June issue of the paper stated that a gent was walking around Main Street to say that “he had been chased by a grizzly bear on the San Fernando plains, and narrowly escaped capture,” with it presumed that “the bear came out of the Tejunga cañon, and looked ‘as big as a horse.'” Part of the area in which the animal purportedly began his pursuit became what is now Sunland-Tujunga, covered in a post on this blog a couple of days ago.
The same area was highlighted again by the Star of 24 October, which reported on a grizzly sighting “near the head of Tejunga cañon” by “a party of sportsmen . . . only looking for deer.” The paper continued that the creature was “not ‘taken in'” because, as one of the hunting party told it, “that bears owes his life to the fact that we had all the venison we could eat,” so there was no interest in bringing down the bruin. That night, it should be noted, the horrific Chinese Massacre took place in Los Angeles as hundreds of whites and Latinos stormed the Calle de los Negros where Chinatown was situated and killed eighteen men and a teenage boy.
In the southeastern part of Los Angeles County, an area that, nearly two decades later, split off into Orange County, a report published in the News of 19 August from “Anaheim and Vicinity” observed that David Watson and one of the members of the Bush family, early settlers of Santa Ana, came back from a hunting trip in the Santa Ana Mountains and “‘took in out of the wet’ eight deer, one grizzly bear and lots of honey.”
The Star made allusion in its 9 October issue to the report that “a man with ‘snakes in his boots,'” that is, suffering from delirium tremens due to acute alcoholism, “saw a grizzly of the largest size on Spring street night before last.” Leaving aside that this was apparently the delusion of a sick person, one does wonder how often the reported sightings of grizzlies were actually of a brown (usually referred to at the time as “cinnamon”) bear, if not some other creature.
In fact, the 4 June edition of the paper ran a humorous story under the heading of “A Grizzly Story,” which began with the comment that “bears of the “Big Bar” kind are said to roam by night in countless thousands” in a nearby canyon, which had mines that were worked by Gold Rush veterans and greenhorns of recent vintage. In this locale, there was a camp fire “around which for three mortal hours” a group “had eaten beans, and told thrilling tales of ursine war, tales of blood and thunder, of desperate encounters with desperate bears, who invariably died game.
One well-armed gent named Jim headed up the canyon on horseback and his partners in camp apparently heard “an awful explosion and a scream of pain” and fearing a bear battle shimmied up a nearby pine tree. The horse returned sans rider, but with a large creature “hanging on to its tail” and those hiding among the branches “saw—O horrors! that the object, nearly the size of a barn, was ascending the tree with great rapidity.” The bear, however, turned out to be Jim, who boasted that he’d just “killed the biggest ‘bar’ in the cañon, and could do it ‘agin,” but had only ascended the tree “as a precautionary measure” because there was a “whole drove of ’em,” but he’d picked the biggest and oldest, “nearly white with age,” to fell.
When the assemblage, however, descended from the tree, they found, not a bruin, but “an animal known during life as a jackass, with his side torn out, ‘nearly white with age,'” and so the group decided to forego a search for “bar meat.” When the rest of the group turned toward Jim for an explanation, he’d vanished—”probably he went to look for that ‘bar'” and “he ain’t been seen since,” so the gents had to settle for “some good beans instead of ‘bar steak’ for breakfast.”
It seems likely the tale was concocted to satirize varied accounts of bear sightings that, in many cases, were perhaps concocted for bravado or just the misapprehensions of the comically mistaken. Whatever the case, we’ll return with a part two, so check back soon for that.