“The Wild Inside”: Our Grizzly Ancestry

This like many stories is a web of what connects us to a past. A spark alights, a memory leads us to our own wild insides. We think we stand alone, but we are connected even to our extinct past. Man and beast we are the same, yet different. Our most innate drives and passions are passed down through generations in ways that we take for granted. This journey reminded me of where I come from.

My local library, like many libraries, has bookshelves of donated books for sale. Most are a dollar for hardbacks and 50 cents for a paperback. For a few years I volunteered on processing the donations and now I occasionally peruse them. My latest purchase was a suspense novel called “The Wild Inside” a first novel of Christine Carbo, published in 2015. The cover attracted me with a lone grizzly bear in a snowy landscape. The description was a bit off putting, but I bought it anyway. The main character, when he was 14, was camping with his father in Glacier National Park and his father was attacked and killed by a grizzly bear. Years later he is investigating the death of another man by a grizzly bear.

I love the serendipity of finding a book and then finding something meaningful in its pages. This turned out to be that sort of book. My father liked bears. I like bears. My grandfather liked bears. I have never seen a grizzly (Ursus arctos horribilis) in the wild, but I have seen American black bears (Ursus americanus) at Grand Teton National Park and occasionally they are spotted in my area in Northern California.

I have always felt the bitter irony of the California State flag bearing (oh dear, excuse the unintentional pun), the image of a California Grizzly bear, which is also our state animal. The last one was killed in the state in 1922 . Two years later, one was spotted several times in Sequoia National Park, then disappeared. The Grizzly was declared extinct here in 1924, and now a hundred years later, our flag still bears her image. It is estimated that 10,000 grizzlies once lived in California and yet none remain. In perhaps a warning to us all.

When I finished the book it inspired me to re-read my grandfather’s poem “The Last Grizzly.” According to his annotated copy of “Artifacts” (his collection of poems), his poem was first written in the 1920’s. In his 1964 letter to the California State Department of Fish and Game he had a recollection about a grizzly article he thought from the 1930’s but he wrote “it could have been referring back to the 1922 incident.” The reply had nothing further after 1922. The inquiry and reply below.

But I found the mention of the 1924 visits of a Grizzly Bear to Sequoia National Park, in the San Francisco Bulletin, Fri, Dec 26, 1924 Page 6. I suspect this may have been the impetus for his original poem. This article is worth a read, dispelling many grizzly bear myths.

My grandfather and father were both great admirer’s of nature. Both fly fisherman and hunters, when their need to fill their bellies, was great. My father, his brother and my grandparents spent a snowy winter in the Trinity Alps, living in a canvas tent. My father set snare traps to catch hares during those challenging years of the Great Depression. They were both great admirers of the naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton. I am sure they would think me remiss if I did not mention his book published in 1904, “Monarch the Big Bear of Tallac” the story of a Grizzly Bear near Lake Tahoe. What I remember most about Seton, I wrote about in a report in grammar school. On Seton’s 21st birthday his father presented him with an bill for all of the expenses connected with his upbringing, including the fee of the doctor who delivered him. He paid the bill, it is said, and never spoke to his father again. That story, and the brutality of it, is one I never forgot. These stories passed down through families are seldom recorded, but shape us none the less. Seton founded the organization the “Woodcraft Indians” in 1902 and invited the local youth to join. The group was open to girls and boys. An extraordinary man ahead of his time and remembered mostly for having being instrumental in the founding of the Boy Scouts of America and for his being an early writer of wild animal based fiction stories. He was also an artist whose spare use of line, my Dad greatly admired.

Here I offer my grandfather’s Poem

“The Last Grizzly”

O Grizzly King, accept the bitterness
Implicit in the words I speak to you;
Nor think I seek forgiveness for my kind,
With hope to mitigate their sordid act;
For you, the Patron—bear with me awhile—
The Patron of this sovereign State lie slain;
The State itself your slayer, unrebuked,
Except for these too feeble words of mine.

In what long-hidden wilderness retreat
Did you seclude that massive frame so well,
That howsoever diligent the ones
Who guard us from the power of the beast,
They did not mark your range; nor even see
Your mighty tracks, until this fateful day?

It has been said that you were gone, ere now;
Ere this a mockery, the Golden Bear.
Ah, well, a day; a year; what matter? Just
So you are gone! For you were dangerous,
And fierce. Your goaded charge had raised
The hair on far too many frightened heads.

You were not one to feel the choking noose,
In passive resignation; nor the force
Of rifled death, against whose brutal stroke
The Rhino’s armored hide avails him not.
But when chains, tormented by the goad;
Rope-wracked and torn; awaiting to be dragged
To some corral to fight a hapless bull,—
That also did not seek the senseless fight—
if then the vast frustration grew too great;
And you would ask, and get, God’s leave to die,
and simply cease, the laughing Don would say,
“He dies of rage!”, not caring to recall
His tons of horses pulling, all opposed,
On rawhide lassos looped about your neck—
And more, vaquero-ridden, standing by
To choke you down, if need be, so to void
Their fellows risk, or hold their chains
that simplified their next brutality.

“He dies of rage!” the laughing Don would say,
As if to hide your torture with that lie.
So the crime of fighting for your own,
Te People passed a judgement on your head;
And you have paid. The state claimed your life:
“For seeking food on your own usurped range.”

You took a calf or two, or maybe three,
Against the awful levy on your race,
That filled the bellies of the gold-mad men
Who trespassed on the land God gave to you.

Myself, sometime, have ranged about the wood,
And from a distance watched, to learn your way;
But you were on good behavior then;
Not acting your reputed self. I saw
No arrogance displayed as you did pry
With eager nose, and claws, in rotten logs,
For ants and termites; and I watched you dig
For lily bulbs, and roots, among the stones—
You filled yourself with fungi, succulent;
With bugs and grubs; and berries in their time,
While mulling over heavy memories
Of honey-bees, and hives in hollow trees.

At such a time you were not bad to see,
But much akin to small and curious boys,
Searching in attic, erstwhile unexplored.

Such scenes are gone, with drowsy summer days;
And insect’s drone, in manzanita grove;
And lupine blue; and poppy-gilded slope—
All gone for you—unless perchance, there be
An ursine garden in Elysium,
Where golden asphodels drip honey-dew.

My grandfather mentions in his notes many attributes of the Grizzly, especially from Harold McCracken’s 1955 book: “The Beast that Walks like Man.” I wonder if that was the greatest of man’s fear, that the Grizzly was both intelligent, thoughtful and terrifying when he rose up like man.

I am past the age, when my grandfather died and can not ask him questions, that I would ask him now. My title above is a play on words “Our Grizzly Ancestry” in the double meaning of grizzled as in old, and in grizzly as in brutal. At times I felt reading his poem again, that it was a metaphor for the native peoples who revered the Grizzly and were feared as savages. Grizzlies reduced to caricatures of their complex natures and labels that aim to justify their extermination. It is a not so gentle reminder of the arrogance of man, and his folly in thinking he has dominion over the earth. His brutality to both nature and his fellow man, exceeds any seen in wild beasts.

And finally in reflection, I see in my grandfather, my children and hopefully their progeny, a desire to understand and do homage to the natural world, which we are gifted, but a brief stay.

Kelly Wheaton ©2024 All Rights Reserved