Hung Out to Dry

Come the turn of the 20th century, grizzly bears were so rare in the United States that, according to zoologist William F. Hornaday in his book Camp-fires in the Canadian Rockies (1906), it was "impossible for a sportsman to go out and kill one, no matter where he hunts, and no matter how much money he spends."

Just 75 years earlier, explorers reported seeing up to 200 grizzlies in a single day. By the early 1900s, even active searching in areas where grizzlies were once abundant produced nothing.

California, for instance, had more grizzlies than any other state in 1850. Twenty-five years later, there were scarcely any left. The last one in the state, which had adopted the grizzly as its official symbol in 1846, was killed in August 1922.

Grizzlies were exterminated in the Great Plains before any record of their numbers was compiled. Texas and North Dakota lost their grizzlies before the end of teh 19th century — 1890 and 1897 respectively.

States like Utah, New Mexico, Arizona and Oregon saw their last grizzlies killed in the 1920s and early 1930s.

By the 1950s, the grizzly bear population in the United States had plummeted to between 800 and 900 animals occupying only two percent of their former range. Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and Washington were now the only states left with grizzly bears, and of those only Idaho had passed a law protecting grizzly bears from hunting.

No longer a serious threat to people, the grizzly bear was no longer seen as a "monster" to most. Books like Harold McCracken's The Beast That Walks Like Man: The Story of the Grizzly Bear (1955), on which much of this chronology is based, were helping people see grizzly bears symbols of the fading American wilderness.