Can We Live In Peace With The Grizzly?

If individual human personalities could be stuffed and displayed like the carcasses of trophy gorillas or reconstructed like the skeletons of brontosauruses, Henry Kelsey would make a fine display for a major museum. He was a courageous soldier, an effective diplomat and a successful entrepreneur. In terms of his own time, the 17th century, he was a keenly observant, progressive-minded naturalist, cultural anthropologist and topographer. In terms of all time, Kelsey was an explorer of the very first rank. Before reaching adulthood, he saw more of this continent when—for Europeans—it was absolutely virgin than any other white man had or would. He was also a poet, not a very good one but perhaps the first English-speaking individual with the temperament and talent to be a bard of the true, howling wilderness of the New World.

Kelsey arrived in the New World in 1685 as a 14-year-old boy-of-all-work who took part in the commercial buccaneering expedition that drove the French out of northern Ontario. He remained as a "servant" of the newly chartered Hudson's Bay Company. During the next five years he became, by the standards of the firm, odd; the only one of that hard crew sufficiently interested in the "red niggers" of the northern wastelands to learn anything about their language and lore or, it seems, to conclude that they were indisputably human.

In 1690 Kelsey was sent off from York Factory—a fortified post at the confluence of the Nelson and Hayes Rivers—on an extraordinary mission that was to keep him in terrae incognitae for the next three years. Officially he was ordered to establish a fur trade with savages who, it was assumed, might be found in the western interior. The masters of the Bay Company may also have concocted the assignment as a means of ridding themselves, at least temporarily, of a restless young man of unsettling, uncivilized opinions. In any event, Kelsey was very likely the only man who would have made such a trip. He left with a party of Cree tribesmen and with a "fire in his heart" to see the lands beyond the edge of the known world. When the Crees dared go no farther, he joined other Indian hunters, one of whom thought Kelsey insane because he "was not sensable of danger."

Always heading West, Kelsey skirted the great Arctic Barrens, then slanted southward across prairies, traveling at least as far as the eastern foothills of the Shining Mountains—the Rockies. He was the first Englishman to come upon a musk ox and the Great Plains, the homelands of the Sioux, Cheyenne and Crow Indians. Probably in the spring of 1691 he met what he accurately reckoned was the most formidable beast in the New World. It was, he noted, "a great sort of a Bear which is bigger than any white Bear [Polar bears were common around Hudson's Bay] & is neither White nor Black But silver hair'd like our English Rabbit."

So impressed was Kelsey, the first of us to see and describe a grizzly, that he summoned his Muse and wrote:

...an outgrown Bear w[ch] is good meat
His skin to gett I had used all ye ways I can
He is man's food & he makes food of man....

Subsequently, the grizzly has wasted enough trappers, lumberjacks, drovers and tourists so that the substance, if not the exact words, of the poet's bottom line hasn't been forgotten—that sometimes we may eat this bear and sometimes the bear eats us. Much lesser creatures of the bee, spider or snake sort have proved more deadly, to judge from the available statistics, but only the great bear, when so inclined for defensive or predatory reasons, has been able to make meat of us in direct, mano a mano confrontations.

As we began to settle in big-bear ranges, the animal proved even more ready and able to make meals of our cattle, sheep, horses, beehives, orchards and storage caches. It was quickly decided that clearing out the grizzlies was an imperative chore if the land from the Plains to the Pacific was going to be a nice place for us to live. This has been largely accomplished. It's thought that there were once 100,000 grizzlies roaming throughout the trans-Mississippi West. Now it's more precisely estimated (counting grizzlies has become something of a cottage industry) that only from 800 to 900 of them survive in the lower 48, mostly in northern Montana, northwestern Wyoming and the Idaho panhandle.

Only raving nostalgics can fail to understand why this has happened or argue seriously that it's possible or desirable to return—bearwise—to the good old days. For example, another guess has it that Northern California supported 10,000 of these beasts in the early 19th century. Now there are none, basically because you can't have that many—or, in truth, any—grizzlies and, say, Sacramento. It goes far beyond direct conflict—bears chasing state senators around Capitol Plaza or harassing midnight dope dealers in the bushes along the American River. All that bears imply in terms of habitat and ecology, and all that Sacramento implies in the way of human use and logistics make the species and city absolutely incompatible.

In their behavior toward us, grizzlies haven't changed appreciably since Kelsey met his first one. They remain determined to pursue and defend their own self-interest, by violent means if necessary, and they generally don't give a damn about what we want. There's no reason to expect they can be persuaded or forced to act differently than they always have.