Expedition's Run-ins With Grizzlies Heralded Bears' Fate

By John Krist,
Senior reporter

Grizzly tracks on sand bar, Yellowstone National Park.

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK -- When explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark led their Corps of Discovery across the northern Plains nearly 200 years ago, they heard tales of a remarkably fierce and dangerous bear, bigger and more aggressive than any they had encountered before.

The bear was the grizzly, one of the most fabled creatures of the American West. The explorers initially discounted the Native American accounts as exaggerated, believing they reflected the hunters' poor marksmanship and inadequate weaponry rather than the beast's actual attributes.

"The Indians may well fear this animal," Lewis wrote, before his men had actually had a close encounter with a grizzly, "but in the hands of skillful riflemen they are by no means as formidable or dangerous as they have been represented."

The explorers soon changed their tune, thanks to repeated incidents like the one on May 5, 1805, in what today is eastern Montana. Spotting a grizzly on a beach, Clark and George Drouillard, the expedition's best hunter, went forward to kill it. Lewis reported what happened next:

"It was a most tremendious looking anamal, and extreemly hard to kill," he wrote. "Notwithstanding he had five balls through his lungs and five others in varrious parts he swam more than half the distance across the river to a sandbar & it was at least 20 minutes before he died; he did not attempt to attack, but fled and made the most tremendous roaring from the moment he was shot."

Over the next few weeks, bears chased the men up trees, across the prairie and into the river, continuing the pursuit even when wounded in the heart and lungs. They forced hunters to flee from the carcasses of elk and bison they had shot. Eventually, the men stopped going out of their way to find grizzlies, their attitude summed up with marvelous understatement by Lewis: "I find that the curiosity of our party is pretty well satisfyed with rispect to this animal."

For all their power and ferocity when challenged, grizzlies did not fare well in their encounters with the explorers. The Lewis and Clark journals record interactions with 37 individual grizzlies, according to Daniel Botkin, a biology professor and expedition scholar. All but a handful of those bears ended up dead, shot as food, in self-defense or merely to satisfy the hunters' urge to bring down a big, intimidating target.

The experiences of Lewis and Clark foreshadowed more than a century of bear-human interaction in the West. As settlers followed the path the Corps of Discovery had blazed, grizzlies died by the tens of thousands -- shot, trapped, poisoned, their habitat expropriated, their food supply eliminated. The pattern would extend to treatment of other predators such as the wolf, and would have parallels in the fate of Native American tribes as settlers pushed westward.

The battle over possession of the grizzly's homeland continues today, although the fight is as likely to be waged by lawyers, lobbyists and lawmakers armed with position papers and research data as by ranchers and farmers wielding rifles. And nowhere is that battle more intense than on the landscape encompassing Yellowstone, America's first national park.

Conflict between humans and grizzlies, which are more aggressive than black bears, led to their widespread extirpation. The grizzly was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1975; fewer than 1,100 remain in the lower 48 states, which once were home to at least 50,000.

Estimates vary regarding the pre-settlement population and distribution of grizzly bears in the contiguous United States, but biologists believe there were between 50,000 and 100,000 scattered across a vast territory that extended from Canada to Mexico, and from the Pacific Coast well onto the Great Plains. There were grizzly bears in the Rockies, the Cascades, the Sierra Nevada. There were grizzlies in Kansas and Nebraska, perhaps as far east as Minnesota. As many as 10,000 lived in California.

The grizzly (Ursus arctos horribilis) is one of two recognized subspecies of brown bears in North America. The other is the Kodiak bear (Ursus arctos middendorffi), found on the Kodiak Islands of Alaska. The grizzly differs from its more common cousin, the black bear (Ursus americanus), in several important ways. Grizzlies are bigger, 6 to 7 feet long and weighing 325 to 850 pounds; black bears are 5 to 6 feet long and weigh 200 to 475 pounds. Grizzlies also are creatures of the open grasslands and forest edge, not woodland inhabitants like black bears. They are more aggressive as well; although they seldom attack humans without provocation, they are more likely to charge when surprised or threatened.

Grizzlies are powerfully built, equipped for digging with long claws and arms driven by thick muscles that form a characteristic hump between the animal's shoulders. Despite their reputation for ferocity, they seldom bring down live mammalian prey. They are omnivorous and opportunistic, able and willing to eat just about anything, their diet varying by season and location.

In Yellowstone National Park, home of the most intensively studied grizzly population, the bears rely primarily on four foods: spawning cutthroat trout, whitebark pine seeds, army cutworm moths, and the carcasses of bison and elk killed by starvation, exposure or other causes. Together, these rather unglamorous sources provide 85 to 95 percent of the bears' energy intake, according to David Mattson, a biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, who spent many years studying the park's grizzlies. The remainder comes from a variety of foods, including elk fawns the grizzlies occasionally kill in springtime.

For about a half-century after Lewis and Clark explored and mapped the West, grizzly habitat remained largely unsettled, inhabited for the most part by roaming Indian tribes that coexisted -- albeit uneasily at times --with the great bears. After 1850, however, American settlers began filling up the region's empty spaces. And as they did, the grizzly population plummeted. By the early 20th century, the grizzly population throughout the West had dwindled to perhaps 1,100 animals concentrated in remote wilderness or in national parks such as Yellowstone. (A series of maps showing past and present grizzly bear distribution is at www.grizzlybear.org/grizpop.htm.)

The reason for the population crash is simple, according to those who have studied the relationship between grizzlies and human beings over the past 150 years.

"The bears didn't starve to death, the ecology didn't collapse," said landscape ecologist Troy Merrill, who runs a private consulting firm in Moscow, Idaho. "We killed them."

Farmers regarded the grizzlies as a threat to their own safety, and ranchers believed the bears a threat to sheep and cattle. That grizzlies seldom attack people unless provoked and rarely kill livestock (although they will happily scavenge carcasses) did not matter much. As homesteaders fenced and plowed their way across the West, they shot grizzlies, wolves and other predators whenever they saw them. Ridding the landscape of such creatures was generally regarded as a social obligation, an essential component of the campaign to pacify and settle the untamed frontier.

Grizzlies actually fared better than wolves as settlers moved across the Great Plains and into the Rocky Mountains, bringing with them sheep, cattle, crops and guns.

Grizzlies were novelties to Americans and Europeans, and it took settlers a relatively long time to develop antipathy toward them. A visceral hatred of wolves, on the other hand, was part of the cultural baggage colonists brought to North America from Europe, and settlers wasted no time trying to wipe them out.

By the 1930s, Canis lupus had been extirpated from the entire United States except for remnant populations hanging on in northern Minnesota and on Isle Royale in Michigan. They were listed as endangered in 1967 under a predecessor of the current Endangered Species Act (the Endangered Species Protection Act of 1966, which provided only modest protections).

Even Yellowstone, America's first national park, had proved to be no haven: Wolves were exterminated there in the 1920s and 1930s by the National Park Service itself during a predator-extermination campaign intended to "protect" big ungulates such as elk and deer, which were popular with tourists in the park and with hunters outside it. The NPS also destroyed mountain lions, lynx, coyotes and other predators. The policy backfired when elk and deer populations exploded, leading to overgrazing and winter starvation.

NPS very nearly managed to eliminate the Yellowstone grizzly population as well in the 1960s and 1970s, when it abruptly closed the park's garbage dumps. Deprived of their customary food source, hungry grizzlies immediately began invading campgrounds and wandering into communities outside the park. Within four years, at least 158 bears -- more than half the park's grizzly population, by some researchers' estimates -- had been killed, mostly when they encountered humans and were perceived as a threat. Grizzlies were listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1975. (For a discussion of the ESA listing process, see this month's series installment on the Web at www.voyageofrediscovery.com.)

Beginning in 1995, gray wolves were captured in Canada and released into the United States in the effort to establish self-sustaining populations of wolves and remove the species from the endangered species list.

If the story of the 19th and early 20th centuries was one of predator extermination, that of the current era is reintroduction and recovery. New laws and a new appreciation of the role predators play in maintaining ecosystem balance -- as well as a growing public appetite for wildlife observation -- have led to intensive efforts to bring wolves and grizzlies back to the landscape first explored by Lewis and Clark.

Gray wolves began their Yellowstone comeback in 1995, when 14 animals captured and radio-collared in Canada by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists were released into the park's Lamar Valley. The next year, 17 more Canadian wolves were released in the park, and in early 1997, 10 young wolves -- orphaned when their parents were killed for attacking livestock in northwestern Montana -- were set free. In the spring of the wolf restoration project's third year, nine packs of wolves produced 13 litters of 64 pups.

The Yellowstone wolf population now stands at more than 200, according to the NPS, in at least 24 packs. Federal biologists also have reintroduced wolves into central Idaho, and other wolves have dispersed on their own from Canada into Montana and Idaho. Yellowstone wolves have moved into Wyoming. The USFWS estimates the wolf population in the northern Rockies is now more than 550 animals and growing.

The grizzly population also has rebounded since the 1970s, although there is disagreement over just how robust that recovery has been. The official estimate of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team is that between 400 and 600 grizzlies occupy the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, a region of 14 million acres with the park at its heart.

Some independent researchers, however, question the accuracy of the estimate. A smaller population occupies Glacier National Park, and federal wildlife managers officially maintain that grizzlies occupy four other wilderness areas in Montana, Idaho and Washington. Again, other researchers disagree, saying field surveys suggest at least two of those areas contain no bears or at best only a few.

Believing that the species has recovered sufficiently, federal wildlife managers have proposed removing the grizzly from ESA protection, turning its management over to the states. Federal officials also have proposed changing the gray wolf's status from endangered to threatened.

The proposals are viewed skeptically by many environmentalists, who note that many westerners still are not comfortable sharing the landscape with powerful predators, and that ranchers with vulnerable calves and lambs have been joined in their hostility by rural suburbanites with pets and children, whose homes often have been built in or near bear habitat. At least one county in Wyoming, for example, has adopted ordinances declaring wolves and grizzlies to be "unacceptable species" and prohibiting their "presence, introduction or reintroduction."

Timber, oil and mining companies are pushing to explore federal lands along the Rocky Mountain front in Montana, posing an additional threat to survival of the grizzly, which requires huge expanses of roadless habitat in order to thrive. One study by USGS researcher Mattson found that grizzlies living in areas containing even secondary roads are five times as likely to be killed as bears in the backcountry. Grizzlies do not long persist where roads, drill pads and logging machinery intrude.

"Habitat's the name of the game," said Lee Metzgar, a bear biologist who spent many years studying Yellowstone grizzlies.

Scientists warn that there are other threats as well: Invasive species and disease may diminish the grizzlies' natural food supply. Stream-spawning cutthroat trout are being displaced by introduced lake trout, which spawn in deep water and cannot be caught by grizzlies. Blister rust, an introduced fungus, is killing whitebark pine trees.

Less food means the Yellowstone grizzlies, each of which already defends a large home territory -- an average of 900 square miles for each male and 350 square miles for each female, according to Louisa Wilcox, who heads the Sierra Club's Grizzly Bear Ecosystems Project -- would need even more space to patrol if they are to find adequate nutrition. Alternatively, they will be driven out of the backcountry to forage in areas where they're likely to encounter humans, meaning their chances of being killed will rise dramatically.

"We are almost certainly going to have a major decline in carrying capacity in this ecosystem," Mattson said. Given these potential threats, along with uncertainty about grizzly bear population trends and increasing human pressure on remaining habitat, Mattson and others suggest the push to remove grizzlies from federal ESA protection is premature.

Last spring, several biologists with long experience studying Yellowstone's wolves and bears accompanied a group of writers into the park for a first-hand look at its wildlife.

Grizzlies and wolves are the totemic embodiment of wild nature -- powerful, dangerous and beautiful -- and their presence has changed the park experience for millions of visitors. Sightings are now common enough in Yellowstone to draw crowds of tourists each year whose primary goal is to catch a glimpse of a grizzly or wolf and take its photograph, and the park did not disappoint on this occasion.

Caravaning from Cooke City into the broad Lamar Valley, where grazing animals congregate in early spring to feed on the new crop of grass, the group stopped near twilight and climbed to a rise overlooking the Lamar River. Scattered across the greening valley floor were thousands of elk, bison and pronghorns, a primal scene that called to mind the African Serengeti. Or perhaps merely the American West as it was when Lewis and Clark saw it.

Prey draws predators, and before long, one of the biologists -- Steve Gehman, whose perception has been honed by years of field observation in Yellowstone -- spotted a grizzly striding along at the foot of a ridge nearly a mile away. Thousands of dollars' worth of fancy German and Japanese optics quickly focused on its humped silhouette. A few minutes later, Gehman spotted another grizzly high on a slope across the valley, rolling in a patch of late-season snow as if determined to produce an ursine angel.

On a similar excursion the next morning before dawn, the group watched a wolf trot along the valley's edge for more than a mile, passing through vast herds of elk and bison that seemed unconcerned by its presence -- perhaps understanding instinctively that wolves are pack hunters. All along the park road, visitors had parked their cars and were huddled in the chill air with spotting scopes and cameras, hoping to take home memories of such primal scenes: a wolf pack on the prowl, a grizzly striding with power and grace along the forest edge.

Predators test human tolerance in a way that no other component of the natural landscape does. Although the crowds of camera-toting tourists in Yellowstone are proof of human fascination and even affection for wolves and grizzlies, there is ample evidence that the antipathy responsible for their near-extinction during the 19th and 20th centuries persists today.

The state of Montana, for example, has proposed a sport hunt for grizzlies, although they still are among the rarest mammals in North America. In April, federal wildlife agents killed an entire 10-member wolf pack in Idaho for preying on livestock, even though a private environmental organization, Defenders of Wildlife, compensates ranchers for the full value of any domestic animal killed by a wolf. Wolves suspected of attacking livestock also were killed in Montana last spring, and the Idaho legislature this year passed a law allowing ranchers to shoot a wolf whenever it enters their property, even if it doesn't threaten livestock.

The essential problem, suggests author and environmental activist Doug Peacock, is simple intolerance -- an unwillingness to accept any impediment to satisfaction of human desires. That was a consistent theme during the settlement of the American West in the century after Lewis and Clark's exploration of the region, and it led to near extermination of not just wolves and grizzlies but Native Americans as well.

"Grizzlies are wilderness incarnate," Peacock wrote in his 1990 book "Grizzly Years," which recounts in passionate detail his experiences living among wild animals. "If we are to succeed in saving grizzlies with all their wildness, we will not do it by changing the bears to meet our needs. For the first time in our relatively short history on this planet, we will have to be the ones to bend."