How Black Bears Returned to Kansas Script

At the dawn of the 19th-century, Kansas was a very different place. Buffalo roamed while deer and antelope played. Black bears lived alongside them.

You might be surprised but it’s true!

            They lived in riparian zones along rivers and creeks where bears had plenty of food and shelter. Unfortunately, people wanted to live in the same areas. Proximity bred conflict and the bears lost. Badly. 

You’ll have to keep watching to find out why they disappeared and how we brought them back! It’s a classic American conservation story.  

            The why is simple. Thanks to human wildlife conflict black bears were hunted off the Kansas prairies by the 1880s. Stories like this one in 1866 happened across the state.

            In October, The Daily Kansas Tribune reported that Mr. Fisher killed a bear on the Cottonwood River. The bear was just strolling up the river in the heart of the tall grass prairie.  

In a scene out of Frankenstein, Mr. Fisher, Jonathan Wood, and others banded together to kill the bear. By all accounts I could find it was peaceful.

            People actually thought it was someone’s pet.[1]

            Dick Stevenson’s hunt in 1872 drew state wide attention. He was a Sumner County commissioner and shot a 400 pound bear in Barbour County.[2]  

            Three years later another bear made state wide news. That time, a black bear visited Mr. Bird’s garden in Arkansas City. The Atchison Daily Patriot reported that it was spotted on a Sunday morning. That’s quite a surprise on the way to church![3]

            I’m sure the bear was dead within a few days of that encounter.

            Just like the European colonizers before them, Americans weren’t big fans of toothy critters. If you’ve watched my videos before, you’ll know that is an understatement.

            They hunted everything that remotely poised a threat to humans. Even though black bears are pretty safe, they were a prime target. Between safety concerns, predation on domestic animals, and blood lust the bears had to go.

            Death and destruction is only half the story though. The other is hopeful thanks to Arkansas.

            Arkansas took one of America’s worst examples of market hunting and turned it into a very successful conservation win.

             It all started in the 1950s when Arkansas decided to reintroduce black bears after centuries of overhunting.

            Bear oil was an important historic commodity in Arkansas. Biologists with the University of Arkansas at Little Rock estimated that thousands of bears were killed every year for the oil alone.[4] Bears had dollar signs carved into their back. By the mid 1900s they were almost gone.

            In 1957, biologists drove a few male young bears down from Minnesota and Canada. Over the next 11 years they released 260 bears into good habitat far away from humans.

            The males needed time to establish territories so females weren’t introduced for a decade. Once that happened, the population slowly recovered. By 1980, bears had recovered enough that the state opened a limited hunting season for bears.[5]

            Over the next several decades those bears expanded out of Arkansas. In 2009, Oklahoma opened its first black bear hunting season. In 2021, Missouri joined the party with a limited black bear hunt.

            By mid 2010s, bears were spotted in Kansas as well. Every spring, more and more bears make their way into Kansas to reclaim their historic territory on the tall grass prairies. 

            So far there are no known breeding populations but someone captured a bear cub on a home security camera in Winfield, Kansas in 2022.[6] In 2023, someone spotted a bear just south of Kansas City in Cass County, Missouri.[7]

            According to Jeff Ford a biologists with the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife, young males can range up to 150 miles away from their core habitat.[8]

            For now, the bears in Kansas are younger males but if females wonder north biologists in Kansas believe they could establish a breeding population.[9]

            We won’t see many predators come back to the prairies but any animals that return should be celebrated. Environmental historian Dan Flores called the 19th-century over hunting on the prairies of North American one of the biggest man made ecological disasters in human history. 

            Thanks to the biologists in Arkansas, we have started correcting a part of that disaster. Next time you think about animals we’ve saved, I hope you think of black bears along with the bald eagle, bison, elk, and many others.

Thank you for watching and if you enjoyed this video please subscribe!

[1] https://www.newspapers.com/image/60856253/?match=1&terms=%22black%20bear%22

[2] https://www.newspapers.com/image/80359109/?match=1&terms=%22black%20bear%22

[3] https://www.newspapers.com/image/81218816/?match=1&terms=%22black%20bear%22

[4] Bowers, Annalea K.; Lucio, Leah D.; Clark, David W.; Rakow, Susan P.; and Heidt, Gary A. (2001) "Early History of the Wolf, Black Bear, and Mountain Lion in Arkansas," Journal of the Arkansas Academy of Science: Vol. 55, Article 4. Available at: https://scholarworks.uark.edu/jaas/vol55/iss1/4

[5] https://news.uark.edu/articles/9023/arkansas-black-bear-reintroduction-one-of-most-successful-in-the-world-ua-researcher-says

[6] https://www.kansascity.com/news/state/kansas/article257771258.html

[7] https://www.kake.com/story/49051293/black-bear-sighting-confirmed-near-kansas-city

[8] https://www.wibw.com/2020/07/14/black-bears-appearing-in-kansas/

[9] https://www.cjonline.com/story/news/2017/08/16/wild-black-bear-population-grows-kansas/16533058007/

Lewis, Clark, and Beavers

As the Lewis and Clark Expedition traveled up the Missouri River they documented a wild, untamed river. Their famous diaries contain stories of Native American encounters, escaping grizzly bears, and many descriptions of wildlife. Deer, elk, and bison are the highlights but beavers are the forgotten heroes. 

To the expedition, beavers were a source of food and commerce. But, the diaries tell a different story. The entries describe lush riparian habitat along the 2,000 miles of the Missouri River Valley. They observed beavers in their natural habitat shaping the world around them as powerful ecosystem engineers. 

Within a few decades those beavers were gone. Trappers, fur companies, and American colonization nearly wiped them out. Lewis and Clark weren’t directly responsible for the decline but their records allow us to see what the Missouri and it’s tributaries looked like at the dawn of the 19th-century. 

The Expedition often mentioned hunting beavers but they also tell us what the beaver's environment looked like. One of those entries was April, 10th 1805. Meriwether Lewis described a section of the Missouri just south of the eventual site of Gavin’s Point Dam in North Dakota as follows:

“the river bottoms we have passed to-day are wider and possess more timber than usual—the current of the Missouri is but moderate, at least not greater than that of the Ohio in high tide; it's banks are falling in but little; the navigation is therefore comparatively with it's lower portion easy and safe.”

The land Lewis described was likely lush, green forests created in part by beaver power. The clever rodents cut down trees and use them to build shelters.

 The dams create habitat for other species as well as storing water. The surface pressure forces water into the underground aquifers that help trees tolerate drought periods. 

The 21st-century Missouri is a straight and narrow channel but historically it was a long meandering river. Beavers likely had more influence on smaller streams that fed into the Missouri but their dams played an important role in shaping the Missouri River basin. 

Every time a beaver dammed a stream it's flow weakend. The dams eventually collected sediment and raised the water level. They forced the water to change course and flow in a slightly different direction.

 It’s more complex as you can imagine, but this basic series of events helped shape the fertile forests and prairies Lewis, Clark, and other early American explorers ogled at. 

A few days later on April 16th, Lewis remarked that beavers were very abundant and he saw the rodents fell trees up to 20 inches in diameter. Those fallen trees were a building block of the riverine environment. 

In the same entry, Lewis observed that beavers only ate the bark of cottonwoods and willows. Beavers actually eat the cambium which is the layer of a tree underneath the bark but Lewis was close enough. 

On April 19th, he wrote “The beaver of this part of the Missouri are larger, fatter, more abundant and better clad with fur than those of any other part of the country that I have yet seen.” Lewis also mentioned they ate nice fatty beavers. A lot of these beavers were trapped.

Like many other trappers, the Expedition used scents to lure the rodents to their death. If you’ve ever been curious what those lures smelled like, here’s a recipe from Lewis. 

They mixed castor, a smelly goo beavers extricate, with nutmeg, gloves, cinnamon, and allspice. I haven’t experienced it but, castor supposedly smells like musky vanilla. If The Expedition used apples, the beavers would have been lured in by a really nice apple cider. 

Later that summer Lewis traveled to the headwaters of the Missouri River in modern day Madison County, Montana. There, he named one of the rivers Jefferson after President Tomas Jefferson, another after future President James Madison, and the third after the Treasury Secretary Albert Gallitian. They combine to form the Missouri at present day Missouri River State Park. 

On August 2nd, Lewis noted that beavers had built many large dams along the Jefferson River. The next day, he described one of them. 

“we saw some very large beaver dams today in the bottoms of the river several of which wer five feet high and overflowed several acres of land; these dams are formed of willow brush mud and gravel and are so closely interwoven that they resist the water perfectly.    the base of this work is thick and rises nearly perpendicularly on the lower side while the upper side or that within the dam is gently sloped. the brush appear to be laid in no regular order yet acquires a strength by the irregularity with which they are placed by the beaver that it would puzzle the engenuity of man to give them.”

One of the other men on the Expedition described the environment created by these dams. 

“Some trees newly cut down by them. Saw ponds where they dammed up the water one dam above another which is curious to behold.    passed a high bank in which was villages of bank Swallows    passed large beautiful bottom prairies on each Side and bottoms of timbe.”

If you are wondering what happened to these meadows when the beavers were killed off over the next few decades? It’s simple. They dried out. 

Scientist have demonstrated how critical beavers are to a riverine environment. One study found that without beavers “River corridors can transform from wet, multithreaded channel–wetland systems housing a diversity of plants and animals to a dry, single-threaded, incised channel representative of a drier steady state known as an elk grassland. Beaver removal fundamentally changed the geography of the U.S

The Lewis and Clark Expedition painted a vibrant picture of the Western United States. The reports spread far and wide and many people began streaming west in Lewis and Clark’s footsteps. Over the next few decades beavers were quickly wiped out across the west and our landscapes were changed forever. There is a growing movement to establish beavers wherever possible so hopefully we can bring back the landscape of Lewis and Clark. 

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Sources:

 https://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/item/lc.jrn.1805-04-10#ln11041004 https://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/item/lc.jrn.1805-04-16#lc.jrn.1805-04-16.02

 https://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/item/lc.jrn.1805-04-19#lc.jrn.1805-04-19.02

 https://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/item/lc.jrn.1806-01-07#lc.jrn.1806-01-07.04

 https://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/item/lc.jrn.1805-08-03#lc.jrn.1805-08-03.04

 https://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/item/lc.jrn.1805-08-02#n18080206

 https://www.proquest.com/docview/2644766851/Record/1A8C4B73F61B4B68PQ/1?accountid=46208

History of Grizzly Bears on the Great Plains!

Animals on the Great Plains dealt with scorching summers, bitterly cold winters, and each other. Giant herds sustained large populations of predators in a dance that  played out amongst the grasses, hills, and rivers of the Great Plains over millions of years. Throughout it all, grizzlies ruled everything.

They can weigh almost a thousand pounds and run up to 30 miles per hour. They are omnivores who will eat everything from wild tubers to moose. Today, they are only found in pockets of the Rocky Mountains but historically, they followed the bison, elk, and other prey out on the Great Plains. Manifest Destiny flipped their world upside down. 

As Americans migrated west at the turn of the 19th century, we started a 200-year-long process of reshaping land historian Dan Flores called the American Serengeti. We slaughtered herds of bison, elk, and pronghorn. We carved a path toward the Pacific Ocean, leaving millions of predator carcasses in our wake.

 The plains gave way to farms, small communities, and eventually, cities like Omaha, Kansas City, and others, while the memories of that slaughter faded away. In today’s video, we’ll talk about grizzly bears and how they mirrored our conquest of the Great Plains. Before we continue, please like and subscribe to keep learning about North American wildlife history. 

On the Plains, grizzlies lived in riparian zones along rivers. An early violent encounter between grizzlies and Americans occurred in a place like that along the Missouri River in Montana. The incident happened on May 5th, 1805 during the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

As Meriwether Lewis tells the story, “Capt. Clark and Drewyer killed the largest brown bear this evening which we have yet seen. It was a most tremendous looking anamal, and extremely hard to kill notwithstanding he had five balls through his lungs and five others in various parts he swam more than half the distance acoss the river to a sandbar & it was at least twenty minutes before he died.” 

They estimated the bear weighed 500 pounds and it was full of “flesh and fish.” Watching a full-grown bear take 10 rifle balls shook several members of the hunting party. A few days later, on May 14th they ran into another bear and it almost ended differently for the humans.

Lewis wrote that after that bear was shot twice through the lungs it charged the men. The hunters couldn’t reload fast enough so they ran away. As Lewis tells it, “the bear pursued and had very nearly overtaken them before they reached the river.” 

After two of the hunters shot the bear again, it rushed them and they were forced to jump into the Missouri River. The bear quickly followed and according to Lewis, it was only a few feet behind the humans when someone else shot the grizzly through the head. The bear was so mighty that it took 8 balls to finally kill it. 

Within 100 years of those events, grizzlies were gone from the Plains. A study by The Grizzly Bear Recovery Project suggests that the bear population in the plains states sat around 6,576 in 1800. That study doesn’t believe any grizzlies lived in Kansas by 1800 but newspaper reports disagree. In the fall of 1867, reports surfaced that Herman Marxstein was attacked and killed by a grizzly bear. 

Either way, by 1900, Americans ran grizzly bears off the Plains through hunting and habitat destruction. While grizzlies disappeared in the wild, a few towns folk in Leavenworth, Kansas were interested in captive grizzlies.

The Smoky Hill and Republican Union reported on 6/06/1863 that a group of Winnebago tribespeople being forceably relocated from Wisconsin to the Dakotas visited a captive grizzly bear in Leavenworth. The warriors spoke with a Mr. Cleveland for several days until they were able to visit the bear in order to honor it. That bear was not the last one to be seen in Leavenworth. 

In 1867, the city marshal told Aleck Garden to muzzle the bear he kept outside his store. As the Leavenworth Daily Commercial mentioned, “it is right as the bear is dangerous.” It’s hard to argue with that reasoning! 

Our last dispatch from Leavenworth was on 12/05/1868. Two previous bear captives weren’t enough for Leavenworth apparently and Frank Horn just had to have another one.

 His bear escaped and ran around Cherokee and Delaware streets “frightening the women and children and raising a general panic.” The bear was finally caught next to Woolf’s Shirt Depot where the paper casually mentions “the crowd was greeted by a display of Woolf’s unparalleled shirts and drawers.” I hope Woolf’s appreciated the free advertising. 

Grizzlies weren’t just captives though, people also forced them to fight as entertainment. 

In 1867 someone thought it was a great idea to have a bull and grizzly fight in a ring. This person was described as “an enterprising individual” who just wanted to entertain Leavenworth and every other town along the Missouri River from Omaha to Kansas City. That fight lasted over an hour and the bull eventually died from its wounds. 

A couple of months later, the grizzly was killed in St. Louis by another bull. One paper described it saying the “Bruin was beautifully vanquished” in the fight. Within 20 years of these fights, the grizzly bear vanished from the Great Plains when the last known bear was killed in western North Dakota near Oakdale in 1897. 

The Great Plains Lewis and Clark experienced had been shaped by Native Americans for centuries but it was still teeming with life. They opened the floodgates to the Americans going west and altered that forever. It only took 60 years for the mighty grizzly bear to become a circus act forced into captivity for our entertainment. 

We will likely never see grizzly bears find their way back to the Plains. We covered this ancient landscape with farms and concrete and the land grizzlies roamed is largely gone. You can see this landscape on public lands across the Plains but the animals are still missing. To find them, you need to close your eyes and imagine. I hope you enjoyed today’s video. Thank you for watching.

Citations

 Lewis and Clark diary 

 The Boreder Sentinel, 11/01/1867.

 “Big Indian,” The Smoky Hill and Republican Union, 06/06/1863. 

 Leavenworth Daily Commericial, 07/21/1867. 

 “Great Excitement”, Leavenworth Daily Commerical, 12/05/1868. 

 “Fun Ahead”, Leavenworth Daily Commerical, 11/14/1867. 
 Leavenworth Daily Commerical, 11/26/1867. 
 The Marysville Enterprise, 1/04/1868. 

 Lewis and Clark on the Great Plains a Natural History, Paul A. Johnsgard, University of Nebraska Press 2003.

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Wild Animals / New Orleans, Louisiana, National Archives

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History of Coyote Bounties! Script

Coyotes are an American original. They evolved in North America one to two million years ago in the heart of the Pleistocene Epoch. Their world had North American hyenas, dire wolves, and sabertooth cats, among other predators. They became omnivores and master survivalists in that world, and those adaptations served them well when another predator showed up in North America about 12,000 years ago. Us. 

We co-existed fairly peacefully for most of humanity's history on this continent. In many Native American religions, coyotes were revered as trickster gods. They were responsible for everything from unleashing buffalo onto the Great Plains to providing fire. Euro-Americans shattered that co-existences when they started an all-out war on coyotes. 

In today’s video, I’ll discuss the first salvos of that war, coyote bounties. We’ll cover the history, why bounties were misguided, and how much money states wasted on them. Before we continue, please like and subscribe to learn more about North American wildlife history. 

Bounties have a long history in the United States. The story began in 1630 when the Massasschutes Bay Colony placed a bounty on wolves. Bounties were a tool to incentivize people to kill more animals. Europeans passed their hatred of wolves onto future generations through oral storytelling like Little Red Riding Hood. 

As settlers moved west, they brought diseases, livestock, and a disdain for predators. When they encountered coyotes, they confused the animals with wolves. Merriweather Lewis described coyotes as “prairie wolves” in his journal. The name stuck, and people have associated wolves with coyotes ever since. 

The earliest record of coyote bounties I could find is in Missouri in 1825. In Kansas, the state government passed the first bounty law in 1877 that applied a 1 dollar bounty to each scalp. Today, one coyote would be worth around 30 dollars. Remember the dollar amount because it will be important later in this video. 

The hatred for coyotes was based in part on false assumptions about their diet. Many people believed that coyotes eat larger game or domestic species like deer, cows, etc, that humans rely on. While they occasionally eat those animals, it has been shown in many studies that coyotes typically eat smaller prey that many humans consider pests.

 A biologist for the National Parks Service named Adolph Murie conducted one of those early studies in 1940. In “Ecology of the Coyotes in the Yellowstone” Murie concluded that coyotes mainly consumed small mammals, birds, and a variety of smaller prey like fish, reptiles, and insects. Basically, they’ll eat whatever they can find whenever they can find it . 

Despite the misunderstanding, states across the western U.S. placed bounties on coyotes in the 19th century. Some states went to extreme lengths to support the bounty. Montana, for example, spent almost two-thirds of its annual budget on wolf and coyote bounty payments between 1883 and 1923.

States wasted a lot of money paying bounties. As we see today, coyotes are still alive and well. They’ve even expanded their range. The bounties failed to wipe out coyotes, and they wasted money in other ways. There are reports of people raising coyotes as farm animals for these bounties.

I searched newspaper archives across the country and found over 1,000 mentions of people raising or farming coyotes for the bounty. It is easy to see why if we look at an example from Oregon. 

Sheep ranching was a significant business in Oregon in the 19th century. However, some ranchers argued they could make more money selling coyote scalps. The Statesman Journal published an article titled “Coyotes VS. Sheep” on 11/27/1894 that argued sheep ranchers should raise coyotes. 

At the time, one sheep was worth around two and a half dollars, and the bounty on coyotes was 6 dollars per scalp. Coyotes also have five to seven pups a year, while ewes only have one or two. As the writer said, “The arithmetic and logic of the matter are easy.” A similar story unfolded in Kansas. 

In 1913, Anderson County discovered that they had suffered fraudulent bounty payments for a number of years. According to an article called “Coyotes Raised for Scalps in the Chanute Weekly Tribune on 05/09/1913, a hunter named W. F. Wells discovered several people were raising coyotes for the scalps. 

These people had caught a breeding pair of coyotes and kept them. The article mentions that a Sunday school superintendent raised the coyotes for years and made 50 dollars in five years. A neighbor got fed with this and stole the coyotes before the superintendent could turn them in. The neighbor collected the one-dollar bounty. 

Another example from Kansas comes in May of 1903 when The Wellington Journal reported that a dozen or more farmers were organizing the “Society for the Prevention of the Destruction of Female Coyotes” or S.P.D.F.C for short. Their goal was to protect female coyotes as breeding stock. 

The writer says that the larger than normal number of bounties being turned in led to “a general suspicion that the bounty business is being worked for all its is worth in this county.” Females were rarely turned in, with “nine out of every ten being young coyotes.” There could be another explanation, however.

The article is scientifically inaccurate because it claims females can have several litters of pups a year. Female coyotes only have one litter, and they typically give birth to four to seven pups, generally born in April or May. The number of pups depends on the how much food is available and the local coyote population. 

The fewer coyotes in an area mean more food is available and more pups are born. Notice when that article was published, late spring. It’s easy to see how someone would suspect foul play when the majority of animals turned in were young pups in May or June. But another likely scenario is hunters found and killed dens when the mother wasn’t around. 

People across the country were suspicious, but we shouldn’t assume that raising coyotes was common. It's possible people simply didn’t believe coyotes could continue to thrive under hunting pressure and made up excuses for their failures to exterminate coyotes. 

Bounties were the start of America’s war on coyotes. In a future video, I’ll discuss the federal government's role in the slaughter. Ultimately, that was a failure as well. Even today, the United States Department of Agriculture estimates that 50,000 coyotes are killed a year. 

They keep expanding and, despite our best attempts over the last couple of hundred years, are still thriving. That is where the power of adapting to an ever-changing landscape helps them. The strategies they employed to live with North American hyenas, dire wolves, and sabertooth cats serve them just as well as living with us. 

Thank you for watching.

Citations

Coyote America, Dan Flores.

Louis and Clark Journal

A Brief Hist A Brief History of Extension Pr y of Extension Predator Contr or Control in Missouri ol in Missouri
The original text of the law was published in the Walnut Valley Times on May 18, 1877. It is also possible to find the text fully cited as a Kansas statute. See Kansas State Board of Agriculture. Biennial Report – Kansas State Board of Agriculture, Volume 1, 584.

 Murie, Adolph. Ecology of the Coyote in the Yellowstone. (Washinton D.C., U.S Government), 1940. 

Predatory Bureaucracy, Michael J Robinson

 Statesman Journal, Coyotes vs Sheep, 11/27/1894. 
 Coyotes Raised for Scalps, Chanute Weekly Tribune, 05/09/1913. 

 The Wellington Journal, 05/09/1903. 

Video Clips

United States Fish and Wildlife Service American Mammals 1

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KANSAS’ LOST WILDLIFE SCRIPT

KANSAS’ LOST WILDLIFE SCRIPT

In the early 1800s, Americans called Kansas and the Great Plains the North American Desert. They were misled by Major Stephen H. Long and his poor attitude towards the plains during his expedition across North America. To him, the Great Plains was a boring, drab place. Today, many people share his view of this expansive grassland that historically rivaled the African Veldt in terms of biodiversity.

Sadly, Long’s assessment was a prediction. We’ve wiped out most of our megafauna. Environmental historian Dan Flores called the Great Plains pre-Manifest Destiny “one of the marvels of the world.” Today, that marvel means seeing the ghosts of bears, elk, and other animals who called Kansas home before Americans migrated west. 

In today's video, we’ll explore Kansas’ rich environmental history, and I’ll show you a small part of that biodiversity. It will start with a crash course in Kansas ecology and discuss some of our native wildlife. 

Before we continue, please like and subscribe to learn more about North America’s wildlife history. 

As you travel across the state, you’ll go from forests in the east to the short grasses of the Great Plains in the west. In between are tallgrass and mixed grass prairies. Those prairies are named for, you guessed it, how tall the grasses are. The vegetation follows annual rainfall, with eastern Kansas getting the most and western the least.

Like the rain, we’ll go east to west in this video. I’ll highlight black bears, elk, and grizzly bears. All three are animals people don’t typically associate with Kansas. 

In eastern Kansas, black bears were the largest predator. Historically, they occupied the eastern half of the state while grizzly bears dominated western Kansas. 

Black bears are omnivores, so they eat a wide variety of nuts, berries, grasses, insects, fish, and mammals. They were more widespread in Eastern Kansas because the forests provided them with abundant food and shelter.

Unfortunately, black bears vanished within 30 years of Kansas becoming a state. The last official bears were killed in the 1880s though they started disappearing a couple of decades before that. 

They were uncommon enough that when a bear was shot near Cottonwood Falls, KS, in 1866, some locals speculated about where it came from. The Daily Kansas Tribune shared the story on October 10th, 1866. 

It was a lone bear who wandered onto Mr. Fisher’s prosperity. His gun failed to go off, so “Messrs, Fisher, Jonathan Wood, and other citizens of Chase County” chased the bear down and killed it. 

According to the paper, they didn’t know where the bear had come from, which led to speculation that the bear was an escaped pet from “somewhere up the Cottonwood.”

If bears were an everyday occurrence, I doubt there would have been speculations about their origin. Our next species was much easier to spot, and no one could confuse them for someone’s pet. 

Elk were creatures of the Great Plains and called all of Kansas home. Americans pushed elk up into mountainous areas. 

You may think about majestic elk bugling in the Rocky Mountains, but these huge cervidaes were the dominant deer species on the Plains.

Sources show elk were mostly found in the Tallgrass Prairie but were eliminated by the 1830s. After that, elk in the mixed-grass and short-grass prairies were killed off as Americans took over the rest of Kansas. By the late 1800s when elk were officially eliminated in Kanas. Like bison, elk were a casualty of market hunting and the quest for civilization. 

Wild elk, black bear, and even a stray wolf have returned to Kansas, but our last species has not and probably never well. 

I compared the Great Plains to the African Veldt at the beginning of this video, and the mighty grizzly bear brings that comparison home. The grizzly bear is our lion, tiger, or great white shark. 

They are our link between the current neutered Great Plains and the historic wild country that stretches between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River. 

Grizzlys tended to stay within river basins where they would have found food, shelter, and water. We know through historical accounts that grizzlies were found throughout the state, but physical evidence is rare. I could only find one story where sisters found a grizzly skull along the Arkansas river in south-central Kansas. It was approximately 16 inches by 8.5 inches.

A vivid description of a grizzly bear hunt happened in a similar environment along the Missouri River in Montana. It occurred in 1874, and William de la Montagne Cary witnessed it from a steamboat headed up the river. 

He wrote that “about a mile off an immense grizzly bear [was] making for a cottonwood miles away and behind the bear came two men superbly mounted, armed to the teeth… We could see distinctly the horses straining every muscle to overtake the bear who was equally anxious and making every effort to escape his pursuers.”

Removing grizzlies represented the ultimate taming of the Great Plains. After they were wiped out of Kansas in the mid-1800s, no other predator could truly threaten people. The last removing wolves were killed in the early 20th century, leaving coyotes as the largest mammalian predator in Kansas. In typical American fashion, we tried to kill them off, also. 

Every time one of these keystone species was eliminated, Kansas became quieter. We Americans took this once grandiose landscape and domesticated it to the point where it's almost unrecognizable in the 21st century. 

If you enjoyed this video, please subscribe to get notified when new videos are published. In February, I will talk about coyotes. Thank you for watching.

Citations

Dan Flores American Serengeti

Fort Hays State Mammal Atlas

 The Daily Kansas Tribune, 10/25/1866. 
 Historical and Current Status of Elk in Kansas, University of Nebraska

https://www.kwch.com/content/news/Kansas-sisters-find-grizzly-bear-skull-along-Arkansas-River-563213811.html

Footage

United States Fish and Wildlife Service

American Mammals 1

American Mammals 10: Elk

American Mammals 5: Black Bear and Javelina B-Roll

American Mammals 12 and 13: Bison

United States National Archives

Predators

Music

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