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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Footage
Wild Animals / New Orleans, Louisiana, National Archives
BABIES OF WILD ANIMALS, National Archives
YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, , National Archives
Other footage courtesy of Videvo