Bear necessity - Western Wanderings - famous bear hunt in California

MT. PINOS, CALIFORNIA--From this mountain's 8,831-foot summit, you see a Southern California you might be surprised still exists. To the south rise the high ridges of Ventura County's Sespe backcountry. To the west, the Cuyama River curls through corrugated badlands. Mainly what you sense are space and wildness.

In short, you see why this was the ideal locale for the most famous bear hunt in California history.

"HOW HE WAS CAPTURED," read the headline of the San Francisco Examiner on November 3, 1889. "It Took Over Five Months to Do It, but He Was Caught at Last."

The author of the article was a San Francisco journalist named Allen Kelly The object of his quest was a California grizzly bear.

Now, in the 21st century, it is hard even to imagine a California with grizzly bears. But in their classic book, California Grizzly, biologists Tracy Storer and Lloyd Tevis Jr. estimate that the state's grizzly population once reached 10,000 and extended from Oregon south to the Mexican border. Weighing as much as 1,000 pounds, with 3-inch claws and crushing teeth, the grizzly was a formidable presence, respected and hunted by California Indians, by Spanish explorers, by American gold seekers. The bear was so entwined in California's sense of itself that when American settlers revolted against Mexican rule in 1846, they naturally chose the bear for their symbol and slapped one onto their flag--after all, as one of the rebels explained, "A bear always stands its ground."

And so journalist Kelly was not merely hunting a bear; he was, in a way hunting California. But his expedition was a farce. Kelly went to the ranch town of Santa Paula and hired local guides who took him for a city slicker with money and not much sense. Together they plunged north, squabbling, scouring the Sespe watershed for bears, not finding them. At last, probably here on the slopes of Mt. Pinos, they managed to lure a bear into their trap, then chained him, gagged him, caged him, and transported him by wagon and rail to San Francisco.

It sounds incredible, and in fact so much of Kelly's story is hazy and contradictory that there still are disputes over where and how he acquired the bear. Still, by November of 1889, San Francisco had its grizzly now named Monarch and ensconced in Woodward's Gardens amusement park, where more than 20,000 visited him on the first day he was exhibited. "A BRIGHT AND JOYOUS HOLIDAY," proclaimed the Examiner "No Accident or Unpleasant Incident."

Eventually Monarch was moved across the city to Golden Gate Park, where he became a star exhibit at the San Francisco Zoo. He died in 1911, but he did not vanish. Taxidermied, he resides in the California Academy of Sciences' Wild California Hall. And his brethren are still venerated as symbols of California. The grizzly remains the state animal; the grizzly poses on the state flag.

It's only the living California grizzlies that aren't around. Even when Monarch was captured, they were vanishing, victims of hunters' rifles and ranchers' strychnine. Bears were spotted in Santa Barbara County as late as 1912 and in Sequoia National Park in the 1920s. Then they were gone.

Today there are an estimated 1,000 grizzlies left in the contiguous United States--in Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Washington--and 35,000 in Alaska. Every once in a while, a quixotic group proposes reintroducing the species to California, but that seems, to put it mildly unlikely Still, standing on Mt. Pinos, you can't help but feel that something was lost when the Bear Flag Republic lost its bears. Did we go too far? Was California a prize too easily won? Maybe only Monarch knows, and he's not talking.

Monarch the grizzly can be viewed at the California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco (415/750-7145). For information on Mt. Pinos, call the Los Padres National Forest, Mt. Pinos Ranger District (661/245-3731); check for winter road conditions.

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