Ursus Horribilus - California Grizzly

Commonwealth Network

The last visible specimen of Ursus Horribilus is no more than a skin upon an armature. Monarch lived in a pit behind San Francisco's Steinhart Aquarium. Upon the behemoth's death, he was gutted and set in the California Hall of the Academy of Sciences. The taxidermist made this puppet stand with its heavy arms outstretched, his mouth open in a menacing growl. The mummy dwarfs even the tallest of men who come to view it.

The encounter between man and bear proved, in the long run, to be bad for the bear. The last wild California grizzly died in 1922, twenty years before California had an agency which could have protected it from trophy hunters and the fearful. The bear could be found nearly everywhere -- upon wooded mountain ridges and in the open valley grasslands. Human encounters with the grizzly had not been pleasant: the bears hunted men, preferring the shepherd to his sheep. The bones of one unfortunate, killed while on an expedition for the Hudson Bay Company in 1837, turned up in the Tejon Pass sixty years later. A companion carved his memorial into an oak tree:

PETER LEBECK
KILLED
BY
A X BEAR
OCTr. 17
1837

Men feared the Grizzly, so they shot him or made sport of him as one of the antagonists in the notorious bull and bear fights. For its part, the grizzly often strolled into human settlements showing little fear as it sought out the butcher's dumping grounds. Pioneers, who had cleared the land of its native peoples, endeavoured to cleanse it, too, of the bear. Eradication became the policy of the day and, in less than a hundred years, the largest land carnivore known to science disappeared.

The people of California loved the Grizzly in its decline and they love it now as memory. A Golden Bear stands atop a pillar at the University of California campus at Berkeley. Ursus horribilus, made safe for us with the name ursus californicus, graces the state flag. Everywhere one looks in the Golden State, one can pick out Monarch's ghost in advertisements, mascots, stuffed toys, and other emblems. We forgive the grizzly for the horror he brought to our camps and small settlements, now, but this is an easy, gutless task. For the Golden Bear is dead, and the last true relic of its existence deteriorating. Once again, popular history shows itself to be the sentimental recollection of what we have lost. In these pages, we seek to resurrect the carnivore and to contemplate what we have made of our memory.