True Bear Stories

TRUE BEAR STORIES JOAQUIN MILLER
BY JOAQUIN MILLER, WITH INTRODUCTORY NOTES BY Dr. David Starr Jordan, President of Leland Stanford, Jr., University.
TOGETHER WITH A THRILLING ACCOUNT OF THE CAPTURE OF THE CELEBRATED GRIZZLY “MONARCH.”
FULLY ILLUSTRATED.
CHICAGO AND NEW YORK: RAND, McNALLY & COMPANY, PUBLISHERS.
Copyright, 1900, by Rand, McNally & Co.
DEDICATED to My Dear Little Daughter, JUANITA MILLER, FOR WHOSE PLEASURE AND INSTRUCTION I HAVE MANY TIMES DUG UP THE MOST OF THESE STORIES FROM OUT THE DAYS OF MY BOYHOOD.
My Bright Young Reader : I was once exactly your own age. Like all boys, I was, from the first, fond of bear stories, and above all, I did not like stories that seemed the least bit untrue. I always preferred a natural and reasonable story and one that would instruct as well as interest. This I think best for us all, and I have acted on this line in compiling these comparatively few bear stories from a long life of action in our mountains and up and down the continent.
As a rule, the modern bear is not a bloody, bad fellow, whatever he may have been in Bible days. You read, almost any circus season, about the killing of his keeper by a lion, a tiger, a panther, or even the dreary old elephant, but you never hear of a tame bear’s hurting anybody.
I suppose you have been told, and believe, that bears will eat boys, good or bad, if they meet them in the woods. This is not true. On the contrary, there are several well-authenticated cases, in Germany mostly, where bears have taken lost children under their protection, one boy having been reared from the age of four to sixteen by a she bear without ever seeing the face of man.
I have known several persons to be maimed or killed in battles with bears, but in every case it was not the bear that began the fight, and in all my experience of about half a century I never knew a bear to eat human flesh, as does the tiger and like beasts.
Each branch of the bear family is represented here and each has its characteristics. By noting these as you go along you may learn something not set down in the schoolbooks. For the bear is a shy old hermit and is rarely encountered in his wild state by anyone save the hardy hunter, whose only interest in the event is to secure the skin and carcass.