THEODORE ROOSEVELT
VARIETIES OF BEAR
The king of the game beasts of temperate North America, because the most dangerous to the hunter, is the grizzly bear; known to the few remaining old-time trappers of the Rockies and the Great Plains, sometimes as “Old Ephraim” and sometimes as “Moccasin Joe”—the last in allusion to his queer, half-human footprints, which look as if made by some misshapen giant, walking in moccasins.
Bear vary greatly in size and color, no less than in temper and habits. Old hunters speak much of them in their endless talks over the camp-fires and in the snow-bound winter huts. They insist on many species; not merely the black and the grizzly, but the brown, the cinnamon, the gray, the silver-tip, and others with names known only in certain localities, such as the range bear, the roach-back, and the smut-face. But, in spite of [popular opinion] to the contrary, most old hunters are very untrustworthy in dealing with points of [natural history]. They usually know only so much about any given game animal as will enable them to kill it. They study its habits solely with this end in view; and once slain they only examine it to see about its condition and fur. With rare exceptions they are quite incapable of passing judgment upon questions of [specific identity] or difference. When questioned, they not only advance perfectly impossible theories and facts in support of their views, but they rarely even agree as to the views themselves. One hunter will assert that the true grizzly is only found in California, heedless of the fact that the name was first used by Lewis and Clark as one of the titles they applied to the large bears of the plains country round the Upper Missouri, a quarter of a century before the California grizzly was known to fame. Another hunter will call any big brindled bear a grizzly no matter where it is found; and he and his companions will dispute by the hour as to whether a bear of large, but not extreme, size is a grizzly or a silver-tip. In Oregon the cinnamon bear is a phase of the small black bear; in Montana it is the plains variety of the large mountain silver-tip. I have myself seen the skins of two bears killed on the upper waters of Tongue River; one was that of a male, one of a female, and they had evidently just mated; yet one was distinctly a “silver-tip” and the other a “cinnamon.” The skin of one very big bear which I killed in the Bighorn has proved a [standing puzzle] to almost all the old hunters to whom I have shown it; rarely do any two of them agree as to whether it is a grizzly, a silver-tip, a cinnamon, or a “smut-face.” Any bear with unusually long hair on the spine and shoulders, especially if killed in the spring, when the fur is shaggy, is forthwith dubbed a “roach-back.” The average sporting writer, moreover, joins with the more imaginative members of the “old hunter” variety in ascribing wildly various traits to these different bears. One comments on the [superior prowess] of the roach-back; the explanation being that a bear in early spring is apt to be ravenous from hunger. The next insists that the California grizzly is the only really dangerous bear; while another [stoutly maintains] that it does not compare in ferocity with what he calls the “smaller” silver-tip or cinnamon. And so on, and so on, without end. All of which is mere nonsense.
Nevertheless, it is no easy task to determine how many species or varieties of bear actually do exist in the United States, and I cannot even say without doubt that a very large set of skins and skulls would not show a nearly complete intergradation between the most [widely separated individuals]. However, there are certainly two very distinct types, which differ almost as widely from each other as a wapiti does from a mule deer, and which exist in the same localities in most heavily timbered portions of the Rockies. One is the small black bear, a bear which will average about two hundred pounds weight, with fine, glossy, black fur, and the foreclaws but little longer than the hinder ones; in fact, the hairs of the forepaw often reach to their tips. This bear is a tree climber. It is the only kind found east of the great plains, and it is also plentiful in the forest-clad portions of the Rockies, being common in most heavily timbered tracts throughout the United States. The other is the grizzly, which weighs three or four times as much as the black, and has a pelt of coarse hair, which is in color gray, grizzled, or brown of various shades. It is not a tree climber, and the foreclaws are very long, much longer than the hinder ones. It is found from the great plains west of the Mississippi to the Pacific coast. This bear [inhabits indifferently] lowland and mountain; the deep woods and the barren plains where the only cover is the stunted growth fringing the streams. These two types are very distinct in every way, and their differences are not at all dependent upon mere geographical considerations; for they are often found in the same district. Thus I found them both in the Bighorn Mountains, each type being [in extreme form], while the specimens I shot showed no trace of intergradation. The huge, grizzled, long-clawed beast, and its little, glossy-coated, short-clawed, tree-climbing brother roamed over exactly the same country in those mountains; but they were as distinct in habits, and mixed as little together as moose and caribou.
On the other hand, when a sufficient number of bears from widely separated regions are examined, the various distinguishing marks are found to be inconstant and to show a tendency—exactly how strong I cannot say—to fade into one another. The differentiation of the two species seems to be as yet scarcely completed; there are more or less [imperfect connecting links], and as regards the grizzly it almost seems as if the specific characters were still unstable. In the far Northwest, in the basin of the Columbia, the “black” bear is as often brown as any other color; and I have seen the skins of two cubs, one black and one brown, which were shot when following the same dam. When these brown bears have coarser hair than usual their skins are with difficulty to be distinguished from those of certain varieties of the grizzly. Moreover, all bears vary greatly in size; and I have seen the bodies of very large black or brown bears with short foreclaws which were fully as heavy as, or perhaps heavier than, some small but full-grown grizzlies with long foreclaws. These very large bears with short claws are very reluctant to climb a tree; and are almost as clumsy about it as is a young grizzly. Among the grizzlies the fur varies much in color and texture even among bears of the same locality; it is of course richest in the deep forest, while the bears of the dry plains and mountains are of a lighter, more washed-out hue.
A full-grown grizzly will usually weigh from five to seven hundred pounds; but exceptional individuals undoubtedly reach more than twelve hundredweight. The California bears are said to be much the largest. This I think is so, but I cannot say it with certainty—at any rate, I have examined several skins of full-grown Californian bears which were no larger than those of many I have seen from the northern Rockies. The Alaskan bears, particularly those of the peninsula, are even bigger beasts; the skin of one which I saw in the possession of Mr. Webster, the taxidermist, was a good deal larger than the average polar bear skin; and the animal when alive, if in good condition, could hardly have weighed less than 1400 pounds. Bears vary wonderfully in weight, even to the extent of becoming half as heavy again, according as they are fat or lean; in this respect they are more like hogs than like any other animals.
HABITS OF BEAR
The grizzly is now chiefly a beast of the high hills and heavy timber; but this is merely because he has learned that he must [rely on cover] to guard him from man, and has forsaken the open ground accordingly. In old days, and in one or two very out-of-the-way places almost to the present time, he wandered at will over the plains. It is only the [wariness born of fear] which nowadays causes him to cling to the thick brush of the large river bottoms throughout the plains country. When there were no rifle-bearing hunters in the land, to harass him and make him afraid, he roved hither and thither at will, in burly self-confidence. Then he cared little for cover, unless as a weather-break, or because it happened to contain food he liked. If the humor seized him he would roam for days over the rolling or broken prairie, searching for roots, digging up gophers, or perhaps following the great buffalo herds either to prey on some unwary straggler which he was able to catch at a disadvantage in a washout, or else to feast on the carcasses of those which died by accident. Old hunters, survivors of the long-vanished ages when the vast herds thronged the high plains and were followed by the wild red tribes, and by bands of whites who were scarcely less savage, have told me that they often met bears under such circumstances; and these bears were accustomed to sleep in a patch of rank sage bush, in the niche of a washout, or under the [lee of a bowlder], seeking their food abroad even in full daylight. The bears of the Upper Missouri basin—which were so light in color that the early explorers often alluded to them as gray or even as “white”—were particularly given to this life in the open. To this day that close kinsman of the grizzly known as the bear of the barren grounds continues to lead this same kind of life, in the far north. My friend, Mr. Rockhill, of Maryland, who was the first white man to explore eastern Tibet, describes the large grizzly-like bear of those desolate uplands as having similar habits.
However, the grizzly is a shrewd beast and shows the usual bear-like capacity for adapting himself to changed conditions. He has in most places become a cover-haunting animal, sly in his ways, [wary to a degree], and clinging to the shelter of the deepest forests in the mountains and of the most tangled thickets in the plains. Hence he has [held his own] far better than such game as the bison and elk. He is much less common than formerly, but he is still to be found throughout most of his former range; save, of course, in the immediate neighborhood of the large towns.