Customer Reviews

Bear in Mind: The California Grizzly

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While this book is as hefty as a grizzly, and costs as much as a concert ticket (granted, only an upper mezzanine seat), Bear In Mind is *the* book for my coffee table: I want to read it luxuriously, I want to pore over every written word, every detail of art and artifact in its pages. I want my Californian friends to see it. I want to get copies for their homes.This book reclaims the legacy of the grizzly, and ought to replace the bear flag as the symbol of state and national pride and humility.

I absolutely enjoyed this book along with the great photographs and illustrations. It is hard to imagine that the great bear once roamed so much of California, especially in the modern day concrete jungles that sprouted from such pristine wildlife habitat. Ms. Snyder did a great job of putting together and telling the stories of this facsinating animal. Can you imagine, hiking Malibu beach and seeing grizzlies feasting on a beached whale? I was born 100 years too late. If you love grizzlies, or California history, buy this book!!!

Forty or so dangerous wild animals just had to be hunted down in an Ohio town when their owner released them before committing suicide. The police shot bears, tigers, wolves, and monkeys not having tranquilizing darts in their squad cars. This book may be a valuable documentary source of the cruelty Europeans visited upon grizzly bears when the former arrived in California but the documents are truly grotesque. Compounded of machismo, delight in torture, and fear of the wild, grizzlies were hunted, tortured, pacified, and then exterminated. Although the author doesn't mention it, Lewis and Clark and their fellow travelers were both frightened of the great bears and took pleasure in hunting them. With their neither reliable nor very effective muzzle loaders, they would go into thickets after bears. (Wilderness Journey: The Life of William Clark) The most effective hunters of grizz's were the Spanish vaqueros who would rope the bears when they came down to feed upon hundreds of carcasses left to rot in the hide trade which was California's first real export so interestingly described by Richard Henry Dana in, "Two Years Before the Mast." Skilled horsemen of the Spanish plains, they conquered Mexico and came into California in the late 18th century where their cattle multiplied. From great estancias they slaughtered their herds and shipped the hides to Mexico and the newly emerging USA. The grizzlies, who came to eat the wastage, were deftly rope with recatas and then tortured, quartered, and sometimes made to fight bulls. Vaqueros had to grease their ropes because a strong bear could pull a rider and mount to him/her and grab the horse by the tail and kill it and rider.

First into the country from the east were mountain men, trappers in the Rockies and elsewhere who hunted out beavers. They began to settle in California in the 1830s. They brought with them the art of killing grizzlies which they turned into a trade supplying meat to miners who came in larger numbers after 1848. Miners intruded into grizzly country and slaughtered the bears out of fear and for vittals. It is shameful history full of braggadocio, heroically killing bears with knives etc. The books gives excerpt after excerpt of these gruesome deeds. There is almost no respect for the bears as wild beings or concern for their place in nature. It is really too much. Besides as a historical resource, who would want to read of all the brutality. I had a hard time. It is so unrelelenting.

Then there came the dancing bears. Tamed brown bears go back maybe thousands of years in Europe and maybe China too. The Romans had their menageries and brown bears lived across northern, Old World. Wretched, muzzled bears on chains were familiar in Medieval Europe. The Spanish who fought bulls relished bear combat. The epitome of dancing bears in California comes with Grizzly Adams. His menagerie included many grizzlies whom he could mostly control, eventually dying of wounds received from the bears. He sold his menagerie to P.T. Barnum. How is one to think about Adams' relationship to his wild captives. Certainly he was able to tame them. If the SPCA were to have walked into his basement zoo in San Francisco would they have been horrified or was Adam's actually able to establish rapport with his beasts that had something redeeming to it. I don't know. Timothy Treadwell, the Grizzly Man, (The Grizzly Maze: Timothy Treadwell's Fatal Obsession with Alaskan Bears)had an extraordinary relationship with bears in the wild until he stepped across a subtle species boundary and a bear killed him and his girlfriend. Treadwell coexisted with his bears in their habitat. Adams subdued his. I am not sure how.

The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley has extraordinary documents and I should be thankful to the editor of this tome for exhibiting this slice of history. But the book is very upsetting and I had to put it down from time to time because I could not take the seeming unconscious cruelty of humans towards the wild. Of course, we do the same to each other.

Charlie Fisher author of Dismantling Discontent: Buddha's Way Through Darwin's World