Early Documented Grizzly Encounters

In 1602, when Explorer Sebastian Vizcaino stopped in the bay of Monterey, he witnessed bears coming down to the beach to feed on the carcass of a stranded whale. Father Antonio de la Ascension, the expedition's official diarist reported that the bear tracks measured “a good third of a yard long and a hand wide.”1

In 1769, Father Juan Crespi wrote: “we saw bears' dung everywhere.”

During the Mission Period, livestock grazed on the land surrounding the Santa Cruz Mission. The animals were much easier for grizzlies to catch than the native deer and elk. In 1933, H. Torchiana of Watsonville wrote of a story told by a Santa Cruz Mission Indian:

Bears were so plentiful that once the soldiers of the guard were ordered to hunt them for target practice.

Cattle roamed on the vast ranchos. They were raised mainly for their hide and tallow, not their meat. So, after the animals had been slaughtered their remains were just left to rot. The grizzlies took full advantage of this tasty meal.

Hubert Bancroft wrote in his History of California that during the early 1800s “the bears became so bold as to kill and eat cattle every-day in full view of the herdsmen.” Traps and poison had proved ineffective and the governor was asked to authorize the use of 1000 cartridges “and a regular military campaign was undertaken against the enemy.”

In 1828, when Kentucky trapper and storyteller James Ohio Pattie wrote about his travels through the Mexican Territory of Alta California, supposedly vaccinating people against smallpox, he described large numbers of grizzlies in the area around Monterey: 

Forests spread around Monte El Rey for miles in all directions, composed of thick clusters of pines and live oaks. Numberless grey bears find their home, and range in these deep woods. They are frequently known to attack men. The Spaniards take great numbers of them by stratagem, killing an old horse in the neighborhood of their places of resort. They erect a scaffold near the dead animal upon which they place themselves during the night armed with a gun or lance. When the bear approaches to eat, they either shoot it, or pierce it with the lance from their elevated position. Notwithstanding all their precautions, however, they are sometimes caught by the wounded animal; and after a man has once wrestled with a bear, he will not be likely to desire to make a second trial of the same gymnastic exercise. Such, at any rate, is the opinion I have heard those express, who have had the good fortune to come off alive from a contest of this kind. I do not speak for myself in this matter, as I never came so near as to take the close hug with one in my life; though to escape it, I once came near breaking my neck down a precipice.2

In 1850, Methodist minister William Taylor described bear tracks he had seen in the Santa Cruz Mountains on his way to a meeting in Santa Cruz. he wrote:

For a couple of miles back as I came through a dense chaperel [sic] thicket, I have been on the track of a grizzly bear. His track by measurement was fourteen inches long and seven wide; he must have been a monster.3

1. Father Antonio de la Ascención's Account of the Voyage of Sebastián Vizcaíno, 1929 Translation by Henry Raup Wagner.

2. The Personal Narrative of James O. Pattie, of Kentucky, James Ohio Pattie, 216.

3. William Taylor, California Life Illustrated, Carlton and Porter, (New York, NY: 1860) 153.