Category: Adventure

Bears I Have Met—and Others

The California Grizzly made his reputation as a man-killer in the days of the muzzle-loading rifle, when failure to stop him with one shot deprived the hunter of all advantage in respect of weapons and reversed their positions instantly, the bear becoming the hunter and the ma...

Chapters

3. Chapter 3

The most famous bear in the world was, is and will continue to be the gigantic Grizzly known variously on the Pacific Slope as "Old Brin," "Clubfoot," and "Reelfoot." He was fir...

2. Chapter 2

Early in 1889, the editor of a San Francisco newspaper sent me out to catch a Grizzly. He wanted to present to the city a good specimen of the big California bear, partly becaus...

1. Chapter 1

The California Grizzly made his reputation as a man-killer in the days of the muzzle-loading rifle, when failure to stop him with one shot deprived the hunter of all advantage i...

18. Chapter 18

This is an incredible bear story, but it is true. George Gleason told it to a man who knew the bear so well that he thought the old Pinto Grizzly belonged to him and wore his br...

15. Chapter 15

"Speaking of bears, Joe," said one of a party of hunters sitting around a campfire at old Fort Tejon, "Old Ari Hopper has had more queer experiences with bears than anybody. He...

7. Chapter 7

Pike was one of the oldest of Yosemite guides and altogether the quaintest of the many queer old fellows who drifted into the valley in early days and there were stranded for li...

14. Chapter 14

In the flickering of the camp-fire the glooming wall of firs advanced and receded like the sea upon the shore, whispering, too, like the sea, of mysteries within its depths; for...

16. Chapter 16

The people who live on the Pecos, away up in the canyon, almost in the afternoon shadow of Baldy and just this side of the Truchas Peaks, do not assert that the bears of that re...

6. Chapter 6

William Thurman, who owned a lumber mill on the Chowchilla mountain, not far from the Mariposa grove of Big Trees, told this plain, unadorned tale of an old-fashioned Grizzly be...

20. Chapter 20

One-eyed Zeke, who hunted for a living along Owen River, in Inyo County, Cal., in the early seventies, claimed to have a method of killing bears that might be effective if a man...

10. Chapter 10

"Yosemite" is an Indian word, signifying "place of the Grizzly bear," and appropriately the Yosemite National Park is made a sanctuary for the California Grizzly by the regulati...

17. Chapter 17

For several years a large Grizzly roamed through the rugged mountain's in the northern part of Los Angeles county, raiding cattle ranges and bee ranches and occasionally falling...

8. Chapter 8

The winter of 1889-90 is memorable in California as the winter of "the big snow." In the latter part of January the Central Pacific line over the Sierra Nevada was blockaded, an...

12. Chapter 12

"Curious how some men will lose their grip on the truth when they talk about bears," said Mr. Jack Waddell, of Ventura. "There's old Ari Hopper, for example, a man whose word is...

13. Chapter 13

What a bear may do under given circumstances may be guessed with reasonable certainty by one who has had experience, but it is not always safe to risk much on the accuracy of th...

9. Chapter 9

A small party of hunters sat by a campfire in a tamarack grove in the high Sierra. Their guide was William Larkin, Esq., alias "Old Bill," a man who had lived in the mountains f...

5. Chapter 5

Over-confidence and some contempt for bears, born of easy victories cheaply won, led one noted Californian hunter into The Valley of the Shadow, from which he emerged content to...

4. Chapter 4

Charles McKiernan was a well-known lumber merchant of San Jose, Cal. To old timers he was "Mountain Charlie," having spent most of his life in the Santa Cruz mountains, where he...

11. Chapter 11

"It was pretty late in the season," said my friend, the prospector, "when I took a notion that I'd like to see what sort of a country lies north of the Umpqua River, in Oregon,...

22. Chapter 22

The man up the creek, the original locator of the denful of Grizzlies, had his opinion of Old Bill as a slayer of bears. It was notorious in the canyon that the only bear Old Bi...

19. Chapter 19

The Cascade Mountains in Oregon and Washington Territory are full of bears, and as the inhabitants seldom hunt them, the animals are disposed to be sociable and neighborly and w...

21. Chapter 21

A man from San Gabriel Canyon came into Los Angeles and told bear stories to the Professor and the Professor told them to other people. The main point of the man's tale was that...