Before the first frontiersmen arrived in Colorado, grizzly bears roamed the state in abundance. They were respected and feared by Native Americans, who viewed the great bears as sacred and hunted them sparingly. That balance deteriorated when explorers of the early 1800s deemed grizzlies a threat and shot them on sight. On their heels came the sportsmen who hunted the bears for trophies and hides. Encroaching civilization in the late 1800s further pitted grizzlies against man. When the federal government sought to eradicate the species in 1931, their death knell was rung.
Wildlife officials say the last Colorado grizzly bear was killed by a hunter in 1979, but many wonder if the bears still exist deep in the wilderness. Perhaps, they say, a remnant population managed to survive their savage demise.
The enormous bear had been shot days earlier by a hunter from the Glenn-Fowler expedition, with whom Dawson was traveling. It had escaped into the dense brush near an idyllic stream, where it hid, suffering from injuries it was unlikely to survive. Roused by Dawson’s approach to the water’s edge, the grizzly attacked, dooming Dawson to a clawsome death.
For three days, the young explorer clung to life before succumbing to his injuries. His death marked the first recorded fatal encounter between a Colorado grizzly and a white man. When Dawson’s fellow explorers buried him not far from where the mauling occurred, he was given the additional honor of being the first non-native interred in Colorado soil. Expedition leader Jacob Fowler documented the horrifying details of Dawson’s death in his journal. He described how his party, in the aftermath of the attack, readied their rifles to kill Dawson’s grizzly and any others they might encounter.
Kit Carson, a famous fur trapper and early Colorado mountain man, considered grizzlies his most terrifying foe. The hair-raising stories he shared of near-fatal encounters with the ferocious bears horrified all who heard them.
One of Kit’s most harrowing encounters occurred in the 1830s, while he was camping with other trappers near a stream in northwestern Colorado. Kit headed into the forest alone to go hunting and shot an elk a mile from camp. As he processed the animal, he was jolted by the sudden presence of two towering grizzlies emerging from the trees. The bears looked hungry and powerful and they lunged toward Kit with a vicious snarl.
Running for his life, Kit dashed toward a nearby pine tree with the notion to climb it. In his haste, he left his gun beside the dead elk. Woefully unarmed, he hoped the grizzlies would satiate their hunger on the elk and move on. To his horror, they ignored the elk and charged his tree.
Kit swung himself up onto a limb as the bears’ jaws snapped shut beneath his dangling feet. He twisted off a branch to strike them. Enraged, the bears gnawed furiously at the trunk. They kept Kit cornered up there in the tree until midnight, when they finally lost interest, devoured the elk, and lumbered off into the forest. Kit inched down the pine, reclaimed his rifle, and hurried back to camp.
Countless other frontiersmen shared perilous accounts similar to those of Jacob Fowler and Kit Carson. Colorado grizzly bears would be worse off for it, particularly once sportsmen entered the scene.
Hunting grizzlies for sport took off in the mid-1800s. Conquering the beasts, taking their trophies, and making money from their hides motivated countless sportsmen to lock grizzlies in their sights. Entire families of bears were killed off in large numbers. Some were stuffed; others were skinned. Hides could fetch hundreds of dollars, and hunters made out like bandits with every grizzly they took.
Few were concerned about depleting Colorado’s grizzly populations. The bears were plentiful at the time. Even official government surveys celebrated their abundance and the opportunities for hunting they provided.
When Captain J.W. Gunnison surveyed south-central Colorado in 1855, he described grizzlies thriving in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains: “Sportsmen’s spirits are excited by grouse and pheasants, deer and grizzly bear, in every valley and glen.”
During the late 1800s, agriculture in Colorado roared to life. Settlers had wrested control of the land from the natives and found ideal conditions for ranching, farming, and growing fruit. In the forested regions, lumbermen enjoyed rich sources of timber. But much like the miners who came before them, who carelessly lacerated mountainsides and polluted waterways, the new agriculturists gave little thought to the wildlife habitats impacted by their pursuits.
The riparian streambeds favored by grizzlies were depleted by open-range cattle and sheep feeding on native grasses. With their food sources wiped out, hungry bears turned to poaching livestock. Ranchers and stockmen responded by killing the bears to protect their herds. Substantially more grizzlies were eliminated by this contingent than by all the frontiersmen and sportsmen who first took aim at the species.
Around the turn of the 20th century, a curious phenomenon emerged. Ranchers and hunters began naming grizzly bears of particular notoriety. These celebrity bears were often given mythical-grade reputations for being prolific killers of livestock and possessing an uncanny ability to evade capture.
According to the Delta County Historical Society, a celebrity grizzly named Old Two Toes had been gorging himself on livestock around Delta County since the 1880s. When his paw was caught in the steel jaws of a rancher’s trap in 1890, he chewed off three toes to free himself. The remaining two toes on his disfigured paw earned him the moniker Old Two Toes.
Desperate to protect their herds from the voracious cattle killer, angry ranchers around Delta County put up a $500 reward for the capture of Old Two Toes. It was a lot of money at the time, and plenty of hunters were enticed. But Old Two Toes proved to be a cunning foe.
Attempts to track and kill the outlaw bear were unsuccessful. It wasn’t until 1902 that a small hunting party traveling through Grand Mesa stumbled upon Old Two Toes and shot him in a willow grove. The least experienced hunter in the group, a sprightly man named Franklin Manges, was credited with the kill.
The enormous pelt of Old Two Toes was hung in the window of a store on Delta’s Main Street and later traveled to the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904.
Even bigger and badder than Old Two Toes was Old Mose, an insatiable grizzly that terrorized homesteaders and ranchers across Park and Fremont County during the late 1800s. Old Mose was credited with killing hundreds of cattle and sheep and as many as three men over the course of his marauding career.
Newspapers across the West featured sensationalized tales of Old Mose. With inexplicable strength, the massive bear would smash through heavy cattle fences and neutralize half-ton cows with a swipe of his paw. He’d outwit hunters by finessing the bait from their steel-jawed traps without disturbing the trigger pan. Frustrated hunters sought to take Old Mose with a lethal dose of lead, but their bullets couldn’t kill the fearsome beast.
In 1904, local rancher Wharton Pigg and professional bear slayer James Anthony set out with a pack of hounds to stop Old Mose’s reign of terror. After a month of tracking the great bear, they cornered it in a gulch. Shots were fired. Old Mose caught bullets but kept charging the men until Anthony raced behind the ferocious bear and delivered the kill shot.
The massive pelt of Old Mose went on display in the window of a local store in Delta, and butcher shops advertised selling portions of the meat for ten cents a pound. Time had run out for Old Mose and Old Two Toes. It was running out for all of them.
The staggering decline in Colorado grizzly bear populations received attention in 1911, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture sponsored a biological survey of the state.
The survey reported that, according to hunters and trappers active in Colorado, grizzlies were now rarely seen in the northern mountains. In the southern mountains, they were only occasionally seen. On the eastern slopes of the Front Range, the bears appeared to be extremely rare if not entirely absent.
The data came as good news. It meant efforts to eliminate the bears were working. Now it was time for the federal government to step in with legislation that would ring the death knell for the last grizzlies still roaming the Centennial State.
In 1931, Congress passed the Animal Damage Control Act, which created a federal agency charged with the eradication of species deemed a threat to agriculture and ranching operations across the country. Included in the act were orders for the Secretary of Agriculture to conduct campaigns in Colorado to eliminate grizzly bears. This meant bringing in government hunters and trappers to kill the bears by whatever means necessary.
The government’s eradication efforts decimated Colorado grizzly bear populations. Ten years after the Animal Damage Control Act was passed, wildlife officials estimated that only twelve grizzlies were left in the state. That number went to zero in 1951, when government trapper Lloyd Anderson claimed he killed the last Colorado grizzly at the headwaters of the Los Pinos River.
Two years of observation seemed to prove Anderson right. In 1953, the Colorado Division of Wildlife pronounced grizzlies extirpated from the state. But not everyone was convinced.
Over the next twenty-five years, wildlife officials received numerous reports of grizzly sightings in Colorado from hunters, trappers, ranchers, and Forest Service workers. Some sightings were of solitary males; others were of females with cubs. Others were simply tracks in the mud. Even government trapper Lloyd Anderson, who was certain he’d killed Colorado’s last grizzly in 1951, filed five reports of new grizzly sightings.
Most of the reports came from the remote San Juan Mountains in southwestern Colorado. Credible reports were verified by experts from U.S. Fish and Wildlife. They were not, however, verified by the Colorado Division of Wildlife. As their officials pointed out, black bears, an abundant species in Colorado, could easily be mistaken for grizzlies. The two species shared many characteristics and often grew to enormous sizes.
In 1973, Congress passed the Endangered Species Act. This classified grizzlies as an endangered species and made it illegal to kill them. The only exception was killing in self-defense.
This seemed like a moot point for Colorado, since grizzlies were declared extirpated from the state in 1953. But at least one grizzly still roamed the state, as wildlife officials discovered in 1979. That was the year a hunter named Ed Wiseman killed a grizzly that nearly killed him deep in the San Juan wilderness.
Ed Wiseman’s account has often been called a tale of hunting versus heroism. As the man’s story goes, he was tracking elk in a remote timberline pocket of the southern San Juans when a sharp growl rang out behind him. Wiseman turned to find an enormous grizzly charging him from the brush. He shouted at the towering creature, but the bear knocked him down and began mauling him.
Wiseman’s first instinct was to curl into a ball and play dead. The bear wasn’t fooled. It continued its vicious attack until Wiseman gripped his knife and inflicted a series of fatal blows in self-defense.
While Wiseman recovered in the hospital, wildlife experts examined the dead grizzly. What they discovered cast doubt on the man’s shocking tale. The grizzly Wiseman killed was an old, arthritic female, unlikely to have charged him unprovoked. Perhaps Wiseman hadn’t survived a surprise attack but was mauled after stumbling upon the old bear and attempting to kill her for a trophy.
Regardless of how the attack unfolded, one thing was certain: Wiseman’s grizzly had given birth to cubs during her life.
A couple of years after Ed Wiseman’s grizzly encounter, a search for more grizzlies in the southern San Juans came up empty. The Colorado Division of Wildlife concluded Wiseman had killed the last great bear in Colorado and the case was closed. Reports of new sightings, however, continued to trickle in.
In 1991, members of the San Juan Grizzly Project, a wildlife conservation group, collected potential grizzly hairs in the Weminuche Wilderness area of the San Juans. Scientists at a lab in Wyoming analyzed the hairs and calculated an 80% probability they came from a grizzly. Four years later, more hairs and a pile of dung were found at nearby Grizzly Knoll. The Wyoming lab offered a 75% probability these specimens belonged to a grizzly.
The encouraging odds generated excitement for the San Juan Grizzly Project. State wildlife officials, however, concluded the specimens belonged to black bears. Certain the officials were wrong, some began to theorize that perhaps the Colorado Division of Wildlife was purposeful in dismissing the evidence. But why?
Illegal hunting of grizzlies had become a serious problem in states where the great bears still lived. If word got out that Colorado was home to a remnant population, poachers could be attracted to the state. At the same time, the Endangered Species Act would dictate dramatic changes to human use of public lands. Grazing, hunting, logging, and recreation would all be shut down anywhere grizzlies might still be present. This would generate conflict with countless interest groups, whose livelihoods could be at risk.
The best way for Colorado wildlife officials to avoid conflict and protect the grizzlies, should any still live in the San Juan wilderness, was to deny the bears’ existence.
While reports of grizzly sightings petered out over the decades that followed, some people in the present day still wonder if a small population of the bears calls the San Juan wilderness home.
Conservationists point out that, ecologically speaking, the southern San Juans would provide grizzlies with the “Big Four” essentials of a productive habitat: clean water, abundant food, protective cover, and room to roam. To be sure, the area is remote, roads and trails are few, accessibility is difficult, and people prefer to recreate in the northern parts of the range.
Questions are also raised as to what became of the cubs to which Ed Wiseman’s grizzly had given birth. Since most grizzlies do not survive their first year of life, the odds would’ve been stacked against them. On top of that, grizzlies are among the least productive mammals in North America. This would make it difficult for a remnant population to stay viable.
Despite these challenges, a minority of people believe there’s a good chance grizzlies still wander the Colorado wilderness. And they hope that if the bears do still exist, no one ever finds them. That’s what the bears would want: to live and roam in peace.
