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Grizzly Bears in Politics

NO MORE POWERFUL EMBLEM OF THE ALASKAN FRONTIER EXISTED THAN THE GRIZzly bear. It drew forth intense feelings of fear and admiration in its detractors and sympathizers. To those who wished to meet one or, to the vastly greater number who preferred to imagine doing so, the bear stood as a manifestation of Nature’s raw power; of the mystery, vigor, honesty, and freedom of wilderness; of beauty, excitement, and danger. Some sought to transfer the power to themselves through elemental (if unequal, given the capacity of modern firearms) combat against the bear. Some settled for purchase of a hide. Others, empowered through contemplation of Nature, endeavored to preserve the bear and its habitat. Those immersed in the settlement dream sought not excitement, danger, or beauty but stability, security, comfort, and material gain. They perceived the bear as a pest, a challenge, a threat, even an insult. For more than half a century before statehood the competing elements—hunters, preservationists, wildlife managers, settlers, developers—fought for the hearts and minds of the American public; in essence, for the soul and future of Alaska. During most of this period, their quarrel revolved in part around the grizzly bear.

Brown and grizzly bears, now considered varieties of the same species, are found throughout mainland Alaska and some adjacent islands and occurred as far south as Mexico in the early 20th Century. Adults vary in facial features, in size from about 400 to 1,500 pounds or more, and in fur color from pale yellow to nearly black. The 1902 Alaska game law classified them as big game. They are also predators: of salmon, moose, caribou, deer, and, sometimes, livestock. They occasionally attack humans, almost always as a result of some provocation. Among the most magnificent of the world’s land carnivores, the bears occupied a unique position in pre-statehood Alaskan wildlife management. Their special character and ambiguous status between “big game” and “predator,” or menace, guaranteed them endless trouble in Alaska, as it had in the States. Controversy over their status persisted throughout the territorial period and gave rise to sanctuaries for their protection. The debates articulated and implemented models for the values of unlimited exploitation, utilitarian conservation, species and ecosystem preservation, and nonconsumptive use.

BROWN BEAR HUNTING

Eskimos, Athabaskan Indians, and other Alaska Natives traditionally killed brown bears for meat, skins, and fat. The fat served as food and as fuel for stone lamps. Hunters employed long spears to brace against the ground and impale a charging bear or to drive into the neck of a bear standing upright. They also attacked bears in hibernation or at night on fishing creeks or bear trails. An estimated total pre-contact population of 71,000, many of whom hunted brown bears, may have been a significant determinant of the size of brown bear populations as well as their fear of humans.¹

Alaska Natives also hunted bears for the Russians as early as the start of the 19th Century. Between 1803 and 1822, Russian fur-trading vessels carried away 2,650 bearskins, many or most presumably of brown bears.² In the 1842–1860 period another 2,280 bearskins left Alaska.³ Commercial harvest apparently slackened in the early years of American rule. Ivan Petroff related in his 1880 census report that

their skins are not very valuable, and, owing to this fact and to the fierce disposition of the animals, they are not commonly hunted. All natives of Alaska respect them, and it is the universal custom of hunters to address a few complimentary remarks to the intended victims before attempting to kill them. Perhaps the skins of fully one-half of the brown bears of Alaska are retained by the natives for bedding and to hang before the entrances of houses in the place of doors. The smaller skins are tanned and cut up into strips and lines, and the natives of the interior utilize them for manufacturing sledge fastenings and the net work bottoms of snow shoes, because this leather does not stretch when exposed to moisture, as moose and deer skins do.⁴

Brown bear at Karluk Lake, Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge, 1958. By Earl Fleming. FWS 4863, Alaska Resources Library and Information Services. As a symbol of wilderness, the bear evoked powerful but conflicting reactions from its admirers and detractors.

Beginning in the late 1880s, brown bears on Kodiak Island and the Alaska Peninsula underwent intense hunting for their skins, fashionable in Europe. Observing the Iliamna-Katmai region, federal biologist Wilfred Osgood described brown bears as scarce in 1902, whereas “not more than fourteen years ago it was not uncommon to see eight to fifteen bears scattered about on one mountainside.” A prime bearskin brought $75 from Russian nobility in 1904, and skins adorned military hats in Russia, Germany, Austria, and England. The Gold Rush era kept the bears under fire well after the turn of the century, by which time their numbers in some areas had been greatly reduced.⁵

English sportsman Charles R.E. Radclyffe, who hunted the Kenai Peninsula in 1903, noted that the law forbade the sale of heads and skins of game animals. Nevertheless, he said,

[T]he natives bring in regularly a supply of brown bear skins to all the local stores, and if not already sold to the shopkeepers, they offer these skins to any one who visits the local settlement. . . . [A]t three of the largest stores on the coast of Alaska . . . I saw a total of 120 brown bear skins sold by the natives to the shopkeepers, and afterwards shipped out of the country openly, and with the full cognizance of the authorities. One only needs to pay a visit to the sale-rooms of Messrs. Lampson in London, where hundreds of Alaskan brown bear skins are always on offer, to see how loosely this portion of the game law is enforced.⁶

A woman who lived on the Alaska Peninsula for three years ending about 1910 related that “my husband shot during the three years over one hundred of the big brown bears for the hides.”⁷ Yet Harold McCracken, who traveled around the western end of the Alaska Peninsula in the spring and summer of 1922, stated, “I saw 190 brown bears. The fact that we saw 28 bears in one day, and as high as 12 in sight at the same time, is in itself good evidence of the numbers to be found.”⁸ Almost certainly bears stood a better chance of survival in remote than more accessible locations.

Adding to the impact of commerce in skins, sport hunters began to seek brown bear heads and hides shortly before the end of the 19th Century. British gentleman-hunter Claude Cane, in the summer of 1902, felt disappointed when for the second time he lost an opportunity to shoot a mother and her two cubs on the Alaska Peninsula. Bears in the vicinity had become wary of humans. Cane had already downed two adult bears elsewhere on the coast of the peninsula and another on the Kenai. His friend Frances Paget bagged five brown bears that summer.⁹

Charles Sheldon, as a Boone and Crockett hunter-naturalist, walked an indistinct line between conqueror of fearsome big game and scientific observer, collector, and preserver of that game. He shot females and cubs but felt ambivalence about it. In his first Alaskan brown bear hunt on Montague Island in May 1905, he unsuccessfully pursued a mother and cub on two occasions. Eventually, he caught up with a pair on a steep mountainside just below the snowline. Creeping up to them,

I saw the cub pushing its head into the body of its mother. The mother, stretched at length in a slight depression among the spruces, was distinctly visible, and I saw that her left forefoot was raised. The cub was nursing. It seemed excited with hunger and moved its head about in a wild frenzy, all the time bawling in a low, strange tone. . . . [T]he bear half rose, her head turned in my direction. I quickly fired at her foreshoulder. With a woof and a jump she came to her feet and I fired again. In savage fury, she slapped at the point where the bullet had struck, rushed a few feet in the direction away from me, then a few up and a few down, all the time woofing in pain or fright. . . . I fired three more times, and at the fifth shot she dropped. . . . The cub soon emerged from the bushes and started running to follow its mother. I shot it before it had gone three feet.¹⁰

As he lit his pipe to relax, Sheldon mused,

I was burning with the glow produced by that rare glimpse of animal life—the very essence of wild nature. I could not resist a strong feeling that I had intruded on sacred moments in that old bear’s life, moments forbidden to the members of the human race by some deep law of nature. Faithfully she had fulfilled her duties. Her last hours had found her still performing them, having hidden so well, on such difficult ground, in a spot high and secluded—taking every precaution to give food to her young. It seemed to me that I had a right to kill her, but not thus to detect her at the time she was giving her breast.

Looking back on the experience, Sheldon reflected that “one thing stands out more vividly than all the rest—that sight of the mother bear nursing her moaning cub. . . . Wounded once, she had taken every care of her offspring. . . . But, in spite of all, fate had overtaken her.”¹¹

During the hunt of several weeks’ duration, Sheldon killed at least five bears and continued to look for more. One of the five fell into a canyon where it could not be retrieved. A wounded male escaped. In recounting the hunt Sheldon wrote more as a ritual sport hunter than as a collector for science. Yet his discourse differed considerably from that of popular sport magazines. After a bear accidentally ran into him and knocked him down, he commented that he “could have written a fine story about a vicious, charging bear.” In that case and most others, though, bears ran away from the perceived source of danger. He concluded that “every experience I have had with them . . . leads me to doubt most of the stories of their aggressiveness in times past.” Later in life he told an outdoor sporting writer that over a period of 35 years he had killed more than 500 big game animals including 70 to 80 brown or grizzly bears.¹²

Other well-educated hunters seemed oblivious to their contributions to the depletion of wildlife species. George Mixter, his brother, and a friend, all influential men from the East, conducted a spring hunt for brown bears on the north side of the Alaska Peninsula in 1908. They killed eighteen bears shortly after the animals had emerged from hibernation. They captured three orphaned cubs to be taken to the National Zoological Park. Immediately after his narration of the hunt in National Geographic and without apology, Mixter quoted Wilfred Osgood: “The brown bears of Alaska will undoubtedly become very rare or extinct at no distant date. . . . Already they have become scarce on Kodiak Island, where formerly very abundant, and on the Alaska Peninsula, though still fairly numerous, they are being killed at a rate probably greatly in excess of their increase.”¹³

Some including Sheldon collected their kills for museums or other scientific purposes. Most seemed to want trophies for their dens and for status among their peers. Russell Annabel aptly described the phenomenon, rating the grizzly bear, which he distinguished from the brown bear, as

tops among American sportsmen. . . . The animal’s legendary courage, craftiness, and willingness on occasion to charge hell-bent into gunfire makes its pelt more than a souvenir of a hunting trip; it is a trophy certifying you have accomplished just about the ultimate in American big game shooting. The old-time Indians felt the same way about the grizzly when they rated a necklace of grizzly claws or teeth as the badge of a hunter who had been places and done things. Then, as now, it was the spice of danger, the possibility of getting batted down and chewed up, plus the primary difficulty of finding a grizzly and maneuvering yourself into position for a shot at it, that made hunting the animals an outstanding he-man behavior.¹⁴

POLITICAL CONFLICT OVER BEARS

As a result of Boone and Crockett’s work, two provisions of the 1902 Alaska game law protected the grizzly bear: no sales of hides beyond fifteen days after close of the season and an annual per-person limit of four adult bears. These measures provoked a strong reaction from Alaskans opposed to federal restrictions. They enlisted Vermont senator William P. Dillingham, convincing him that bears would put livestock ranchers out of business and that the 1902 game law should be abolished. Settlers named a town after Dillingham, but Boone and Crockett fought off the attack on the game law.

A revised 1908 game law authorized the territorial governor to hire game wardens and control the licensing of nonresident hunters and export trophies. It reduced the annual limit of brown bears to three per hunter and required permits for hide exports but bowed to Alaskan critics by abolishing the season on brown bears north of 62 degrees. Hunters could still sell brown bear skins in or outside Alaska on a very limited scale. The 1902 and 1908 laws may have saved the species from extinction in parts of its range. Boone and Crockett went on advocating sanctuaries for the bears.¹⁵

Resentment of the 1902 and 1908 game laws persisted. Asserting the potential of Kodiak Island and the Kenai Peninsula as “great cattle ranges” if the bears could be cleared away, F.E. Kleinschmidt complained in a 1913 Outdoor Life article, “Men who formulated laws for us called us the riff-raff of the Western Federation of Miners; of low intelligence, unable to govern ourselves or to make our own laws suited to our own needs. . . . One of the great monuments of stupidity erected to this, our great Northern Territory, is The Alaska Game Law.” Kleinschmidt charged that outsiders protected the brown bear so they could hunt it themselves.¹⁶ Beyond the normal frontiersman’s resistance to outside interference, his remarks reflected the class difference between local citizens and outside conservationists.

Warden Charles Madsen, asked by territorial governor J.F.A. Strong to advise on the status of wildlife on the Alaska Peninsula, assessed the brown bear in anthropocentric terms:

Its flesh is useless as food; its pelt is of no great value; and it destroys anything and everything that comes within its reach. It even seems to enjoy an opportunity of getting into a trapper’s or prospector’s cache or place of residence, and tearing to pieces his supplies. . . . They help materially in destroying caribou, and make the raising of domestic stock in the peninsula an almost impossibility. . . . Were it not for the bear this peninsula would be a quite ideal range for both reindeer and domestic stock.

When among domesticated animals, said Madsen, the bear’s typical behavior is “killing and maiming without discretion or other intent than demonstrating its power as a mighty slaughterer.” Madsen recommended that “the protection now being given the brown bear be abolished.”¹⁷

Alfred H. Brooks, pioneer geologist and name source for the Brooks Range, stated the settler philosophy regarding brown bears in broad terms:

If the farmer, sheep-herder, and cattleman make progress at the cost of driving out the moose, the caribou, the big bear, and the wolf, it is but an evidence of the progress of civilization. A fundamental principle of advancement of civilization is that the land must be put to its best possible use for the benefit of mankind. Our people have never taken kindly to the European system of game preserves which benefit the few at the expense of the many. All this does not mean that we shall not make every effort to preserve wildlife so long as it does not conflict with the legitimate demands of the settlers.

There have been some wise restrictions put on the killing of game and fur-bearing animals, but some actions taken have been regarded by Alaskans as of more benefit to the non-resident hunter and the occasional visiting naturalist than to the residents of the Territory. For example, some of the game laws indicate a desire to preserve for the use of the large brown bear areas which might be used for cattle or sheep. So far, these laws have worked few hardships, as the land is but little settled. As soon as the settlers demand it, such laws will inevitably disappear before advancing civilization, and the bear will be relegated to haunts not available for better purposes.¹⁸

Governor Strong spoke for the cattle and sheep ranchers in his 1915 and 1916 annual reports to the secretary of the interior: “[T]he Brown Bear is a serious menace to the live-stock industry on Kodiak Island. . . . If these conditions are continued, it will be necessary to abandon the live-stock industry altogether on Kodiak Island and other places where this pestiferous brute is protected by law.”¹⁹ A year later, probably having read Madsen’s report, he heated up the rhetoric: “[The brown bear] is rapacious and predacious, and he is esteemed to be worthy of a congressional iron cross, presumably because of his fierce and warlike disposition. This animal should not be given protection. . . . It is safe to say that an Alaskan Legislature will not protect the brown bear.”²⁰

In 1919 Governor Thomas C. Riggs Jr. echoed his predecessor. Taunting his buffalo-loving opposition, he alluded to big game hunters who took trophies and wasted meat, venturing, “It seems to me that the brown and grizzly bears are being protected for the sole benefit of the nonresident sportsmen. They have no place in the economic development of the territory any more than the herds of wild buffalo would have in the wheat fields of Minnesota and the Dakotas.” A year later he rated brown bear protection by the federal government as “probably the most serious difference of all” in federal-territorial relations concerning wildlife. He added, “I advocate not only the removal of all restrictions covering them, but a bounty for their destruction. I also believe that protection to brown bears can be found to be unconstitutional.” He offered no explanation of the alleged constitutional violation.²¹

Alaskans condemned the brown bear not only as a danger to livestock and human life but also as a predator of valuable game. Governor Walter Clark noted in 1912 that on the Kenai Peninsula “the moose are not menaced by overhunting, but their calves are killed in large numbers by the brown bear.” Governors Strong and Riggs also mentioned bear predation of game but cited no details.²² The difficulty of observing and measuring such predation, and expressions of sympathy for the bears, forestalled bounties and other territorial government efforts to remove brown bears.

In his 1921 summary, Bureau of Biological Survey (BBS) representative Alfred Bailey commented, “Alaskans kill bear at every opportunity regardless of law, and I venture to assert that it would be impossible to find an Alaskan jury which would convict a man for killing a brown bear during the closed season.” He recommended that protection of brown bears be lifted to retard the momentum of an attempt by the territorial legislature to gain control over Alaskan wildlife.²³

The grizzly bear functioned as a scapegoat for Alaskan frustrations. Governor Riggs gathered and publicized accounts of bear attacks on humans, citing several in his 1920 game report. He then discovered a vulnerable spot in the position of the bears’ New York and Washington friends. Former BBS director C. Hart Merriam, a “splitter” mammalogist, had published a study identifying up to 86 species of grizzly and brown bears, most of them found in Alaska. It treated grizzlies and browns as separate species. BBS chief Edward W. Nelson had publicly endorsed the classification.²⁴ Aware that the 1908 game law mentioned only “brown bears,” Riggs threatened to lift restrictions on the export of grizzly bear hides. Nelson, Charles Sheldon, and George Bird Grinnell strove to refute the bear attack stories, arguing that in each case the bear had been provoked. Riggs’s move put them in a weak position to combat market hunting, a threat that could have eliminated bear populations in some locales.²⁵ Boone and Crockett mobilized its allied groups and put a stop to Riggs’s attack. Riggs responded by threatening court action to test the 1908 law. Madison Grant, who had defended the bears for twenty years, and Grinnell met with Riggs in Washington and persuaded him to withhold the lawsuit. They calmed the waters between Riggs and William T. Hornaday, who had publicly insulted one another during the debates and both threatened libel suits. Soon thereafter the 1920 elections brought Republicans into office and ended the contest over brown bear definition.²⁶

Defense of the Brown Bears

Feeble enforcement of the 1908 Alaska game law induced Nelson and the Eastern nature and sporting groups to work for a new law. Hornaday cooperated in this effort, as did Dan A. Sutherland, a candidate for Charles Sulzer’s congressional delegate seat. “A vote for Sutherland is a vote for Hornaday and the Alaskan Brown Bears,” suggested the Juneau Daily Alaska Empire. But Sutherland won.²⁷

Largely as a result of Nelson and Sheldon’s diplomacy, the furor over the bears and the meat hunting issue quieted enough in the early 1920s to enable smooth passage of the 1925 Game Law. But more trouble lay in wait for the bears. The new Alaska Game Commission received numerous complaints about bears, mostly from residents objecting to their protection or demanding a bounty on them. The loudest protest came from the Kodiak Island cattlemen. The commission responded. Its most politically useful argument consisted of an incident involving a brown bear encountered by Forest Service surveyor Jack Thayer on Admiralty Island in 1928. Thayer and his companion Fred Herring surprised the bear at close range in thick cover. Herring climbed a tree and Thayer fired at the bear, which proceeded to terminate Thayer’s career. Herring did not see whether the bear charged before being fired upon. Whatever the case, Thayer had used a light rifle and steel-jacketed ammunition, inadequate for stopping a brown bear.²⁸ Effective in mid-1930 the commission adopted a regulation permitting citizens “to kill a bear at any time when such animal is considered a menace to person, livestock or property” or appears within one mile of any human residence. The regulation exempted most coastal brown bear habitat.²⁹

Outside environmentalists reacted in dismay. Hornaday weighed in with acid commentary:

The present flurry of demand for the “extinction” of the big brown bears of Kadiak Island and other points north . . . is like the breaking out of heat rash on children. It is to be cured by a salve of equal parts of Truth and Reason. . . . There is no such thing as the “edge of civilization,” and the wild beasts of New York and Chicago annually kill and maim about 50 times more innocent people than do all the wild beasts in Alaska.³⁰

Letters poured in to the Game Commission, many from nature enthusiasts in the States. Executive director H.W. Terhune dismissed those from outside as “written for purely sentimental reasons.” The Hoonah Alaska Native Brotherhood chapter sent a petition declaring that “both the black and brown bears are a menace to human life and safety and there is no particular reason for protecting them.” Thomas Gardner of Petersburg wrote, “I have been on the frontier for sixty years and have yet to see the bear that would bother you if you left him alone. The cannerymen say the bear destroy a lot of salmon, but don’t say anything about the salmon they take and cannot can. . . . All the bears in Alaska wouldn’t eat the salmon wasted that way.”³¹

John Pegues, a reporter who had attended every meeting of the Game Commission, held that the new regulation would not be a threat to the grizzly bear population. Introducing another argument unlikely to be well received by the preservationists, he noted that “hundreds of hunters come here annually because of [the bear’s] presence. They spend many thousands of dollars in outfitting, hiring guides, on transportation, hotel bills and otherwise. Men have become interested in Alaskan industries directly as the result of hunting trips. The people of Alaska . . . have no desire to exterminate their biggest attraction to the sportsmen.” “In fact,” he added, “the Alaska Game Commission has since its creation adopted a policy of encouraging big-game hunters to come north.”³²

Brown bears faced guns pointed at them by sport hunters, by settlers who feared them, by ranchers guarding cattle and sheep, by salmon fishers who perceived them as competition, and by loggers who entered their forests. In the Southeast, especially on Admiralty and Chichagof islands, plans for clearcut logging menaced the bears’ protective habitat. John M. Holzworth, who passed three summers and falls in the late 1920s studying and filming brown bears in the Southeast, wrote The Wild Grizzlies of Alaska in their defense. He attacked the claim of Alaska’s officials characterizing Jack Thayer’s death as unprovoked. He had personally encountered brown bears on more than 250 occasions, he said, frequently at close range. They had charged twice but not touched him. His guide Al Hasselborg had lived among the bears for 30 years and been charged twelve times, all by bears he had wounded. “The bear’s criminal offense, apparently,” Holzworth concluded, “is in defending himself. . . . Decimate the bears in Alaska and a great part of the appeal of adventure and the wilderness, the charm of romance which surrounds its islands and mountains, will be gone.” He accused the Game Commission of assisting a land grab by grazing interests and called for retraction of the offending regulation and the setting aside of Admiralty and Chichagof islands as bear sanctuaries. For the consideration of prospective hunters he suggested:

Good photography requires far more skill and ingenuity than hunting with the modern high-power rifle. . . . I also hope that such success as I have had in taking motion pictures, particularly of the grizzly bear, may help to stimulate the use of the motion picture camera rather than the rifle. It affords a much better thrill, and one is soon weaned away from the rifle, with beneficial results both to the hunter and to what remains of the fast dwindling big game animals of the wilderness.³³

Indeed, photographers began to supplement sport hunters in quest of the most interesting wild creature in Alaska, adding to the employment of guides and outfitters and helping to moderate local attitudes toward the brown bears.

Holzworth chaired the Alaskan Bear Committee organized by the American Society of Mammalogists and the New York Zoological Society. He received the endorsements of Madison Grant, C. Hart Merriam, and Edward W. Nelson and enlisted a large number of conservation groups, magazines, and newspapers. One prominent nature writer, Stewart Edward White, authored numerous articles demanding protection for the bears. In the April 12, 1930, Saturday Evening Post he declared, “There is no doubt in the world that if the regulation is permitted to remain in effect, our unique brown bear of Alaska is doomed to as complete extinction as the California grizzly.” He called for retraction of the 1930 regulation, defended the bear involved in Thayer’s death, and ridiculed the notion that the bears constituted a threat to the salmon industry.³⁴

In the 1935–1936 Alaska Game Commission report, director Frank Dufresne mentioned the continuing tendency of coastal fishers and old-timers in the interior to shoot brown bears on sight and the

frequent but oftentimes exaggerated reports of persons being attacked without apparent provocation. While there are no authentic cases of death or severe mutilation from this source during the past year, it is significant to note that several of these so-called “charging brownies” were found to be carrying pieces of old bullets—mute testimony to a former painful but nonfatal encounter with man. This condition, which often produces a crazed and dangerous animal, is largely unwarranted and directly attributable to careless sniping by thoughtless persons.³⁵

Apart from hunting regulations, brown bear advocates hoped to establish Admiralty and Chichagof islands as bear sanctuaries. But the Forest Service coveted the voluminous stands of timber on the islands. Accordingly, the agency supported the National Park Service in protecting bear habitat elsewhere. This understanding facilitated the 1931 expansion of Katmai National Monument and the 1939 additions to Glacier Bay National Monument.³⁶

On the question of logging on Admiralty and Chichagof islands, Arthur Newton Pack seconded White’s views in Nature Magazine: “Alaskans of the promoter type, and some government officials, like to talk in terms of ‘Economic Development.’ They envision employment in lumbering and paper manufacture and the industrialization of Alaska for all Alaskans, all a very fine-sounding theory.” Pointing out the failure of pulp industries in British Columbia hundreds of miles closer to markets, Pack asked, “Should Alaska run the risk of destroying the unreplaceable asset of its wildlife and trading this birthright for a mess of pottage? . . . Alaska will do better by preserving the forests on [Admiralty Island] as a public recreation area and wildlife refuge than cutting it.”³⁷ Pack’s argument would be heard for decades to come, eventually winning the day.

Shifts in Americans’ attitudes had begun to transform the grizzly bear from feared predator to valued symbol of wilderness and integral element of ecosystems. Ecological science and animal rights concepts brought the BBS policy of predator control under critical scrutiny. Nature writers such as White and Holzworth reacted to reports that the Forest Service had tried to arrange for Crown Zellerbach Corporation to log off most of Admiralty Island at low timber rates, for pulp. Senator Frederick C. Walcott, chair of the newly formed Committee on Conservation of Wild Life Resources, visited Alaska to investigate brown bear killing and held hearings in Washington, DC, in 1932. First of the major federal agencies to reflect the attitude changes toward wildlife, the National Park Service in 1931 adopted habitat and species protection as an explicit component of its mission. Joseph S. Dixon, a Park Service biologist and former student of leading ecologist Joseph Grinnell, conducted surveys of the Glacier Bay environs. To institute the brown bear as the premier wildlife species of Glacier Bay National Monument (Chapter 8), he recommended widening the boundaries to take in surrounding forests and the grasslands near Gustavus.³⁸

Responding to bear advocates, in 1925 the Alaska Game Commission had designated much of the forest bordering Glacier Bay National Monument as a bear sanctuary. In 1927 Game Commission director Terhune approached the Forest Service to suggest adding the bear habitat to the monument. Eventually, the Forest Service reached an agreement with the National Park Service: it would transfer jurisdiction over the habitat from the Tongass National Forest to the monument in exchange for Park Service cooperation in heading off the drive to make Admiralty and Chichagof islands national parks. To avoid a clash over mining, Park Service leaders decided to seek a presidential proclamation expanding the monument rather than a law creating a national park. President Roosevelt signed the document on April 18, 1939. While making no specific reference to the brown bear whose welfare had been its central purpose, the proclamation made Glacier Bay National Monument larger than any other in the national park system and incorporated virtually all bordering lands necessary for the bears’ protection.³⁹ But it did not end the effort to designate Admiralty Island a bear sanctuary.

Brown Bears and Livestock

Livestock raising, primarily on Kodiak Island, endured as the outstanding reason or excuse for opposition to the brown bear. The industry had a long and troubled history. Russians first introduced cattle in 1794 and maintained small herds on Kodiak and other islands. American ranchers began operating in the late 19th Century. The Department of Agriculture set up an experimental station and cattle herd at Kodiak in 1906 to facilitate a ranching industry in the region. It moved the herd to Seattle for two years following the Katmai eruption and transferred everything to the Matanuska Valley in 1931. Private individuals owned a total of 349 cattle on Kodiak in 1939, 974 in 1956, and 1,350 in 1965.

American settlers also imported sheep. They introduced a flock of 300 to Kodiak Island in 1883; none remained in 1898. Of 9,000 imported in 1902, only 80 survived in 1904.⁴⁰ Like beef ranching on Kodiak, sheep ranching never did well, and the brown bear received a large share of the blame. Governors’ reports on game conditions repeatedly complained about the threat of brown bears to ranching. Warden Charles Madsen noted in 1916 that “brown bears killed during the fall of 1915 every one of the sheep kept at the U.S. Agricultural Experimental Station at Kodiak.”⁴¹ Investigating such complaints, warden Homer Jewell judged in 1930 that losses of large numbers of sheep on Kodiak Island attributed to bears had actually been caused by loose dogs or by starvation and cold.⁴²

Beginning in 1927 the Interior Department’s General Land Office, attempting to promote economic development, had issued leases for cattle ranching on Kodiak Island. Within a year leaseholders launched a campaign for removal of the brown bears. Complaints of cattle kills by bears in the 1920s precipitated a 1930–1931 investigation, finding that most cattle deaths resulted from starving and from accidents such as falls and entrapment in bogs. Bears often ate the cattle upon finding them dead. Wardens Clarence Rhode and Jack O’Connor drew similar conclusions in 1937.

Meanwhile, a 1933 survey by warden Hosea Sarber had indicated large numbers of brown bears being killed on Kodiak and Afognak islands. Sarber investigated in 1938–1939 and found a maximum of 9 bear-killed cattle, 3 of them questionable, among a total of 74 lost cattle blamed on bears. The rest had died of starvation and accidents. Kodiak Island, he advised, did not suit livestock, and cows had to eat seaweed to survive. He observed that “cattlemen will often go to any extremes to kill or injure the bear. They have extermination first on their minds and state that every bear on the island should be killed. They strongly advocate the bounty system and feel that the Kodiak bear should be destroyed, the government, of course, to pay the bounty.”⁴³ Attempting to target problem bears, Game Commission agents shot eleven on Kodiak Island in 1939.⁴⁴

Alaska Game Commission policy could hardly satisfy all claimants simultaneously—ranchers who wished to eliminate the bears, guides and sport hunters who wanted access to them, salmon fishermen who viewed them as competition, settlers who feared them, and conservationists who insisted on preserving them. The territorial legislature seized upon the issue, accusing the Game Commission of mismanagement and calling for Alaskan jurisdiction over natural resources. Congressional delegate Anthony Dimond introduced a bill to effect the change, but it died.⁴⁵ Control over natural resources remained in federal hands until statehood, generating recurring displays of resentment among Alaskans, who pointed to the fact that other territories had been given control. Federal officials, in part beholden to exploitative industries such as salmon canners, also felt reluctant to grant power over a sixth of the nation’s land to a very small, largely transient group of people who often behaved irresponsibly in their treatment of the resources.

In 1939, legislation transferred the Bureau of Biological Survey from the Department of Agriculture to the Department of the Interior, effective in 1940, and renamed it the Fish and Wildlife Service. Immediately upon assuming jurisdiction over mainland Alaskan wildlife in 1939, Interior investigated the situation on Kodiak Island. Two inspectors from the San Francisco office visited Kodiak Island in 1939–1940. Ranchers told them that in their five locations they had lost a total of 202 cattle since 1928. Several ranchers had allegedly been driven out of business. Bears in the ranching area appeared to be few but active, and the ranchers claimed an increase of bears since 1935. In their appraisal the inspectors stated that the supply of vegetation and mostly mild winters could permit a substantial increase in the numbers of cattle on the island. Moving the ranches to the mainland would not work because of harsh winters and bear or wolf predation there. As for Kodiak Island, the inspectors commented, “If the bears are not to be controlled, it will not be possible to raise cattle at a profit.”⁴⁶

Cow killed by brown bear, Pagashak, Kodiak Island, August 1952. In Russell R. Hoffman, Refuge Narrative Report: Kodiak Wildlife Refuge, May to August 1952, Kodiak: Fish and Wildlife Service, 1952. Bears killed some cattle, but ranchers exaggerated the numbers and treated the bear as predator or vermin.

Fish and Wildlife Service director Ira Gabrielson’s recommendation for a Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge succeeded in 1941. The executive order marked off most of the southwestern two-thirds of the island for bears but excepted a vital one-mile coastal strip for commercial fishing and homesteading.⁴⁷ This strip, frequented by bears, bred endless tension. A land trade in 1958 added the strip to the refuge in exchange for giving up the Shearwater and Kupreanof peninsulas to be leased for cattle ranching. After the deal, the refuge took in 1.6 million acres of Kodiak and Uganik islands.⁴⁸

Stepped-up conflict over the Kodiak bears followed the 1951 organization of the Kodiak Stock Growers Association, whose leaders badgered the Alaska Chamber of Commerce and the legislature for resolutions requesting withdrawal of protection for the bears. Guides, sportsmen, and conservationists resisted and persuaded the Alaska Game Commission not to end the protection.⁴⁹ Wildlife Management Institute director Ira Gabrielson declared, “If it comes to a choice between killing off the bears and trying to develop the optimistically estimated herd of 3,800 range cattle, it is my belief that this country ought to set aside the entire island to preserve the splendid Kodiak bears.” He questioned whether people who would kill off the Kodiak bear for the sake of minute gains for the cattle industry possessed the qualifications for statehood.⁵⁰ The Bureau of Land Management, holding jurisdiction over ranch leases, permitted cattle ranching in a few more bear-intensive areas during the 1950s. It set minimal leasing fees—60 cents per animal per year—and required no fencing to keep bears out or cattle in. Responsibility for leasing shifted to the state in 1966 after it selected the ranch areas as part of its land quota.⁵¹

The Kodiak Island bear-cattle issue went on unresolved. In its final report the Game Commission noted 23 head of cattle killed by a bear in 1959. “Such losses,” it stated, “seriously slow down the building up of cattle numbers on the Kodiak ranches.”⁵² At a Kodiak airport in the fall of 1963 a light plane appeared, a gun on its top. Investigation revealed its owner as cattle rancher Joe Zentner, who had used the plane to kill about 100 bears during the previous decade. The pilot, Dave Henley, presided over the Kodiak Stock Growers Association. His gunning partner during the spring, Kodiak representative Gilbert Jarvela, had done the shooting from the back seat. The operation had been covertly organized and paid for by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G).

When the scandal broke, bear hunting guides and conservation and sporting groups protested. Jim Rearden investigated for Outdoor Life and pieced the story together. Cattlemen had been claiming losses to bears and complained to the governor and game officials. One rancher cited a loss of 61 cattle in 1963 and Zentner claimed 30, although he could find only 10. ADF&G initiated the airborne control program in 1962, killing 15 bears; at least 35 died in 1963. Thirteen of these had been gunned down by a semiautomatic M-1 Garand rifle affixed to the top of the plane. Whereas the law permitted killing in defense of property, gunners dispatched some of the bears at least ten miles from the nearest ranch.

Ranchers, who leased the land from the federal government for twenty-year periods, had eliminated approximately 200 bears on Kodiak Island over the previous ten years, about half by the use of aircraft. Nine ranches sat so close to bear country as to experience recurring problems. The economics, Rearden reasoned, did not make good sense. An average cow sold for $250–$400. Sport hunters, on the other hand, contributed over $2,000 to the Alaskan economy for each bear killed and shot more than 100 annually on Kodiak-Afognak islands.

Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge, 1958 and 1980. Courtesy Jason Geck

Embarrassed ADF&G officials halted the aerial gunning immediately, but neither this nor the economics of the matter deterred the ranchers. “With our expanding population, people are looking for a place to live, such as Kodiak Island,” one reasoned. “The Indians didn’t stop them in the West, the mountains didn’t stop them. They pushed on because they were pioneers. The same thing will happen around here, and the bears will have to give. It’s only a matter of time.”⁵³

A 1964–1965 ADF&G survey indicated that 1,350 adult cattle grazed on Kodiak Island on eight ranches covering 180,000 acres. Over a fourteen-month period bears killed at least 33 and injured 6 more. One bear that killed 5 cattle traveled twenty miles through deep snow in a region of steep hills. Most predation occurred in June, a time of food shortage. Adult males appeared to be the most frequent cattle killers.⁵⁴ Focusing on specific animals thought to be killing cattle, ADF&G continued to control the Kodiak bears. Between 1964 and 1969, agents killed 43 more bears. Thereafter, they left control to the ranchers, authorized to use deadly force only after exhausting all other methods.⁵⁵

SPORT HUNTING OF BROWN BEARS AFTER 1925

Sport hunting of Alaskan brown bears never approached the point of threatening regional extinction. It may have supplemented other killing or disruption in depleting local populations and, for better or worse, it may have kept the bears in fear of humans. To achieve sustainability, the Alaska Game Law of 1925 ended market hunting of bears by prohibiting all sales of bear hides within or outside the territory. The new Game Commission kept the annual per-person bag limit at three in 1925, during specified seasons and subject to trophy hide export fees. The commission reduced the limit to two in 1927 and to one in 1942. Fifteen years later it prohibited killing females accompanied by cubs. When the State of Alaska assumed responsibility for wildlife management in 1960, it employed similar regulations.⁵⁶

Harvest figures from the prewar era are imprecise. On Kodiak Island, the most popular destination for brown bear sport hunters, the annual kill averaged about 25 between 1930 and 1940. A larger but unknown number fell to salmon fishers, cattle ranchers, and to Koniag Eskimos for subsistence purposes. Hunting dropped off during the war and then rebounded rapidly. It peaked at 225 bears in 1953, inducing tightened regulations. By the late 1950s, both legal and illegal kills fell off because of fewer local military personnel and of stream guards protecting the bears from salmon fishers. A flourishing guiding business earned the town of Kodiak more than $100,000 annually. Koniags harvested about 10 to 12 bears each year for food.⁵⁷

Sport hunting may have done genetic damage to bear populations on Kodiak Island and elsewhere. Warden Jack O’Connor noted in 1937 that “Kodiak reports mostly all large brown bears have been killed off and a plentiful supply of smaller bears.” High kill rates in the 1950s and perhaps later also reduced average bear size because hunters wanted the biggest bears they could find. Once attaining a possible 1,600 pounds, large Kodiak bears seldom weighed 1,200 pounds in the mid-1970s. At that time biologists estimated a total of 3,300 bears on the island, 2,000 in the refuge. Game officials set the sustainable level for Kodiak bear kills at 63 to 127 in the early 1970s.⁵⁸

Hunter and brown bear trophy, Kodiak Island, 1957. By Will Troyer. Alaska Resources Library and Information Services. Throughout the 20th Century, sport hunters from around the world came to hunt the great bears.

TABLE 12.1. Estimated Harvests of Brown or Grizzly Bears in Alaska, 1945–1966

Source: Alan M. Courtright, Game Harvests in Alaska (Juneau: Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game, June 1968), 31.

Reported statewide annual kills of brown or grizzly bears averaged approximately 757 between 1945 and 1966 (Table 12.1). The figures showed a significant reduction in the toll between the late 1940s and early 1960s. This may have reflected a change of sentiment along the lines suggested by Holzworth or that of former Game Commission chairman and bear admirer Will Chase: “The primitive instinct and inclination of youth to hunt down and kill for sport diminishes until it is fairly absorbed in the knowledge of truth that creeps into the life of every man that is privileged to go out into the great open places and virgin forests and commune with nature.”⁵⁹ Data from 1961–1984, however, indicated an average annual kill of 772, 56 percent taken by nonresident hunters. Stable populations existed in the protected ranges of Admiralty, Chichagof, and Kodiak islands and in other national parks and wildlife refuges. But the brown bear population as a whole faced the prospect of decline from a range of human activities including oil and gas activity, logging and other habitat destruction, agriculture, and miscellaneous conflicts related to human settlement.⁶⁰

RESERVES FOR BROWN BEARS

Madison Grant and John Holzworth’s dream of an island-wide Southeast bear sanctuary did not materialize during the territorial period; however, Glacier Bay National Monument protected bears and the Forest Service designated 81 square miles of bear management areas in the Pack Creek and Thayer Mountain locales of Admiralty Island in 1935. Interior Secretary Harold Ickes favored designation of Admiralty as a national park for preservation of bears. However, Alaska’s delegate Anthony Dimond objected to the idea, as did National Park Service officials. The U.S. Geological Survey resisted closing off mineral exploration, Hoonah Tlingits wanted tribal control, and loggers, hunters, trappers, and fur farmers sought entry rights. Budgetary limitations also influenced a late 1941 decision by Interior officials to drop the proposal for monument or park status.⁶¹ In part because of the sanctuary lands, no imminent danger threatened the bears. Frank Dufresne and Ralph Young conducted counts of bears on Admiralty, Baranof, and Chichagof in the 1930s, finding healthy populations. No cattle existed on the three islands, and sport hunting left no significant impact.⁶²

By the mid-1940s grizzlies enjoyed some protection on Afognak Island (1892), Unimak Island (1913), Mt. McKinley National Park (1917), Katmai National Monument (1918), Glacier Bay National Monument (1925, 1939), the two reserves on Admiralty Island (1935), the Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge (1941), and the Kenai National Moose Range (1941). The Alaska Game Commission had also protected bears on Kruzof and Partofshikof islands in the Southeast, at Eyak Lake near Cordova, and in Keystone Canyon near Valdez.⁶³ Sport hunting could occur by permit on some of these reserves, as in nearly all other parts of Alaska.

After World War II, logging reappeared as the foremost hazard for grizzly bears in Alaska. Decades of efforts by the Forest Service to stimulate a timber industry in the Southeast paid off in 1947 through the Tongass Timber Sales Act, designed in part to defer competing Native claims. Chief forester and later governor B.F. Heintzleman crucially assisted the passage of the law.⁶⁴ He had consistently opposed park or monument status for Admiralty Island and other repositories of wood, arguing that “the harvesting of timber from the island will not materially affect the bear.”⁶⁵

Pulp companies received uniquely generous long-term contracts. Ketchikan Pulp Company opened its mill in 1954, and the Alaska Pulp Company commenced operations at Sitka in 1959. The contracts committed huge tracts of Tongass National Forest land to logging, much of it prime brown bear habitat. Field and Stream editors Frank Dufresne, Corey Ford, and others called for measures to safeguard the Southeast bears. On a 1956 trip to inspect the effects of the lumber and pulp industry, Ford and Dufresne witnessed, among other impacts, the devastation of a clearcut at Whitewater Bay. They delivered a powerfully negative judgment:

The menace is the pulp mill, destroyer of essential timbered watersheds, polluter of clean waters so necessary to the life cycle of the salmon, enemy of all wildlife including the brown bear, ruthless despoiler of a nation’s recreational heritage. The progress of the pulp industry in Alaska—a progress that appears to be the pet pride of the Territory’s present governor—does not represent a vague threat lurking somewhere in the future. Its shadow hangs over Admiralty Island at this very moment.⁶⁶

Dufresne wrote his popular book No Room for Bears (1965) to support bear preservation on Admiralty.⁶⁷ But the Forest Service had only begun to build up the timber industry in Alaska. Logging in the Southeast precipitated one of the longest-running environmental conflicts in the American experience, lasting throughout the century and beyond. The quest for a bear sanctuary at Admiralty Island continued until the island became a national monument in 1978 and a designated wilderness area in 1980.

The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980 increased the size of most existing national parks and wildlife refuges, added many more, and classified 56 million acres as wilderness in which no hunting would be allowed. Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge took in part of northwestern Afognak Island. But Native land selections created hundreds of thousands of acres of land inholdings within the boundaries of Kodiak and other refuges and parks, threatening their natural integrity. These inholdings, added to mining and other claims, necessitated a lengthy and expensive effort to purchase them back.

CHANGING PERCEPTIONS OF THE BEAR

Alaska’s tug-of-war over brown bear policy evoked local and national reactions ranging across the spectrum of environmental values. Some economic boosters would gladly have seen the beasts extirpated; most tolerated the bear as long as it did not bother humans in any way; others called for species or ecosystem preservation through bear reserves; a few argued that the bear deserved to live as much as or more than some humans. Perhaps because of the confusion of images of the bear as predator, pest, game trophy, wilderness monarch, and winsome furry creature, many private organizations shied away from the debate. Scientific data made a difference, but probably less than sentiment did. Critics called government and corporate interests to account on Kodiak Island and, to a lesser extent, on Admiralty Island. All participants save those favoring extinction got some of what they wanted.

Over time, policy and values shifted toward the preservationist end of the spectrum. Educated members of the Boone and Crockett Club and related groups, while retaining elements of sport hunting as a manhood ritual, could see inherent value in such creatures as the grizzly bear. They also knew that, without safeguards, bear populations could be cut down by commercial or mass sport hunting or by the numerous encroachments of civilization. Thus they encouraged management for sustainable use of the bears and, to some degree, nonconsumptive use. Hornaday, Holzworth, and Stewart Edward White openly insisted on a measure of rights for the bears.

Wildlife managers, in large part brought into being by interest groups led by Boone and Crockett, responded to conservationist appeals. Not beholden to commercial market hunters, they endorsed laws to curb such use of the bears. Notwithstanding their ties to agricultural interests, Bureau of Biological Survey officers did not view brown bears as such serious predators of cattle and sheep as to warrant systematic removal. Rather, wildlife managers felt closest to hunters and trappers, who wanted a reliable store of game and fur. Unlike the wolf, the grizzly bear escaped being targeted as a significant predator of moose and caribou. And the bear itself rated as big game. The managers accordingly applied utilitarian conservation values to the bear, to the end of sustainability. Knowing that, in the case of the grizzly bear, species sustainability necessitated ecosystem protection, they instituted bear sanctuaries at Katmai, Glacier Bay, Kodiak Island, and elsewhere.

After statehood, valuation of the grizzly bear continued to evolve. Wildlife managers still catered to resident and nonresident sport hunters who treasured the ritual of slaying a large and savage beast. Settlers and even hikers could legally kill bears they perceived as a threat. In the 1990s, conservative legislators passed a measure to suppress bears, by shooting them from aircraft if necessary, to enlarge stocks of moose and caribou.⁶⁸ Meanwhile, hunting and conquest of wild animals faded as a national pastime, in part because of nature shows and advancing ecological science. Environmentalists grew more numerous and effective in translating their values into public policy. Both federal and state governments designated or enlarged bear sanctuaries. The McNeil River and Katmai parks attained world status as bear viewing sites. Television nature shows elevated bears to iconic status as exponents of the wild. Ecotourism institutionalized nonconsumptive uses—aesthetic, recreational, spiritual—as the brown bear’s prime value.

Grizzly bears had won important rounds in the struggle for legitimacy. Yet swelling human population and development left open the question of whether in the long run this magnificent wilderness mammal could survive in more than a few isolated refuges.