Grisly gods
Early explorers’ encounters with “the bear that walks
like a man”
By Asha Jhamandas
It remains a mystery whether grizzly bears were named for their thick
coats or their touchy temperments. Early historical texts that use
the spelling “grisly bears” suggest the latter. Early European
explorers, however, might agree that the word “grisly” best
described death under such massive paws and teeth. Those who lived
to tell about such encounters used awe-inspiring language to describe
the great bears.
Henry Kelsey was the first European to write about the grizzly bears
of Canada’s northwest. In 1690, the Hudson’s Bay Company
sent the young British explorer into the interior to secure land, find
potential fort sites, and act as a peacekeeper between warring nations
who were disrupting trade. Standing on the edge of a Manitoban wood
in August 1691, Kelsey watched grizzlies sharing the prairie with bison
and paid tribute to them in his travel journal:
An outgrown bear (which) is good meat,
His skin to gett I have used all ye means I can
He is mans food and makes food of man
His hide they would not me it preserve
But said it was a god and they should starve
Kelsey experienced a much more heart-thumping encounter when two grizzlies
attacked him and one of his aboriginal companions. While his companion
climbed a tree to escape, Kelsey leapt into a clump of tall willows
and shot both while they were stalking his friend at the base of the
tree. The tribe later rewarded Kelsey for his bravery with a special
name, Miss-top-ashish, or “Little Giant.”
Grizzly bears are described in even greater detail in the travel
journals of Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, explorers
sent by Thomas Jefferson to chart the wild lands west of the Mississippi
river in 1804. Part of the mandate of Lewis and Clark’s Corps
of Discovery was to document new species of wildlife and collect specimens.
Lewis, who later mused that the Corps was lucky not to have lost
men to a grizzly bear attack, was at first sceptical about their ferocity.
Despite warnings from the aboriginal Americans that it required up
to ten men to kill one bear, he believed that they were no match for
a man with a rifle. He quickly changed his mind on May 5, 1805.
That was the day that group happened upon a bear of approximately
270 kilograms. Clark described it as “very large and a terrible
looking animal.” After the battle, Lewis confessed in his journal
that it was a “most tremendous looking animal, and extremely
hard to kill.” Burdened with ten bullets, it “swam more
than half the distance across the river to a sandbar & it was at
least twenty minutes before he died; [he] made the most tremendous
roaring from the moment he was shot."
Over the course of their two-year expedition, the group learned to
respect the grizzly’s mighty strength and dangerous reputation.
Lewis’s journal entry in 1805 probably captures the sentiment
of all the previous and ensuing Europeans during the age of North American
exploration. "I find that the curiossity of our party is pretty
well satisfyed with rispect to this anamal."
top
|
