Grizzly About Town, 24 – The Real Grizzly Adams
24. The Real Grizzly Adams
What exactly was Grizzly Adams’s deal, anyway? I’d already ordered the DVD set for Season 1 of the TV show online, but it hadn’t arrived yet. Why wait? I could go straight to the original source rather than excerpts and the reporting of others. I found his out-of-print autobiography in an e-book store, free since it was long past copyright restrictions, and downloaded it onto my tablet. I then headed out for Alamo Square, excited about a grizzly bear two-fer afternoon: read about the real Grizzly Adams, and do sketches in the hilltop park area, which I had penciled in as my next Grizzly About Town illustration. Specifically, there was a stately old Victorian on Alamo Square’s northeast corner, which, as far as I was concerned, was much more iconic than the Painted Ladies on the other side of the park, though it lacked the downtown skyline in the background. Plus, I could avoid the tourists taking photos while recreating the famous jumping scene from the TV show. Though, maybe that was short-sighted? I could perhaps draw a grizzly ambling up as young people with Texas university sweaters leaped and grinned, legs askance. Or a grizzly lounging on one of the Painted Ladies’ steps? Scattering several terrified lap-dogs onto adjacent streets? No, no, no, don’t get distracted.
It was a beautiful day, perfect for park sitting, sunny with a gentle breeze, and I didn’t sense any incoming fog. Surely it would come, but not for at least a couple of hours, judging from the moderate movement of the upper branches of the cypress trees. I found a good spot along the concrete retaining wall on the park’s western side that afforded a good view of the Victorian and I started sketching. There was the pleasant smell of wildflowers, with patches of orange poppies and purple lupines running up the nearby slope. To the right was a giant willow softly shifting in the ocean breeze, so I sketched that as well. Satisfied I had the main idea down, the key lines right, I took a couple of photos with my smartphone. Then I wandered up the steep incline to the crest of the park. It was inspiring, like walking toward sunshine, up into the bright blue sky beyond.
Over the hill I found a spot on the grass facing downtown. I sat down and began to soak in the sun. I looked at the rising towers of this rapidly changing city—in fact, was it ever not rapidly changing since gold was discovered in 1848? Aside from the sun’s soothing warmth, there was a gentle ocean breeze on my face. I could hear the sound of my breathing. I fell into one of those momentary, semi-meditative disassociations from the self, a brief yet joyful sensation.
I listen to the gently groaning cypresses above, the prickly gesticulations of their branches. All this talk of history makes me think of futures. Now I’m perched up in a cypress, watching the seasons rapidly fly by. The breeze turns into howling winds. The sky shifts from sunshine to dark clouds, to rain and fog, until everything burns away into a relentless, punishing heat. The city hills grow taller, towers piled upon towers, and in time spaceships lumber high above like colossal metallic carp. Below, the laughter of children at play, sounds of lovemaking, and the screams—the collapsing sobs—of late-night murders. Then I watch as earthquakes and fires and cataclysms not yet conceived wipe away everything: all that remains are scorched hills surrounded by churning water. In time, fresh structures bloom into a future place unrecognizable from now, which comes only as sensations, not forms.
Wait, where am I? Who am I?! I snapped out of my reverie. Enough of that! What was I doing? Right, Grizzly Adams! I picked up my tablet and selected the volume.
Even though the book was written in the first person like an autobiography, it was actually authored by Theodore Hittell, a San Francisco journalist. Scrolling through, I could see that it was much more focused on Grizzly Adams’s wilderness adventures and how he came to gather the menagerie that he would later showcase in the fast-growing city’s downtown, but I figured it would still be interesting to see the details on how Adams captured his bears, and where, and what it was like at the time, since he was right at the start of American California.
In the other two books I’d read about the general arc of Adams’s life, so I knew the scope of his adventures. It started with his youth near Boston—John Adams was a second-cousin of President and Founding Father John Adams—where he developed a love of hunting in the woods and even worked for a time trapping small wild animals in the area for a regional zoo, before getting married and setting up a more practical trade as a shoemaker, a job he held for 15 years. But then, “when, Yankee that I was, I must needs speculate,” Adams went bankrupt after putting his entire life savings into a shipment of boots and shoes to St Louis, where a fire destroyed the entire cargo.
Struggling, Adams, among 10,000s of others, decided to try his luck as “the great gold fever broke out, and intense excitement about California prevailed over the whole county”: he left his wife and child and joined the mass migration, taking the southern desert overland route down through Mexico, arriving in the fall of 1849—making Adams a bonafide 49er. Within three years, Adams went boom and bust three times at a variety of enterprises—minin’, farmin’, speculatin’—and finally, disgusted by his own “reckless speculations” and “the villainy of others,” he turned his back on society and the pursuit of wealth and “took the road toward the wildest and most unfrequented parts of the Sierra Nevada, resolved thenceforth to make the wilderness my home and wild beasts my companions.” As I’d read in the first few pages of the book, it was there where Adams experienced a kind of rebirth.
The roads were very rough; my team was none of the strongest; I had to rely on my rifle for provisions and the roadside for pasture; but the new and romantic scenes into which I was advancing, enchanted my imagination, and seemed to inspire me with a new life. The fragrance of the pines and the freshness and beauty of nature in those elevated regions were perfectly delightful to me. The mountain air was in my nostrils, the evergreens above, and the eternal rocks around; and I seemed to be a part of the vast landscape, a kind of demigod in the glorious and magnificent creation.
It wasn’t long, however, before Adams’s old ambitions arose, and his hunting for sustenance turned into trapping and trading in wild beasts, drawing on his youthful zoo animal-trapping experiences in the Massachusetts woods. To his surprise, he discovered he had a knack for tracking and killing grizzly bears, something that made him popular with Indigenous tribes and miners alike. While the miners loved a good grizzly battle story and favored the bear’s meat, they were there to strike it rich and didn’t want the nuisance of grizzly bears to inconvenience them. Indians thought Adams half-mad but were impressed by his audacity in the face of deadly predators. For three years Adams traveled all over the West, hunting and trapping: up and down the Sierras; to the Cascades in Eastern Washington; into and around the Rocky Mountains; then, once back in California, he went to the Tehachapi Mountains, eventually traversing up along the coastal ranges around Monterey and San Jose. It was then that he finally brought his considerable menagerie to San Francisco. He opened up a small “museum” of live wild animals in a basement at Leidesdorff and Clay, which is across the street from what’s now the Pyramid building, at least in the city’s current layout, no doubt modified many times due to fire, fire, earthquake and fire.
This is where Hittell first encounters Grizzly Adams. He recounts in the lengthy introduction how he was a young journalist and editor working for the “San Francisco Bulletin” at the time and came across a placard for “‘The Mountaineer Museum’— a collection of wild animals of the Pacific Coast, the principal of which were ‘Samson, the largest Grizzly Bear ever caught, weighing over 1500 pounds, Lady Washington (with her cub), weighing 1000 pounds, and Benjamin Franklin, King of the Forest.’” Hittell went down to a dark basement, large but dingy, where two of the featured grizzly bears were chained to the floor, pacing restlessly, along with several other grizzly and black bears, including cubs, a stall with two elk, a row of cages with mountain lions and “other California animals,” and in the back, in a very large iron cage, the “monster grizzly Samson.” Hittell describes Adams himself as “muscular and wiry, with sharp features and penetrating eyes” and dressed in clothes and moccasins of buckskin, with a deerskin cap and fox-tail. The book included a woodcut lithograph “drawn from life” by German immigrant Charles Nahl depicting Adams with Ben Franklin, the grizzly with a kind of chilled-out smirk beside his handler (not unlike the symbol on the California state flag!), whose hand rests on the grizzly’s telltale hump—it’s a gesture at once proprietary, confident, and affectionate—and the mountain man looks just as reported. Adams, he writes, was “quite a strange as any of his animals.”
Hittell talked to Adams as he put the two chained bears, Ben Franklin and Lady Washington, to boxing and wrestling, with each other and then themselves, and which “went through the performance with good nature and great apparent enjoyment of the sport.” Then Adams showed Hittell why the two chained grizzlies’ backs had the fur worn away.
At the same time Adams said he would show how the bears would carry burdens; and, after loosing Ben Franklin and jumping upon his back, he rode several times around the apartment. He next threw a bag of grain on the animal’s back, and the bear carried it as if used to the task.
The young journalist was immediately fascinated and charmed by the strange character. Over the next three years, Hittell helped boost the museum with coverage in his newspaper, which allowed Grizzly Adams to move the rebranded “Pacific Museum” over to the more auspicious California Exchange building on Kearny and Clay, where “many thousands” attended. Throughout their acquaintance, Hittell took nearly 700 pages of notes while Adams talked to him in the evenings when Hittell came around, no doubt free of charge since the “Bulletin” was regularly publicizing him (and maybe Hittell was getting a portion of the proceeds?), with an agreed upon idea that it would later become a book of his adventures. Hittell concludes the introduction by stating that he trusts Adams and believes his stories “truthful,” and that the wild mountaineer’s memory is “remarkably good.” After all, Adams had all the animals he described, not to mention the scars and wounds. Thus a future judge and one of California’s first historians wrote up Adams’s adventures into a book that was published in 1860, just months before the outbreak of the Civil War.
Often books written in the mid-1800s are a slog, replete with tedious, florid asides, unnecessary blandishments, like word-rococo, but the prose in this book was surprisingly good: economical, no-nonsense and to the point, those particular American characteristics that other writers of the time tended to overlook, especially before fellow San Francisco journalist Samuel Clemens cut a new path for that uniquely American form of literary expression. And the book had strong adventure story characteristics, a precursor to what Bay Area native Jack London would perfect 40 years later in his rugged stories of men vs. nature tales involving risk, glory, pain; and, for the unlucky or stupid or cruel, a lonely or gruesome death.
However, as I read more about the real Grizzly Adams, I became confused, even mystified. I mean, he was nothing like the Dan Haggerty character who sat in my youthful TV memories. Could it be that I misremembered the show so completely?! Was my brain malfunctioning? Was all I’d seen or seemed merely a dream? Or a lie?
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