Grizzly About Town, 33 & 34 – Monarch the Big Bear
33. Monarch the Big Bear: The Grizzly Is Captured
The history of the California grizzly, reaching its population peak in the Mexican-Californio era, until its complete extermination in the 70 years after Americans took control, was full of grim and sad tales, but in many ways the story of “Monarch” best captures the paradoxical and hypocritical story about the state’s emblem, its dreamy myth vs. the brutal reality. Not only did I have the stories from the two main grizzly books, but I’d read the short first-hand account by Allen Kelly, who purchased the full-grown grizzly from vaqueros and recounted the experience in Bears I Have Met. I’d also read a fictional version of Monarch’s story, a thin, weirdly written account for boys, but with excellent illustrations drawn from life by the author, a book by Ernest Thompson Seton (later notable as the co-founder of the Boy Scouts of America). The impossible-for-me-not-to-acquire book was titled Big Bear of the Tallac and was set in a green valley near Lake Tahoe rather than the arid mountains of Los Angeles County, but otherwise generally followed the familiar pattern of the story. With these accounts under my belt, I felt confident I had a solid grasp Monarch’s story, the last native California grizzly held in captivity just a couple of miles from where I lived, first on Mission Street at Woodward’s Gardens, then in Golden Gate Park.
It was the late-1880s, only 40 years since American annexation and the Gold Rush had transformed the new U.S. state from the hinterlands of Hispanic-Mexican territory to an exploding population of American and international immigrants that seemed to double every ten years, even well after the gold and silver rushes had abated. Decades-long and merciless efforts to remove or exterminate the grizzly had reached the point where the very existence of the once-widespread and oft-feared beast was in question. After all, it’d been years since a confirmed grizzly kill, and even reports of sightings, a compelling enough subject to make the newspapers statewide, were rare. In San Francisco, one such contentious debate erupted between Allen Kelly, a journalist on the San Francisco Examiner, and his ambitious new boss: Is the native California grizzly that adorns the flag—the great symbol of proud strength and fierce vitality—already extinct? William Randolph Hearst, then just 25 years old, argued that the native beast was gone for good—or damn close to it. (Huell voice: “You mean Citizen Kane Hearst, from that old movie?! Well, isn’t that something?”) Kelly, a somewhat experienced bear hunter, retorted that grizzlies were still around: if you journeyed into the more unpopulated, harder-to-reach hillsides of the state, you could still find them. He could find one, anyway.
A wager was made. Soon Kelly found himself on an impulsive Hearst-funded expedition to the southern mountains of the state—then among the most remote—to prove his case. But there was a catch. Hearst wanted the grizzly captured alive so that the animal could be used for promotional purposes, a living symbol of the emerging commercial and entrepreneurial clout of the ambitious young state. The bear must be trapped and brought back alive for Hearst to pay what was effectively a bounty on the bear, though they called it a gentleman’s bet. Now, Kelly was a hunter, not a trapper, but he agreed, figuring he could pay professional trappers for that part of the endeavor and still make a tidy profit from Hearst’s wager (the dollar amount wasn’t stated). Besides, he couldn’t let the arrogant young silver-spooned millionaire, heir to his father George Hearst’s mining empire, get the better of him, could he?
Kelly trekked down to the rugged coastal mountains in the south-central part of the state, where he attempted to locate a notorious, elusive, but very real grizzly he’d read about known as Pinto, who had a taste for cattle in the ranges between Antelope Valley and the Tehachapis up east of Santa Barbara. But his efforts were for naught: the bear understood the devious tricks of its fellow mammals and was shrewd and careful to avoid any interactions. After a couple of months without even a sighting of the bear, Kelly moved further south to Ventura County, where an enterprising yet unscrupulous Mexican vaquero syndicate strung along and fleeced the rich big city gringo—making fake bear tracks, requiring fees to guide him to empty dens, shrugging and calling for patience as more money was required to extend their bear-finding operations. Soon Hearst fired the journalist for failing to produce a tantalizing grizzly adventure story and cut off funding for the operation to bring back a living mascot. But Kelly persevered, expecting that Hearst would in the end still pay up if he could bring a bonafide California grizzly bear back to San Francisco.
Shortly after, Kelly learned that a vaquero had trapped a grizzly bear high up in the San Gabriel Mountains north of Los Angeles, on Mount Gleason. The vaquero, meanwhile, didn’t know exactly who the rumored rich big city gringo was—many thought he’d gone back to San Francisco with empty hands and an empty coin purse hahaha!—and the bear was extremely dangerous, so he must either offload it soon or just kill the grizzly and sell the fur and meat. Playing dumb, like he wasn’t the rumored man but someone who might still be interested in buying the grizzly if it was available, Kelly paid an agent connected to the vaquero to bring him to where the massive grizzly bear had been trapped in a large wooden log cage. Kelly looked at the animal and had no doubt: here was his California grizzly. He made a deal with the vaquero to pay a fraction of the wanted fee for the bear before the agent and the vaquero realized Kelly wasn’t just a convenient buyer but the actual “rich” man that had started the whole thing. Still, the agent and vaquero kept their end of the bargain. It helped that Kelly had to pay more if he wanted to get the grizzly down from the mountain and back on a train to San Francisco—no job for just one man. Deals were made, more vaqueros hired, the forthcoming Hearst cash promised.
The grizzly bear that Allen Kelly encountered was wild, violent, dangerous. The big bear raged in its log cage. Recalling later, Kelly described the grizzly’s “furious attempts to escape. He bit and tore up the logs, hurled his great bulk against the sides and try to enlarge every chink that admitted light. He required unremitting attention with a sharpened stake to prevent him from breaking out.” They could not move the bear in its current state. The bear relentlessly attacked his confinement and refused food or water for a week. Finally, after he became exhausted and weakened, Kelly and the vaqueros were prepared to move him from the trap to a cage for transport. To do so, they had to chain down his legs, which took many attempts before they could finally loop the chains around his forepaws and truss him to the floor of the trap. Kelly recalled those dangerous moments:
He fought ferociously during the whole operation, and chewed the chains until he splintered his canine teeth to the stubs and spattered the floor of the trap with bloody froth. It was painful to see the plucky brute hurting himself so uselessly, but it could not be helped, as he would not give up while he could move limb or jaw.
The grizzly was gagged with a stick and harness so he couldn’t bite. His captors fed chains under his armpits and around his throat, making a chain collar. He was then roped, hauled out of the trap—with great struggle—and bound to a sled, similar to lumberjack’s “go-devil” for shuttling tall logged trees down slopes. The crew had trouble finding horses that would pull the grizzly, with two teams shimmying away in fright until the third “tractable” team worked. (One can only imagine what their previous careers had involved.) During transit to a wagon trail down on the Mojave side of the mountain, the grizzly was released and chained to a tree each night. But the grizzly did not rest, only waited patiently for the fire to burn out and its captors were asleep; it then paced and tried to rip the tree down, pulling at the chain with all its strength. Every morning it was the same fight to get back on the sled, the bear roped and tied, though it learned quickly, each time finding tricks to thwart their attempts to truss it down. Kelly explained the grizzly was “watching every movement of his foes with alert attention and wasted no energy in aimless struggles.”
34. Monarch the Big Bear: Hearst’s Spectacle
Down from the mountains, at the next opportunity Kelly sent a notice via telegram to Hearst: he had the grizzly and needed money to pay the vaqueros. Hearst was only too happy to rehire the journalist for an exclusive expose on capturing the animal—of course he couldn’t let the newspaper competition get his grizzly!—and pay all the related expenses. At this point, the grizzly was completely exhausted: the chained, caged animal put up little fight as preparations were made to transport him first by wagon, then rail, to San Francisco.
For Hearst, it was the perfect wager to lose: not only could he make a sensation of the bear’s story for the newspaper—an entire series of articles!—but now he had a mascot for his newspaper. In this spirit, and even though he puffed loudly of magnanimity and conservation of California’s nearly extinct official mammal in the Editor’s Note, William Randolph Hearst named his new acquisition after the newspaper’s own sales slogan, “Monarch of the Dailies.” In the series of articles, heralding first the arrival and then the exhibition of the native animal, there were many descriptions of the grizzly as “Monarch of the Forest” and, not unironically, “His Bearship.” In the Record, this was a running epithet in California for grizzlies, about the animal’s stubbornness in general and his refusal to accept man’s superior gunpowder in particular, which had led to much of its kind’s destruction during the early years: the grizzlies would stand and fight rather than run for safety. It also demonstrated America’s contradiction of mocking royalty yet admiring it. According to Kelly, the centerpiece tabloid-style story of the capture itself, even though running with his byline, was just a “Hearst yarn,” full of misleading statements, embellishments, and outright fabrications. Evidently, Citizen Kane started his career just as he finished it, expanding his father George Hearst’s vast silver mining wealth—the Examiner was lost in a poker bet with the original publisher, E.A. de Young—into a media and real estate empire by merchandizing loosely factual celebrity gossip, political scandals, international rivalries, and domestic antagonisms. “Truth” was what solid newspapers or magazines—told readers a story they already wanted to hear—not what actually happened.
And never to miss a business opportunity, Hearst paired the grizzly bear’s arrival in San Francisco not just with the Examiner-sponsored hoopla and coverage but with a paid ticket showing at Woodward’s Gardens, a popular entertainment location reminiscent of a circus—an elderly miner, somehow not dead or returned home, might’ve even drawn a comparison to Grizzly Adams’s famed menagerie from the wild old days. “Monarch,” meanwhile, was far from cooperative toward his new home. Kelly described those early days after the bear arrived at the Gardens and was moved to an iron cage for display: it would “fight anything” and “permit no man to handle him while he can move a muscle.” Over time, though, Monarch somewhat accepted his position, but only because it had been shown to him by “chains and imprisonment.” However, Kelly added, the grizzly “preserved an attitude of armed neutrality,” and though he would take bits of sugar from Kelly’s fingers, he “would tolerate no petting.”
The California grizzly, while still thin from not eating and visibly injured with parts of his fur gouged and scraped off from his attacks on the walls, and though “his broken teeth trouble some,” nevertheless attracted 20,000 during his first day of exhibition at Woodward’s Gardens (surely exaggerated, but still obviously a big event, especially with the sensational press coverage). Monarch remained a star attraction at the Gardens for three to four years, until he was moved to a “Bear Pit” enclosure in Golden Gate Park, which he shared with other bears, and was eventually donated by Hearst to the city, a spot that would later become the starting point of the San Francisco Zoo before it was moved out by Ocean Beach.
Again, the change of venue was traumatic for the bear. Kelly explained that Monarch devoted a week to trying to escape the Bear Pit, “testing every bar and joint of his prison, and when he realized that his strength was overmatched, he broke down and sobbed.” He stopped eating, reflected Kelly, and likely would’ve died had Louis Ohnimus, who handled Monarch back at Woodward’s Gardens and cared for the animal, not tactfully and carefully coaxed the animal into eating again. Eventually, he was successful, and Monarch was revived, accepting his new imprisonment and making the best of it. Yet, Kelly warned, “the fires of rebellion never were extinguished and it would have been foolhardy to get within reach of his paw.”
As Kelly looked back on his capture of the bear, there was certainly pride that he’d been responsible for bringing the California grizzly to San Francisco, but his narrative had more than a little tinge of melancholy, along with a respect for Monarch and the grizzly’s intelligence.
He knew his own strength and how to apply it, and only the superior strength of the iron and steel kept him from doing all the damage of which he was capable. The lions, for example, were safely kept in cages which they could have broken with a blow rightly placed. Monarch discovered the weak places of such a cage within a few hours and wrecked it with swift skill.
For example, he described Monarch scaling the 12-foot iron palings around the initial Bear Pit, where he bent the tops of the 1.5-inch-thick bars. He was nearly over the top before getting spotted and pushed back with sharp sticks, forcing the rangers to dig a deep ditch near the base of the palings so he couldn’t get leverage to pull himself up again.
He remains captive only because it is physically impossible for him to escape. Apparently he has no illusions concerning man and no respect for him as a superior being. He has been beaten by superior cunning, but never conquered, and he gives no parole to refrain from renewing the contest when opportunity offers.
This ended Kelly’s narrative. He never saw Monarch after his initial installation at the Bear Pit. Ernest Thompson Seton, who saw Monarch at the Bear Pit in later years and came to sketch him as he was working on books for young boys and fascinated by the animal, said “I consider him the finest Grizzly I have seen in captivity.” In time, though, Monarch became truly broken by his enclosure. In 1903, the San Francisco Chronicle described Monarch in bad shape, “seemingly suffering from an extreme case of ennui. [Monarch] dug a hole that he would lie in. …The park commissioners feared that he was grieving, and that he might die of a broken heart. They decided to get him a mate.” They brought him a “silver-tipped” grizzly from Idaho, a different ecotype and significantly smaller in size, and though it took some time for the pair to mate, after a year two cubs were born. Still, in time the novelty of the native grizzly in Golden Gate Park wore off, and Monarch was just the sad aging grizzly who begged for food scraps, the managers fending off cruel teenagers practicing a time-honored tradition: taunting dangerous predators when the animals were safely behind bars.
When the Earthquake and Fire of 1906 destroyed most of San Francisco, the Bear Pit and Monarch survived—the ocean winds were blowing east. Golden Gate Park became a refuge for many of the homeless and destitute survivors during the immediate aftermath of the disaster, and tent camps were set up during the rebuilding period, new neighbors of the old big bear. Not long after, sick and decrepit, after 22 years in San Francisco, the last known captive California grizzly bear was euthanized in 1911. After his death, Monarch was weighed for the first time, at 1,100 pounds, somewhat overfed and under-exercised. His skeleton went to UC Berkeley for study, and his pelt was preserved and taxidermy into a sort of stuffed semblance of his former self, which could, I read, be seen not far from the old Bear Pit, at the California Academy of Sciences, just across from the de Young Museum*.
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*Monarch has since been moved to the California Museum in Sacramento.