in the wilderness and shot at on the trail. He was trapped, dynamited, blown away by set guns, and run down by dog packs. His rapid demise was facilitated by large bounties and boosted by government trappers. The end of the killing in each region resulted in the extinction of discrete grizzly populations. It began with the Spaniards in California and continues today in Montana and Idaho, a sweep of killing that goes back and forth across time for over a hundred years, depending on when the local bears were blown into eternity.The fewer the bears, the rougher the techniques: a pipeline worker wrapped a sandwich around a primed stick of dynamite, and a grizzly lost his head. From a Canadian town dump came a report of a bear caught in a culvert trap, then doused with gasoline and set on fire. The last surviving grizzlies in each region were the stuff of which legends were made, and great tales were told about the passing of these old outlaws. The last grizzly on record in California was killed in 1922. In Oregon: 1931 Arizona: 1935. In southwestern Colorado, one lasted until 1979. And so on. The wildlife agents who paid the hunters stood by watching until it was too late. By the time anyone questioned whether we should keep a few grizzlies around, the big bear was on his way out. Invariably, the last estimates of bear populations in each region were overstated, and the grizzly was gone before the agencies could believe it. Throughout the U.S.A. we managed the wilderness efficiently, tidying up those little pockets of resistance and taming the entire West in record time. As a culture, we saw ourselves as hard-pressed warriors, beleaguered frontier heroes righteously running over anything that was in our way. In a little more than a century we killed 100,000 grizzlies with our rifles and westward expansion. Our dealings with the grizzly are not unique; bears provide only one example of a Native American species that did not bend to our purposes. The efficient way we handled the bison, Indian, wolf, and grizzly was the way we wrote our colonial history, the convergent, blood-flecked roads that carried us here. Despite a bit of latter-day remorse about the way we treated Indians, our unapologetic dominion marches on. Grizzlies now survive in one percent of their former range in the continental United States, occupy much of their historic territory in Canada, and roam throughout Alaska. About a thousand now live south of Canada, although the number could be a few hundred more or less. Nearly all of these grizzlies live in two ecosystems, the cores of which are Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks. A handful of animals hang on, perilously close to extinction, in three or four other ecosystems near the Canadian border. Another forty to sixty thousand brown bears may live in Canada (mostly in British Columbia) and Alaska. *** Today the Yellowstone grizzly bear population may again be in serious trouble. During 2008, the bears suffered a double disaster: grizzlies died in record numbers, and global warming dealt what could be a death blow to the 34
watershed