by Farley Mowat
“In my Preliminary Synopsis of the American Bears [I recognized] eight grizzlies and big brown bears of which five [were new to science. I did] not suspect that the number remaining to be discovered was anything like so great as has since proved to be the case. The steady influx of specimens resulting from the labors of the Biological Survey, supplemented by the personal efforts of a number of hunter-naturalists, brought to light many surprises... and beginning in the spring of 1910, a fund placed at my disposal made it possible to offer hunters and trappers sufficient enducement to tempt them to exert themselves in securing needed specimens. As a result, the [U.S.] national collection of grizzly bears has steadily grown until... it now far excels all other collections in the world together.
“Nevertheless... knowledge of the big bears is by no means complete... Many bears now roaming the wild will have to be killed and their skulls and skins sent to museums before their characters and variations will be fully understood and before it will be possible to construct accurate maps of their ranges. Persons having the means and ambition to hunt big game may be assured that... much additional material is absolutely required to settle questions [of race and species] still in doubt.”
What the good Dr. Merriam succeeded in doing was to separate the grizzly into a total of seven species and seventy-seven subspecies, to fifty-eight of which his name was attached as the discoverer. Alas for ambition. Modern scientists have invalidated most of his discoveries, and the maps of the grizzly’s range, which Merriam felt could only be drawn accurately if a lot more “specimens” were killed, became mere cemetery charts where the bones of the bulk of the grizzly population of North America rot unremarked.
However, more than 9,000 “study specimens” of the grizzly, carefully garnered by science assisted by “hunter-naturalists,” are held in storage in the great museums of America against the day when perhaps another Dr. Merriam will undertake a new revision of the species and subspecies of a vanished animal.
Through several centuries, stories trickled out of the vast Labrador/Ungava wilderness about a creature that, from the descriptions, could hardly have been anything except a grizzly. Added to these were matter-of-fact records from fur traders who bought skins of “grey,” “grisly,” or “grizzly bears” from the Inuit of the coast and the Indians of the interior. However, because none of these skins fell into the hands of scientists or ended up in museum collections, the accumulating evidence that grizzly bears existed in the region was ignored.
In 1954, C.S. Elton, an Oxford-based expert on animal population dynamics, published a paper setting out the evidence that a grizzly not only had inhabited much of Labrador/Ungava but might still exist. Unfortunately, as Elton pointed out, “No white man has ever certainly seen alive the barren-ground grizzly to which the natives refer... [scientists therefore] have mostly shelved the question of its existence and identity.”
The definitive rejection had been made in 1948 by Dr. R.M. Anderson, chief mammalogist to Canada’s National Museum. “Admittedly,” said Anderson, “some kind of Grizzly or ‘big Brown Bear’ is legendary in northern Quebec or Ungava, but no... specimen... has ever been examined, and so I shall not have much confidence [in its existence] until a skin with skull, and feet with claws, has been produced, and the specimen should have a pedigree or abstract of title to show where it came from.”
In 1974, Anderson’s sarcastic dictate was still being defended by a successor to his post, Dr. A.W.F. Banfield, who gave it as his considered opinion that no race of grizzly bear had been native to Labrador/Ungava in historic times. “Hearsay accounts of grizzlies,” he opined, in an oblique reference to Elton, “have misled scientists more often than not, perhaps more in the case of the rumoured presence of the bears in the Ungava peninsula of Northern Quebec and Labrador.” Here is a synopsis of the evidence Anderson and Banfield so cavalierly rejected.
Although nothing exists in print to tell us what early Europeans knew about the great brown bear, the Descelier World Map, dating to about 1550, shows two well-drawn bears on the shore-ice off Labrador, accompanied by the legend ours sur les glaces. Both bears are of equal size, but one is white and the other brown. A third bear, also brown, is depicted standing on the Labrador land mass. Barren ground grizzlies in the central Arctic are known to frequent sea ice where, although white bears are quite at home, black bears seldom if ever venture.
One of the first English settlers in Labrador, Captain George Cartwright, recorded the presence there of a species of bear different from the white and black bears. Cartwright never penetrated into the interior and so did not see the strange bear himself, but on the basis of what his interpreter could gather from the natives, he described it as “a kind of bear very ferocious, having a white ring around its neck.” This agrees with accounts offered by present-day Indians of the region when referring to the Great Bear of the Montagnais and the Mehtashuee of the Nascopie—both of which were very large brown bears that were fierce and dangerous if aroused. Cartwright’s white ring about the neck is probably a half-understood reference to the grizzly’s silvery-grey mantle.
References to the big bears became more numerous and more specific in the nineteenth century. The Hudson’s Bay Company was then operating trading posts on the Ungava Coasts and occasionally in the interior as well, while Moravian missions had posts along the Atlantic coast of Labrador. One of the early HBC factors, John Maclean, spent six years trading at Fort Chimo near the bottom of Ungava Bay after four years serving the Company in what is now British Columbia, where he had become familiar with the western grizzly. In a report on the Ungava District for 1837–38, he lists black, grissle, and Arctic (viz. white) bears as being among the local fur resources. In a book about his trading experiences in Ungava, he added that “The black bear shuns the presence of man and is by no means a dangerous animal; the grisly bear, on the contrary, commands considerable respect from the ‘lord of creation’... When we consider the great extent of country that intervenes between Ungava and the ‘far west’ it seems inexplicable that the grisly bear should be found in so insulated a situation... the fact of their being here, however, does not admit of a doubt, for I have traded and sent to England several of their skins.”
HBC fur returns for Ungava District for the seasons 1838–39 and 1839–40 still survive. In 1838, one black bear skin was traded and, in the following year, one black and four “grey bears”—grey bear being the HBC trade term for grizzly. Reports by other HBC employees substantiate Maclean’s observations. Captain William Kennedy, who served in Ungava District during the 1860s, stated that many bear skins were received at Fort Chimo, Fort Nascopie, and the George River post and sold in the trade as a variety of the (western) grizzly. And a Mr. Mittleberger, a retired HBC factor living in the U. S., is quoted in 1884 to the effect that the grizzly was still found in Labrador in his time, which seems to have been the 1870s.
The trading records of the six Moravian missions strung along 300 miles of the Labrador coast, from Makkovik in the south to Nachvak in the north, show that the Moravians had regularly traded for skins of “grey” or “grizzly” bears through more than a century, buying the last one in 1914.
During the latter part of the nineteenth century, interior Labrador and Ungava began attracting scientific travellers. One of these, the ethnologist L.M. Turner, was at Fort Chimo from 1882 to 1884. Turner had no doubts about the existence of the grizzly in that region. “The brown or barren-ground bear appears to be [now] restricted to a narrow area and is not plentiful, yet it is common enough to keep the Indian in wholesome dread of its vicious disposition when enraged.”
That the bears had indeed become rare by that time was confirmed by A.P. Lowe, a government geologist who made extensive explorations of north-central Labrador and Ungava between 1892 and 1895. He reported that “specimens of the barren-ground bear are [now] obtained only at infrequent intervals... [but] there is no doubt that this species is found in the bar
rens of Labrador... skins are brought at intervals to Fort Chimo when the Indians have a favourable chance to kill it. On other occasions they leave it alone, having a great respect for, and fear of its ferocity and size.”
By 1894, there were probably few left alive. The Hudson’s Bay Company seems not to have traded any skins after that year, and the Moravians only one. But around 1900, an independent trader named Martin Hunter, who had a post on Anticosti Island, bought some large brown bear pelts. According to Hunter, the animals that produced these skins were of “immense size and very savage. One skin I got measured seven feet broad by nine feet long and showed no fewer than eleven bullet holes in his hide.” These skins may have come from southern Labrador. Newfoundland writer and naturalist Harold Horwood tells me that “Labrador natives, both white and Indian, state positively that the [grizzly] bears were once found as far to the south and east as the Mealy Mountains, a barren, broken range between Goose Bay and Cartwright.”
Dillon Wallace, an American traveller who spent part of the winter of 1905–06 at Fort Chimo before making his way overland to Hamilton Inlet, reported “a very large and ferocious brown bear that tradition says inhabits the barrens to the eastward of George River. Mr. Peter McKenzie told me that, many years ago, when he was stationed at Fort Chimo, the Indians brought him one of the skins of the animal, and Ford, [the trader] at George River [Post] said that, some twenty years since, he saw a piece of one of the skins. Both agreed that the hair was very long, light brown in colour, silver tipped and of a very different species from either the polar or black bear... The Indians speak of it with dread, and insist that it is still to be found though none of them can say positively that he has seen one in a decade.”
Elton believes that, after 1900, a remnant of the original population lingered on in the almost impenetrable triangle of mountain tundra lying west of the Torngat range in northern Labrador. This region could well have been the provenance of the bear that yielded up its skin to the Moravians during the winter of 1913–14. The skin was traded by Inuit who hunted caribou in the tundra triangle.
One last glimpse of the great bear of the barrens may have been permitted us as late as 1946, when the crew of a Royal Canadian Air Force survey plane flying low over the open tundra about a hundred miles northwest of Chimo spotted three bears. The trio consisted of “one largish brown bear followed by two smaller ones.” Both the pilot and the navigator-observer were familiar with northern fauna and were certain that these were neither black nor polar bears.
Despite all of this evidence, and more, the scientific establishment continued to deny the existence, past or present, of a resident population of grizzly bears east of Hudson Bay. However, since 1975, the denials have been muted. In that year, while excavating a late eighteenth-century Inuit midden at Okak Bay on the Labrador (not far from the site of a Moravian mission and trading post), Harvard anthropologist Steven Cox uncovered the well-preserved skull of a grizzly bear.
The Okak skull is that of a young female. It possesses certain unusual characteristics that have led some specialists to speculate that a Labrador/Ungava grizzly, long-separated from its cousins to the west of Hudson Bay, had evolved into a distinct race. Probably we shall never know for certain whether the demise of the Nascopies’ Mehtashuee marked the extermination of a distinct life form. What we do know is that the great grizzled bear of Ungava and Labrador is gone forever.
According to the late Dr. Francis Harper, an American zoologist who travelled extensively in Labrador, the northeastern grizzly, which he believed to have been a distinct species, perished as a direct result of the introduction of firearms to the Labrador/Ungava peninsula. On the one hand, Indians and Inuit then had the means (the incentive was provided by the traders) to attack the great bears that, until then, had been virtually invulnerable. On the other hand, firearms resulted in such massive destruction of barren ground caribou that the remaining bears, which depended on caribou carrion for a large part of their sustenance, were fatally reduced by starvation and attendant disease.
As we have been, so we remain.
Grizzly bears still survive in significant numbers in national parks and other such preserves. However, the species is not safe even there in the face of growing pressure to “ban the bears” from vast areas of many parks on the grounds that they pose a threat to the increasing hordes of human beings who go there purportedly for contact with the natural world.
Sterilized contact, apparently, is what such people want. There is very little doubt but that they will get it. Scores or even hundreds of grizzlies are being “disposed of” in national parks in the United States and in western Canada. Sometimes they are shot outright. Sometimes they are live-trapped and transported to peripheral regions where there is insufficient food to support more than the existing bear population. Sometimes they are dumped over the boundaries of the parks where they are quickly dealt with by commercial hunters, some of whom take only the gallbladders, which, as in the case of the polar bear, they sell for huge prices to Oriental buyers.
Wherever wild grizzly populations still exist they are being killed, not only by sport and commercial hunters but as a result of government programs designed to placate the human hunters of caribou, moose, elk, deer, mountain goats, and sheep. Having over-hunted these animals, the hunters are now blaming the grizzly and the wolf for a consequent shortage of game and are demanding their destruction.
Even the remnant of the barren ground clan living west of Hudson Bay is not exempt. Although nominally protected in Canada’s Northwest Territories, they may still be killed “in self-defence.” Considering the reputation with which we have saddled the grizzly, any gunner, white or native, who chooses to kill one can rest assured of immunity from the law. During a tour of the western Canadian Arctic in 1967, I heard of eight grizzlies and a number of polar bears having supposedly been shot “in self-defence.” Not one of these cases was investigated by the authorities.
The surviving barren ground bears probably do not number more than 300. They cannot or, at least, will not live in proximity to human activities, and so are further threatened by the escalation of massive “resource development” across their one-time domain. Through the past several decades, there seems to have been a migration by some of them from the Arctic prairies into the rocky, lunar-looking wilderness north of Chesterfield Inlet. Here they may be temporarily secure from molestation, but in a brutally inhospitable corner of the world where only a handful of bears can hope to sustain themselves.
One wonders whether, at some future time, learned experts will not contend that the barren ground grizzly of whatever provenance was no more than a legendary creature.
In his gleaming ebony coat, the bulky but agile black bear plays a dual role in the wilderness scenario contrived by modern man. He is viewed on the one hand as a somewhat comic and rather endearing creature who nevertheless can bring a delicious shiver of apprehension to the camera-adorned tourist; on the other as a savage potential killer seen through the telescope of a high-powered rifle by a sportsman acting out his fantasy of being Daniel Boone.
Paradoxically, the black bear is thus one of the mainstays of wilderness tourism, and at the same time he is a prime ingredient in the bloody potpourri of “harvestable” big game animals.
When Europeans first arrived, black bears abounded from Atlantic to Pacific, from sub-Arctic timberline south into Mexico. They occupied the whole of the Atlantic seaboard with the exception of a few islands such as Sable and the Magdalens, which were too far offshore for such essentially terrestrial animals to reach. Moreover, they occupied this territory in such numbers that early settlers sometimes referred to them as “that Plague of Beares.”
In 1750, one Thomas Wright spent several months on then uninhabited Anticosti Island, and he later wrote a little book about his experiences, which includes this passage: “The Bears, who are the principal inhabitants of this island, are so numerous
that in the space of six weeks we killed fifty-three and might have destroyed twice that number had we thought fit... These animals have been so little molested by mankind, that we have frequently passed near them without their discovering the least fear; nor did they ever show any inclination to attack us, except only the females in defence of their young.”
Wright’s observations give us a glimpse of the black bear as it must have been at the time of first European contact—one of the commonest large mammals; inoffensive toward man yet relatively fearless of him. Confirmation of its abundance is commonplace in early records from New England, from the region that became the Atlantic Provinces of Canada, and from the domain of New France. As late as 1802, new settlers on the St. John River in New Brunswick complained that bears were so numerous (“the woods are infested with them”) that, in irrational panic, they drove their cattle onto islands in the river, and women and children refused to leave the shelter of their cabins unless accompanied by a man armed with gun or axe.
The initial size of the black bear population can be estimated. Around the year 1500, between 100,000 and 120,000 lived to the eastward of a north-south line that would pass through the present cities of Boston and Quebec. Because they were mainly forest dwellers they seem to have held their own rather well during the early period of coastal exploration and maritime exploitation; but after settlement began in earnest, their numbers quickly waned.
Settlers and colonists slaughtered bears not simply for meat, fat, and fur, but because they saw the animals as a threat to agriculture. Whereas native people viewed bears with respect shading into reverence, the newcomers reserved their respect for the bear killers. Successful bear hunters enjoyed great prestige. They were viewed as saviours of the settlements in the same sense that hunters of Indians were. They are epitomized by the likes of Daniel Boone, that insatiable butcher who massacred as many as 2,000 black bears, thereby earning himself an heroic niche in American mythology.