230 The Grizzly Bear 



for self-defence, than I would commit suicide. That 

 they will not fight when they think they have to, no sane 

 man would maintain. That, when they do fight, they 

 are not the most formidable and doughty of antagonists, 

 I have never heard hinted. But that they habitually seek 

 trouble when they can avoid it, or that they ever did, I 

 do not believe. Nor, in the authentic records upon which 

 this popular belief is largely founded, and in which it 

 was first put into words, can we find any facts calculated 

 to uphold it. 



On the contrary we see, plainly enough, that the white 

 pioneers, even before they had seen a grizzly, were pre- 

 pared to meet a dragon, and that, when they had peppered 

 a tough old bear or two with their pea-gun ammunition, 

 they found their expectations realized. That the Indians 

 regarded the grizzly as the king of brutes; that the tale 

 of his terribleness had passed into their folk-lore; that 

 "they never hunted them except in parties of six or more"; 

 that they gave greater honor to one of their young men 

 who had killed one unaided, than to him who took the 

 scalp of an enemy, all this we can well believe and 

 understand. And that the early explorers accepted the 

 Indian verdict and thought it upheld by their own ex- 

 periences is no less credible. For the grizzly bear, pur- 

 sued into his fastnesses and attacked with bows and ar- 

 rows, would be terrible indeed. And hostilely faced by 

 men armed with the muzzle-loading smooth-bores of 

 small calibre and still smaller penetration, he would be 

 an antagonist but slightly less formidable. These things 

 being so, it is scarcely to be wondered at that our prede- 

 cessors overlooked two salient features of their expert 



