144 EXTINCT AND VANISHING MAMMALS 



found them common, and in 1856 F. V. Hay den of the trans- 

 continental surveys collected specimens. Bailey quotes an old 

 resident that in 1867 there were many grizzlies in the river 

 bottoms about Fort Buford and farther west in Montana. 

 Old hunters told of killing grizzlies in the Killdeer Mountains 

 between 1864 and 1870. In the late eighties they were still 

 to be found in smaller numbers along the Little Missouri, but 

 they were constantly hunted down, so that "at the present 

 time there is certainly not a grizzly bear left in the State of 

 North Dakota, and it is doubtful if there is anywhere a living 

 representative of tnis original species of the grizzly group that 

 was first given a scientific name and status in literature . . . 

 Like some of the savage tribes with which it was associated, it 

 has in passing left behind a thrilling record of savage bravery 

 of surpassing interest to red-blooded Americans." 



In the middle of the last century grizzly bears were found in 

 some numbers in Nebraska and Kansas. Baird (1857) lists 

 specimens in the LTnited States National Museum from several 

 localities in the former State, and Hibbard (1933) notes that 

 in earlier years it was common in Kansas west of the Flint Hills. 

 It has long been extinct in these States and probably in Texas 

 as well, where, Vernon Bailey (1905) writes, "The only speci- 

 men of grizzly bear that I have seen or heard of from Texas 

 was killed in the Davis Mountains in October, 1890" and was 

 found to agree in all essential characters of the skull with the 

 so-called Sonoran grizzly. Merriam, however, made it the 

 type of a special subspecies, Ursus horriaeus texensis, in 1914, 

 later according it specific rank; he believed it identical with 

 bears from the adjacent mountains of southern Colorado, 

 a region where Gary (1911) found grizzlies rare in the wilder 

 parts over 30 years ago, though occasionally seen in the San 

 Juan, San Miguel, and La Plata Ranges. In northern Colo- 

 rado, according to the best information he could obtain, in 

 1905-6 it was already rare. Along the eastern slopes of the 

 Front Range, however, where grizzlies were still found in the 

 early seventies, they were by 1907 apparently quite gone. 

 He gives a number of recent records of the grizzly in the 

 southern mountains of Colorado up to 1907, and no doubt a 

 few still remain in the more inaccessible mountainous regions 

 of the central and western parts of the State, for a 1939 census 

 issued by the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service placed the 



