ZOOLOGY. 
49 
dropped his hag and ran. When afterwards he returned, having gained courage and assistance, 
as might have been anticipated, the sack was empty. 
The track of the hind foot of the grizzly hear is very like that made by the foot of a negro ; 
one of the thousand things which give the bear a kind of human character. His attitudes and 
motions, his arm-like use of the fore leg, his fun and malice, and, if we may believe the hunters, 
his festive games, wrestling matches and dances, are very human. 
URSUS AMERICANUS. 
Black Bear; Cinnamon Bear. 
Ursus americanus, Baird, Gen. Rep. Mammals, 1857, 225, 228. 
The black hear inhabits all portions of Washington and Oregon Territories, extending its 
range into California only near the coast. Near Fort Jones it has been occasionally killed, hut 
south of that point it is replaced by the grizzly. In passing from California to Oregon, by way 
of the Klamath lakes, we found no traces of it till we reached the headwaters of the Des 
Chutes river ; there we saw no grizzly “sign,” but the black bear was evidently very abundant. 
Several were seen by the members of our party, hut they were very shy, and none were killed. 
The light volcanic soil, composed of disintegrated pumice, of the region bordering the main fork 
of the Des Chutes, as it issues from the Cascade mountains, sustains little vegetation except the 
yellow and spruce pines, ( P. brachyptera and P. contorta ,) and receives and retains the impress 
of the feet of passing animals with almost the fidelity of snow. On this surface, therefore, we 
had an authentic record of the fauna of the region. The elk, the mule, the white-tailed deer, 
the antelope, the badger, the red fox, the coyote and large gray wolf, Townsend’s hare, the 
artemisia hare, all had ther6 made their marks—even the striped squirrels, Spermophilus 
lateralis and Tamias toiunsendii, had recorded their visits to the bushes of red gooseberry and 
ceanothus, which furnish them with food. Among these hieroglyphics, by far the most con¬ 
spicuous, and perhaps most numerous, were those in which the black bear had told us of 
his various wanderings. His tracks, deeply sunk in the yielding surface, resembled those of 
a horse, only set more closely together; and during the interval that had elapsed since winter’s 
rains and snows had obliterated all former records, the hear had passed and repassed so fre¬ 
quently that the ground in some localities was tracked up like a barn yard. 
The subsistence of the hears of the region I have described is evidently, for the most part, 
vegetable. The manzanita, ( Arbutus laurifolia,) the wild plum and cherry, which fruit profusely 
and are very low, and especially the whortleberry, which covers whole hill-sides in the Cascade 
mountains, furnishing an unheard of quantity of large and fine fruit; all these assist in making 
up their hill of fare. Rarely, too, we saw trees of the yellow pine bearing marks of bears’ teeth, 
where they had torn off the hark to get at the succulent inner layer, whicli is capable of sustain¬ 
ing life, and to which the Indians very generally have recourse when pressed by hunger. I 
have known the black hear of the eastern States strip off the bark of the hemlock spruce 
( A. canadensis ) for the same purpose. 
The brown or cinnamon hear, generally regarded by naturalists as a variety of the black 
species, inhabits the same territory and shares the habits and the food of the black bear. 
I made every effort to secure good specimens of the brown bear in order to settle the question of 
its relations, for the hunters and Indians whom I consulted generally regarded them as distinct, 
but I could only obtain the prepared skins. Lieutenant Crook, United States army, a thorough 
sportsman and a careful and accurate observer, tells me that he killed a brown bear in Scott’s 
valley, California, in a tree , engaged in tearing off a branch from which a hornet's nest was sus- 
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