Stuff You Should KnowGrizzly bears had never killed a person in Glacier National Park until the night of August 12, 1967. That's when everything changed for National Parks moving forward.
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Hey everybody, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff you Should Know. Let's go. How do you like that one?
I did? I'd also like his title that Livia gave this one. Yes, it's very fun. Can I read it?
Sure?
The Night that Transformed Bear human relations.
It's pretty straightforward and says everything you need to say.
Yeah, it's actually sadly very accurate.
Yeah. And yet despite it being that straightforward, there's a pretty interesting story hidden amid those letters.
Sounds like a crossword clue it does.
I feel like we should tell that story now or else? Really? What are we doing here? Chuck?
All right, well, I think this is one of those Unfortunately we can't just sort of play out as a teaser to reveal what happens. I think we kind of need to say what actually happened and then tell that story. Yeah, all right, did you want to tease this thing out?
No, and justult.
Because what we're talking about is a very sad night August of nineteen sixty seven when two young women, two nineteen year old women were killed by two and here's the kicker, two different bears in two different places in the same National park. If it was one bear that just went crazy or something and they were all camping together, that would be obviously tragic, but not like, Hey, we need to really look at what's going on here. And that's what happened, because it was two bears in two places.
Yeah, And the reason why it was such a kicker is because in the fifty seven years leading up to that that Glacier National Park was a national park, only three other people had ever been killed by grizzly bears. And then all of a sudden, it went from three people in fifty seven years to two women in two separate incidents in one night. That is crazy, and it really did kick off this a national conversation about should grizzly bears stay alive as a species because we like living in national parks? Do we have the right to do that kind of thing. It's a pretty interesting story. It's got a lot of facets to it. And I feel like we should talk a little bit about grizzly bears first, because I didn't realize that they were just a subspecies of brown bear, although that makes a lot of sense.
Yeah, grizzlies are brown bears. They are generally darker than brown bears in coloring. They're generally smaller. They can be you know, a couple hundred pounds up to about six hundred, but they And it's interesting here because I think it depends on where you live and here you ask. Like, usually brown bears are called brown bears. When they're more coastal, like the ones you see like grabbing that salmon out of the river, you would call a brown bear. I thought that was a grizzly, whereas if you live inland and you're a bear, a brown bear, you're called a grizzly. But then I also saw people talking about coastal grizzlies, so it may be one of those names is just sort of been tacked onto a lot of kind of brown bears.
Yeah, I think it's just, you know, it's confusing.
Yeah, but they're brown bears.
Yeah, they're brown bears, which makes them, you know, and they're relatively small brown bear. There's a type of brown bear called a kodiak that gets up to ten feet tall when it's standing on its hind legs.
No, thank you.
Grizzlies are not nearly that big, but they're still big enough. I mean, the males can get up to about six hundred pounds, and there used to be a lot more of them than there are today. The early nineteenth century, I think, I think around the time of Lewis and Clark there was an estimated fifty thousand to one hundred thousand grizzly bears. They went all the way from Canada down to Mexico. They were in every what's now states along the West, all the way over to the Great Plains. There was a ton of them. And then as we started to move out there, we meaning white American settlers and colonists. Part of what that whole West were expansion included was not just wiping out Native Americans, it was also wiping out large carnivores too.
Yeah, like when they talk about taming the West, that's what they mean. It's like, let's go out there and kill things. And they did this for a few reasons. Sometimes it was because they had cattle that they wanted to take care of, or you know, occasionally if they thought they were in harm's way, they might kill a bear. But a lot of it was just that sort of I was about to say human nature, but really man's nature, at least some men, not me or you, to want to kill big, beautiful animals because they're big and beautiful, and you know, I guess could be considered dangerous.
Yeah, you got to keep an eye on those people because they can very quickly become real like most dangerous game types.
Right, that's right.
So by the time nineteen sixty seven rules around, when the two nineteen year old women who died lost their lives, and I'll just go ahead and say their names are Julie Helgeson Man and Michelle Coon's. By the time they died in August of nineteen sixty seven, grizzly bears had been wiped out so thoroughly that they had a territory that was about two percent of what it had once been. Mostly they were in national parks because those were protected areas, and there was something like under a thousand of them in the entire continental United States.
Yeah, that's two percent is great when you're talking milk. It's not great when you're talking about animal populations.
Did you write that one down?
I didn't. It just gained.
I mean it still present.
Here's the weird thing, though, is, and it seems rather counterintuitive, there were there were more even though there were fewer bears, there were more human encounters with these bears for this very reason. And as we'll see, this is what part of what led to this huge mess. And it's really hard to if you're our age and maybe obviously younger. You don't realize that National parks weren't always these places where they really were smart about everything they did right, because at the time, they would do some crazy things in national parks. They would try and get bears around, they would leave food out, they would There was one story here that Livia found where and luckily a park ranger kind of stopped this in the act. But these parents brought a bear over with some food with a candy bar and then tried to put their eighteen month old on this bear's back to take a picture.
Yeah, there's a story in that same article about a guy who was trying to lure a bear into his car to get a photo of it behind the wheel. Yeah, just people interacting with giants. Again, six hundred pound grizzly bears. They can just take your head clean off if they want to. But that's the thing. They are really unpredictable, and for the most part, they're vegetarians. I think plants make up something like ninety percent of their diets, and a lot of times they're I don't want to say docile. But the eight month old baby survived, and so did the mom. And so did the dad. If that bear had acted any differently, they wouldn't have survived. So I saw that their personalities can best be summed up as unpredictable. But at the time in the sixties, that is not the impression people had of bears. They were kind of considered a lot more gentle. There was a park ranger who was quoted by Jack Olsen who will meet in a little while, who said that on a scale of a danger scale, where a butterfly is a zero and a rattlesnak is a ten, the grizzlies of Glacier Park would have to rate somewhere between zero and one. That is entirely wrong. He really should have said they rate between a zero and a ten. And you have no idea which what it's going to be at any given moment.
If you encounter a bear, yeah, and you know, like a lot of large animals like this, when there is a you know, their accident. So I'm gonna call it an accidental killing. Because bears weren't like, ooh, human, let me eat them, like you said. They're mostly vegetarian, and even when they ate stuff that was non vegetarian, it wasn't like oh boy, let me go chow down on that person. It was let me go chow down on that person's steak by the fire or the fish that they're cooking, or something like that. And so when there is an accident, it's usually one of a couple of things. It's either the sort of familiar scenario where you stumble upon a bear and scare them, or they may have their cubs around them. I be a mama with some cubs, or it is that bear that's like, wait a minute, that's my food. You're eating that fish out of that river. I want it, so let's go. Yeah.
Apparently they defend their food like it's like with the most jealous violence that they need to like, that is their food, even if it's your food.
Yeah, exactly, because that bear thinks it's their food because it's their territory. And the other thing that Livia was keen to point out, which is like it sounds sort of funny at first, but it really is a thing that you need to pay attention to, is the Yoga Bear cartoon was a big thing, and Yogi and Booboo as these sort of friendly bears going after the picanic basket that came about, because that's what it was like. It wasn't like someone said, I got this crazy idea, let's take these ferocious animals and make them a hand of Barbara and let's make them into a lovable cartoon character. It was like, No, that's when you went to these national parks. Like you said, people are luring bears around. They're like, ooh, take my picanic basket. If I can take a picture, pick a picture, pick a picture. Yeah, going to make that into a cla picnic thing. Anyway, That's how things were. So that's why they made that cartoon, and that was just sort of what was going on. Like they literally at Glacier at one Oh I'm sorry, this is at Yellowstone, but they were doing similar things in Glacier. At Yellowstone they put bleachers up around the open air dumps so people could show up and watch the bear show, which was bears wandering in to eat.
Yeah. So a lot of people rightfully lay a lot of the blame for the deaths in nineteen sixty seven at the feet of the administrators of national parks at the time, because they were using the bears as entertainment and at the very least even if they weren't in some of the parks, they were not instructing the public on how to interact with bears and just how dangerous bears were. And that was a huge problem because, like you said, people were treating them like they were just these docile, gentle animals that wouldn't do them any harm. And then the other factor that kind of gets overlooked is that this is right after the national highway system had really been developed and people were hitting the road. So these national parks were suddenly just swamped with tourists for the first time in their history. So people were there were far fewer bears, but there were a lot more people all up in the bear's grills than there ever had been in human history.
Yeah, and leading up to this specific incident, and we'll know, we'll detail a little bit more of this after I guess we'll take a break here in a couple of minutes. But at Glacier there were sort of in the days leading up, there were a lot of alarming incidences where bears were becoming way more aggressive or if you're watching a cartoon, way more friendly than they had been. There were fires that came through the park in the summer of sixty seven, so that shrank their habitat some and kind of squeezed them into a smaller area. And there was one bear in particular that had been reported a few different times. I went back, I'm sure you did too, and read this great original Sports Illustrated article. Who was it that wrote that?
Jack Olson?
Yeah, jack Olson is kind of the standard account of this horrific event. But this bear was an emaciated female who is underweight. Had been reported a lot going up to people being very brazen and you not like typically when you see a bear, if you ever watch these outdoor shows, you start yelling at the bear, like get out of here, and clanking a pot and the bear usually he's gonna leave. Bears are scared and they don't want to be around people. But this bear was not taking any orders and not doing any of the things that a bear would usually do. It would just come into a camp and start eating and not leave until they wanted to leave. This skinny lady bear right.
So we have in the Western National Park System a situation where bears have become acclimated to humans. They're totally fine with being really close to humans, kind of not scared of us. And then also they had become habituated on human food and garbage, and they now associated humans with food and they were no longer scared of humans. There were a huge population of bears in the western parks with lots of humans coming to see them.
All right, well, that sounds like a very natural place to stop, thanks and never come back, but we do. We have to tell this bad story, so we'll be back right after this, all right, So we're going to take this one horrible incident at a time, and we're going to start with the story of you mentioned earlier, Julie Helguson. Man, that is really hard. For some reason, it is I want to say a different word, but it's Julie Helgason. She was from Minnesota, and she was nineteen years old. Along with her friend that we're going to meet who also lost her life, Michelle Coons. They were both working summer jobs at Glacier. I imagine in the late sixties at Glacier it was probably pretty great. I mean, Glacier is an amazing place even today, but back then, I imagine it was a pretty awesome summer job to have.
Yeah, So I think Julie was working in the laundry facility and Michelle was working in a gift shop. And that makes the whole thing even more bizarre to me because they knew each other. They both set out on separate hikes on the afternoon of Saturday, August twelfth, nineteen sixty seven, and they knew each other well enough that Julie and her crew invited Michelle or no vice versa. Michelle and her crew of five other friends and a dog named Squirt invited Julie and her friend I'm getting boyfriend vibes, Roy duke It to join them. But Michelle and her group were going somewhere. I think they were going to Trout Lake, and Julie and Roy had been to Trout Lake the weekend before, so they wanted to go in a different hike to Granite Park. She La and they all set out, and these were experienced hikers. They knew what they were doing, and they were off to have a good weekend overnight camping trip out in the woods. In the back country is what they call it, but the back country is another word for wild territory.
That's right, I imagine they you know, we say they knew each other imagine it was a pretty tight knit group back then. There are many many more employees now at these national parks and there were back then, and you know these they were the same age, and they were teens working this like amazing summer job. So we're talking about Helgeson and du Kat at this point, they hitchhiked to the and if you've ever driven down this road, it's amazing. It's called going to the Sun road. The main roadways it is, but it's really great. Well it's really not because you don't actually go to the sun it we'd be going toward the Sun road would be what it should be called. But they went to spend the night at this chalet initially, but the chalet was full, and so back in the days where when you could be surprised by something like that, and when they got there, they they saw it was full and they said, all right, well we'll just go camp about five hundred yards away. We'll go camp in the woods sort of the immediate backcountry, and they ate dinner, they watched the sunset off that road, and they take it. They didn't have tents because they thought they were going to be the chalet. No, so they just bedded down in their sleeping bags on the ground outside.
I've seen sleeping bag. Oh, that's why I took it to possibly be her boyfriend.
But you could have zipped them together. That'll move.
There's one thing that yeah, I guess so I forgot you could do that. There's one thing we should say about the chalet Granite Park chalet that they hiked to and were camping near. That was the site of a purposeful feeding area that the managers of the chalet were throwing out food scraps to attract the bears for the entertainment of their guests. And just four days before this, some rangers had visited Granite Park chalet saw what they were doing and we're like, you can't do that, stop doing that, And the manager were like, sure, sure, we'll definitely stop doing that. So these guys are open air camping about five football fields away from that very shellet.
That's right. So after they're in their bags at night, just after midnight, a bear arrived, grizzly bear to their camping spot. And you know, some of this stuff has come out later in different forms, whether it was interviews with survivors after the fact, or that sports Illustrated story or them writing about it years later, and they've tried to piece it together as best they can. But I did see some of the details kind of varied here and there among the accounts. But what we do know is that Ducott said later on that Julie had seen the bear and woke him up and said, hey, there's a bear here. And from what I read in Sports Illustrated, it was about ten feet away, but it was definitely a bear, and so she's like played dead. The bear did not fall for that and began mauling Ducott got to his arms, his legs and his back and then left him alone and then dragged poor Julie Helgeson off.
Yeah, and so Ducott and there were other people camping nearby, and you know, the chalet was five football fields away, but there was probably help there. So they were screaming there, using their flashlights to flash sos and they managed to get the attention of some people who called for a helicopter, and they came and got Ducat and he said, well, don't forget Julie. She's out there somewhere. Apparently a ranger who would have been in charge of sending out the search party waited about two hours before he finally said, okay, let's go out and find her because he was concerned about putting other people's lives in danger, additional lives and danger searching for her because we might run into that bear and that I don't know if that caused her death. I mean, the bear caused her death, but that might have helped seal her fate. Two hours, Yeah, that was two hours they finally found her. This happened just after midnight. Remember. They finally found her and got her to the chalet at three forty five am, and she died at four to twelve am. She we had puncture wounds to her throat and lungs, but she probably had died largely of blood loss and it entered shock and that was it. So I don't you can't really say, yes, she definitely would have survived, but perhaps her chances of survival would have been higher had they gone out and searched for and founder a couple hours earlier.
Yeah, I think for sure. My initial reaction was to be, you know, like, what the heck with this ranger? But again, this is nineteen sixty seven, it was a different time. They didn't have the resources they do now they didn't. I'm sure now if there's any kind of bear situation, they A they know exactly what to do and exactly how to handle it, and B they have I would imagine they have all kinds of tranquilizers or just more guns and stuff to deal with this kind of thing that they didn't have back then. I mean, it sounded like if they would have gone after this bear, it might have been one park ranger who maybe had a pistol, maybe didn't, and then a bunch of other people with you know, baseball bats or something like. They weren't prepared. So I tried not to judge too harshly that this guy said, hey, let's wait, because they had never encountered something like this before.
And I think rightfully so, like people don't usually make decisions out of cowardice. It's normally there's some other line of thinking that in hindsight proved to be a bad decision. So that was the unfortunate death of Julie Helgeson. She was very terribly mauled and died of blood loss and wounds to her lungs and throat. Michelle Coons just hours later, essentially around the same time that Julie Helguson was dying in a makeshift operating room at the chalet, a bear was wandering up to Michelle and her her group's sleeping bags that they had set up around a campfire and a beach, because that same bear had already visited them all the way back at eight pm and caused them to split.
Yeah, yeah, that bear came up. This bear came back a few times. It was it was a very kind of one of those things. Again, in hindsight, you're like, they should have gotten out of there, but you know what kind of detail, all the reasons why they had gone fishing. They set up by this great lake, not capital great lake, but this amazing lake. No, right, they went fishing. They're one of the guys that was with them was just sixteen years old, like these were kids, you know. And he caught one fish. He caught a rainbow trout, augmented that meal with some hot dogs, grilled it up, and that grizzly, like you said, at eight pm, came wandering around and they took off. They watched this bear from a short distance eat that food and then grab one of their backpacks and take it away. And this is a point where like they could have gotten the heck out of there, but they were like, it's getting dark, we don't know what to do. This bear left. It got our food, so it's probably fine now, right. And also, if we're going to get out of here, we got to go through this berry bush field that are you know, that's tall berries or bears love those berries, so they're you know, that bear may be there, there may be may be more bears. So let's go down here to the beach area. Let's build a huge fire to try and help keep the bear away. And they built a log barricade between that fire and their old campsites and then line their sleeping bags up around this campfire. But very key here they did bring some food. They brought some cookies and some cheese its so to that new campsite.
So is that the idea that that that was what attracted the bear back again? The food, Yeah, the cheese its.
I mean it was food and thereafter food.
So okay, we should also say one other thing. As they were before they even reached Trout Lake in the afternoon, when they were on their hike to it, they passed some other hikers who said that they had been recently chased up a tree by a grizzly around that bear nuts to that we're gonna keep going, and that that same bear they believe. Also, it turned out actually they not even they didn't believe it, like it was that same troublesome bear that had been chasing girl scouts around and had had been a problem all summer because it was underfed and emaciated. And apparently that's a really good way for a bear to start acting and behaving very oddly and aggressively, is when it's underfed.
That's right. So this same bear that has been overly aggressive toward everybody it meets, it seems like, came back again after the eight o'clock visit, came back at three am in the middle of the night. One of them wakes up, sees that that fire is has basically died out, and he jumped up things. The guy who caught the trout jumped up to go start rebuilding this fire again really quickly, and apparently set those cookies down on that log barrier that they had between it and the old camp site. So now it's three am. They all decide the bear takes these cookies and goes away, and they all decide, listen, we're gonna stay awake for the rest of the night because now we're out here in the middle of the night, we're genuinely stuck, like we can't just hike off in the darkness, and so they decide to all stay awake together.
So, man, I would have been quite scared by this time. This is the second time the bear visited, right.
Yeah, eight o'clock PM, three am, constantly just taking this food.
And then now we get back to four thirty am when the bear returns a final time, and this time it just goes straight up aggressive. I don't know if it was because they ran out of food and the bear didn't like the fact that they didn't have any more food or what, but it bit one of the guys sleeping bags. It clowted his sweatshirt. So now we get back to four thirty am when that bear returns a final time, and I don't know if it was because they had run out of food and the bear didn't like that very much, but it became more aggressive than the other times, and it actually started attacking the kids in this camping group. One of them had its sleeping bag bitten, which if a bear's attacking you and it bites your sleeping bag, that's kind of best case scenario. Clawed his sweatshirt, and I think there was other bear encounters in this event.
Right, Yeah, so that was Paul Donne. He starts screaming, He runs away and climbs a tree. This bear is chasing him. He runs away and he climbs a tree. This kid's sixteen, So he's up this tree in a matter of seconds. Apparently he did get all cut up in stuff though, because he didn't have a shirt on and he was, you know, climbing like a person scared of a bear. Sure, so he gets up in this tree, and from up in this tree, he looks down and this bear is sort of circling below him. His friends are at the camp. They have obviously woken up at this point, and they see the bear circling the tree, so that they use that as their opportunity to get away. They grab that dog first of all, Squirt, And yeah, they grab Squirt when this thing first started happening. They grabbed it and put it inside the sleeping bag and literally like had their hand over this dog's poor dog's mouth like to try and play dead. But so they finally get away as well. They run away while this bear is circling the tree below Paul Dunn and except for one person, and that was Michelle Coons. She they hear there, literally, you know, thirty forty feet away from this bear and their friend, and they hear her screaming. They're like, you know, get out of there, get out of there. They hear her yell, I can't he's got the zipper. They hear her yell, he's ripping my arm. He's got my arm. My arm is gone. And then they finally hear her yell, oh my god, I'm dead, and this bear carries her off in the sleeping bag, still right right in front of them.
Yeah, so they are. They have no trouble staying awake for the rest of the night. At this point. They couple hours later, the sun came up, and after it did and they saw that the bear was gone, they took off for help. Right.
Yeah, that was a you know, in these parks, I'm sure they still have stuff like this, said what's called seasonal rangers that were maybe just there for the summer. And there was a guy named Bert Gildart, and he said at six thirty in the morning, he was at West Glacier at this point in his little apartment, he got a knock from another ranger named Norm Hagen, and Guildhart was the one who knew about that previous killing earlier in the night. And I'm not sure how, but somehow he managed to go back to sleep, and he's the one that got the emergency responders there. Hagen shows up and says that there's a young woman who is mauled at Trout Lake. And he was like, no, no, no, you're confused. This was over at the chalet. And then as you know, this Hagen guy keeps going, it dawns on him, like, my god, what has happened. This has happened twice in a matter of hours.
Yeah, So he very quickly out of himself over to Trout Lake. I read that he essentially ran four miles from the trailhead to the lake and there was another ranger already there named Leonard Landa and two other men arrived by helicopter and they formed a little search party, and very quickly Leonard Landa discovered Michelle Kuhon's body. And you had said earlier that like grizzly bears just generally don't see humans as prey or as food, and one of the things that makes them so unpredictable is they'll do that sometimes sometimes they do see us as prey and food. Like sometimes they'll attack one person in a party see them as food, and then attack the other people that defend that first person that they see as food. And that seemed to be the case also with Michelle Coons, because when her body was discovered, the bear had begun eating it. And another dead giveaway usually is that the bear will eat some and then go essentially bury the body under some like dirt and twigs and stuff like that, and then sit around and protect it. And I don't know if I don't think they found the bear around her body. They just found her body, but yeah, but she had been essentially partially eaten.
Man, all right, I feel like we should take another break. That is the sad story of what happened that night, and we're going to talk a little bit about the aftermath of what happened right after this.
Okay, So that was a big deal, not just in Glacier. That stuff made it out very quickly and one of the first responses among park officials was to go find these bears that did this, and not only that, we might have a problem with any bear that eats human food. So Gilder and Landa formed like basically a death squad looking for bears, especially the one who killed Michelle Kuons, and they were basically instructed to shoot any bear that didn't run away from him. And the first day they didn't find any bears. They stayed overnight at a patrol cabin at a place called Arrow Lake, and when Gildert went out to use the bathroom the next morning, he saw a bear and he called for Landa to bring out the rifles, and Landa did, and as they were standing there, giving the bear chance right, because none of these people wanted to kill bears, there wasn't like vengeance necessarily, and even if there was, I think actually that's not true. I think Gildert had a sense of vengeance and then eventually kind of had a change of heart. But some of the other rangers were not happy about this job of killing bears. And even if they, however they felt about it, you were supposed to still kind of give the bear a chance. If the bear took a step towards you, that was a dead bear. If it ran away from you, that bear could live to you know, be examined. Another day, this bear started coming toward them, so they had to kill it.
That's right. And this was the bear. The bear was seventeen years old. The bear was under three hundred pounds. And I know we said their range can be a couple of hundred and up, but I get the idea that this was a larger bear that was under three hundred pounds and like clearly underfed and emaciated. They opened this bear's stomach jaws movie style and found some a big ball of blonde hair undigested inside the bear, and also found this which and this is is all. It's a tragedy for these humans. It's a tragedy for these bears because they had been you know, fed human trash for so long, and we're used to people. It's not their fault. But they found glass embedded in the molars of this bear. So this bear had been eating glass food that was probably in glass from trash and made it difficult for this bear to eat. Probably probably made the bear very uncomfortable and grumpy, and that probably all contributed to what happened to Michelle Kuhon's.
Yeah, I think it's really important to remember that none of this was the bear's fault. The bears were acting like bears, and they were being essentially mistreated by humans in the park administrators by allowing them to get habituated human food, because it was destined. This was destined to happen essentially the way that people were behaving in the parks. So they had definitively the bear that killed Michelle Kuhon's. I mean, they didn't test the hair or anything like that, but it was just her. Yeah, they were still looking for Julie Helgeson's bear, and they actually never offinitively identified it. But another ranger named Dave Shay, who was among a group of four who shot a bear and her cubs that were feeding at the Chalet garbage pit, he was convinced that that was the one that killed Helgeson because that bear had blood on her claws, and I don't believe Julie Helguson had any feeding done to her, So it's not like that could have been an innocent bear that just came along and was like, oh, I'm going to have a bite of this but didn't kill her. It was almost certainly the bear that killed her. And even if it wasn't, there an orgy of grizzly bear death fell over Glacier and Yellowstone and the other national parks that had grizzly bears in the ensuing weeks, months and years after the Night of the Grizzlies.
Absolutely, like you said, the media got hold of this and all of of course, all of a sudden, everyone once got an opinion. Everyone thinks that they know exactly why this happened. Some people were like, well, there were thunderstorms and lightning nearby that could have agitated them. The idea that bears are attracted to minstrual blood was brought up. I think they now say that that's maybe true with polar bears.
Only well, they've never experimented with They experimented with polar bears. Polar bears showed a preference for that and like seal blood or something, and then they've never experimented like that with grizzlies. But somebody that did like a once over of grizzly attacks and didn't find any pattern necessary. So we don't know experimentally, but we do know anecdotally that's probably not true.
Right, But at any rate, that doesn't keep the media from reporting something like this, sure, and then showing up in Anchorman as a joke years later. But you know, it was coincidence. There was never any like link between these two. It was just a really bad coincidence, a horrific example of bad human luck that night between these two young women. Jack Olson wrote that story, the Sports Illustrated Story, which is a really fun read parts and three separate issues that you also get the benefit of. The ads of nineteen sixty seven in a magazine Whi's always fun. I'm sorry. This is nineteen sixty nine when it finally.
Came in, right, the Summer of Love, right, that's.
Right, one of them. This was when everything started to change. People started. There was a biologist name Gardner Moment who said, you know what we should And it's interesting that this was a biologist, but this guy came out and was like, hey, you know what, we need to finish what our forefathers started, and we need to make them extinct in the United States. And not only that, but the common rat in the fire ant, some kinds of sharks that seats fly this guy was like, let's wipe out anything that bothers humans or is a potential threat to humans.
If a biologist can be a hack, Gardner Moment was a hack biologist. Agree, that's just a terrible idea, and it's not like that was just like the zeitgeist. People arguing it, like Gardner Moment introduced it to the zeitgeist, or at least kind of stoked any existing feelings in the public. And so now all of a sudden there was like a push to get rid of grizzly bears because they wouldn't behave around the humans that had invaded their areas.
Yeah, luckily that didn't happen, right. I think there were more people, or I don't know about more, but there were people beating the drum on the other side of like, no, this is not something we should do, and they went out.
Yeah, real biologists, grizzly biologists. They're known as the father of grizzly Fathers of grizzly biology. They were twin brothers, Frank and John Craighead, and they became the Philischaffley of the movement to eradicate bears. They just almost single handedly gotten the way of that and managed to swing public sentiment back toward conservation. And it was a real that was a real accomplishment because when Jack Olsen wrote Knight of the Grizzlies, which by the way, there it was called the Grizzly Bear murder Case in Sports Illustrated.
Right, Oh wow, I'm.
Glad they switched it. When he wrote the actual book in nineteen sixty nine, he was a disinterested observer, he was a reporter, but he concluded like that was the fate of the Grizzlies. They were goners, Like the public had turned against them so much that it was all but already done. So the Craighead brothers managing to turn public sentiment like that was a big deal. And they did it by saying, like, there's just a few common sense things we need to do, and if we do them, you're going to basically get rid of human bear interactions or deaths by grizzly bear.
Yeah. And they actually had research. They weren't just saying, you know, this is what we think. They had a full decade of human grizzly interaction and they could point to actual stuff and say no, no, no, this is what we have found. And they cited this research. And this is a great quote. I think it was John that said, you know, getting rid of all these bears, he said, would be as tragic as the leveling of Yellowstone Canyon because somebody fatally fell from its brink. Yeah, like, you don't go knocking down the mountain because someone fell off of it, And you don't go killing all the grizzlies because they killed somebody.
Jack Kerouac said, you can't fall off a mountain. Did he really, Yeah, it was in the Dharma Bums.
I read that one. It's been a while.
So the common sense stuff that they pointed out, where like keep humans out of some parts of the park. It's like, sorry, this is bear territory. Just leave it to the bears. Don't go back there, it's too dangerous for you. Step one, at least another is just like actually monitor bears, like start tracking the bears in the park, know them, get to know who they are, and then also like when they're moving around, you should probably have a good idea of where they are and win and who's around them. And basically just teach the public that Yogi bear is fictitious, not a real bear. He lives in Jellystone you're in Yellowstone. Big difference, right, And if they do that, but also teach the public like, yes, they're a risk. You're at greater risk outboating on one of the lakes. But they are still a risk, so treat them as such. They're a wild animal. But yes, go see them and take in their majesty, but from afar like that would definitely reduce encounters and thus the chances of bears killing humans.
Yeah, and if you've been to a national park at all in the last well, since this really then what you see are bearproof garbage cans. I actually bought these for my camp. I have bearproof stuff at my camp. Bearproof garbage cans. You're going to see where you're cooking area should not be where you sleep. You're going to see these cables strung between trees or you're encouraged and they teach you how to do it yourself. So you hang up your food high off the ground, suspended between trees at night. You can't just loop it over a branch because they'll climb up that tree. You gotta suspend it to pain in the butt, but you got to do it. And you know this stuff now you can't go to a national park or go back country camping without seeing signs and just knowing everything that we know now has all been in place literally because of this night that all came out of this, that you shouldn't have food around your camp, You cannot entice bears. Don't get that candy bar near your windshield, Like this is not how we should be treating bears.
Yeah, and I think also a general idea that your bad behavior might not result in your death, but you're increasing the chances that it could kill someone else. So there was a collective responsibility that was put upon visitors to the park too, and I think that was super helpful. Yeah, like we said, there was a this changeover wasn't just without fault. Apparently Yellowstone was just they just shut down the garbage dumps like they were like no more garbage for bears. Smart, I mean what you would do in response to something like the Night of the Grizzlies. But the Craighead brothers had said, like, don't do that, Like, yes, shut them down, but do it gradually and start supplementing their food that you're taking away from them with actual food of theirs, like elk or something like that, and they didn't do that, and as a result, the bears were now made more appearances at campgrounds looking for food because the dumps have been shut down, and it ended up in more bare deaths and the death of a camper in nineteen seventy two.
Yeah, I mean it's basically saying it's basically like having a food store for a wild animal that they know is always open, and then they just shut that food store down all of a sudden. The bear doesn't know that they're going to keep coming back there. They're going to be confused. It will take them a long time to learn that there's not food there to go elsewhere, which is why the Craighead said to do it gradually. It makes sense, but just rash decisions were made, Like you said, in seventy two, another camper was killed. This was an illegal campsite I think, and you know had left their food out, so that's what happened. They still killed a lot of bears. I think one hundred and eighty nine bears were killed between sixty eight and seventy three, and by nineteen seventy five, between those killings and then the lack of food, there were only one hundred and thirty six grizzlies left in Yellowstone, prompting them to be placed on the Endangered Species list and covered by the Endangered Species Act. They've made a very nice recovery such I believe they have six recovery zones starting in the early nineties, one of which was in Glacier and one around Yellowstone where they you know, were trying to have reintroduced these bears. And now they are up to a couple of thousand I think in the US.
Yeah, yeah, I think nearly two thousand.
Yeah. I mean such that there are people now that are saying, like, hey, we should let people hunt bear again in the US.
Yeah, yeah, which is a great idea. Do it. Of course, we should really get that instinct of killing a large trophy animal for bragging rights back as soon as we possibly can.
That's sarcasm.
Yeah, And so that didn't do a way like it's not the end of bear killings among humans, like it does happen. Actually, twenty twenty three has seen four different deaths from three different bear attacks just this year alone in I think national parks in the United States. That's pretty significant because it is really really rare despite you know, events like that. The National Park Service estimates that if you visit a national park you have a one in two point seven million visits chance of being injured, not killed, injured by a bear. But if you stay in the developed areas like the roads and everything and don't go into back country, you have a one in thirty nine point six million chance of being injured by a bear. But it it cuts both ways because if you do go back country camping overnight, you have a one in five hundred and fifty four thousand overnight visits chance of being injured by a bear. So it really depends on where you go and what you do, and if you put yourself out there in bear country, you have to come prepared.
Yeah, I've done. I mean, you know, we've got my little black bears at my camp that I've caught them my camp camp. But these are the you know, the little guys in Georgia and they No one has literally ever been killed by a bear in Georgia. But I've done a lot of camping in back country, camping out west over the years, and I never saw a bear. You know, it's if you're smart, It doesn't mean it can't happen, but like you said, the chances are very remote, but you got to be smart. You got to do the right thing with your food and your trash, be good steward of the land. Back in the late sixties, it was I think at one point Olivia said that they were starting to clean up a little bit then, and they got three helicopters worth of trash just out of this one area of glacier. People. This is the time when people just go back country camping, not everyone probably, and just leave their stuff another yeah, and just leave their garbage. And it's a Thankfully, we've come a long way since then, and even though that still happens, I guarantee you every time there's a bear incident in the United States, it is highly scrutinized and studied, and they're still trying to learn from it.
Yep, you got anything else?
I got nothing else?
All right, Well, if you want to know more about bear attacks, go familiarize yourself, especially if you're going to a national park. And since I said that, it's time for a listener mail, I'm gonna call this.
One Hammond clock. Remember we talked about the Lawrence Hammond episode. He made those clocks.
Oh yeah, the tickless clock.
Yeah, Tim and Sarah have one and it's beautiful. Hey, guys, listening to the Lawrence Hammond episode and had to write in. My wife's parents owned a Delhi in Brooklyn and had a Hammond electric clock hanging up for many years. When they passed on, the clock came to our possession not in the greatest shape. I was able to clean it up and discovered that it also had low voltage light bulbs on the inside. It took some time to find them, but I got that working too. My wife never knew that the face lit up all those years. That's super cool.
Yes.
During my online searches for bulbs, I had read about the uniqueness of the Hammon electric clock. One thing he did differently from all the other electric clock manufacturers at that time was his clock requires a restart when the power goes out and comes back on. The other people's clocks start right back up automatically, And Hammond designed it the way on purpose. And I agree one hundred percent with the design decision. We know exactly what time the power went out. Think about it. Even if the clock automatically restarts after a power outage, you still have to adjust the time. Anyway, the man really did have an analytical mind and thought of just about everything. And I think I agree Tim. That is from Tim and Sarah.
Nice Tim and Sarah, thank you very much. So it was a great email. I guess they send a picture of the clock all lit up.
They sent a picture later because I was like, why didn't you send a picture?
Oh, I want to see it. Did they send it to both of us?
I'm not sure, but if not, I'll afford it to you.
That's very kind of you. And that was Sarah and Sarah and Tim. Yes, thank you guys again. And if you want to be like Tim and Sarah, you can send us an email too. Send it off to stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
