Night of the Grizzlies

Up through the middle of the 20th century, as the frontier of the American West became more and more crowded with humans, the mighty grizzly bear population found its safe spaces dwindling to smaller and smaller enclaves. This led to increasing numbers of close encounters between people and the

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bears believed to be averse to human contact. Still, no one had ever been killed by a grizzly in the U.S. — until 1967, when two women were killed by two different grizzlies on the same night inside Glacier National Park in Montana. What provoked the bears to attack? And why did the National Park Service ignore a multitude of warnings all that summer that human-bear interactions were reaching dangerous levels?

Olsen tries to answer those questions with this account, though he comes up a bit short on final conclusions. And given that the book was first published in 1969, his pessimistic conclusion that the killings were the beginning of the end for the grizzly bear in North America proved to be premature. In fact, the population rebounded after being listed on the Endangered Species List in 1975 and has now recovered to the point where some of the restrictions on hunting and killing grizzlies are being lifted. By sheer coincidence, I heard a story about this very topic this morning on NPR: Grizzlies Have Recovered, Officials Say; Now Montanans Have to Get Along With Them.

Despite the ways in which Olsen's account is outdated, it's still worth reading for the descriptions of the beauty of Glacier NP and the magnificence of the grizzly bear. It's clear that Olsen, while not quite condoning the grizzly attacks (though it's clear he places the majority of the blame on the NPS), is on the side of Ursus horribilis when it comes to deserving a corner of the planet where they can live without human interference.

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