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He is furry, huggable, and cute; he is also big, wild and scary. He is the legendary California grizzly bear. There were about 10,000 grizzlies once living in California. The California grizzlies exemplified the "untamed" wilderness of the west. Because they were seen by the settlers as a dire threat to human existence and settlement, they were hunted and killed in large numbers. As a result, they are now extinct in California.
Among the first hunters in the Merced County area was Captain Joseph Walker. In the early days, the San Joaquin Valley was a hunter's paradise abundant with elk, antelope, deer, salmon, ducks, geese and grizzly bears. Capitan Walker and his hunting party came to California in 1834 and grizzly bears were one of their main games. They set foot in Merced County in 1854 and camped on the San Joaquin River in the vicinity of Santa Rita. For about two months, they would pair up and hunt all day. One day, while two of his men were in pursuit of a large group of elk, they ran into a nest of five grizzly bears. These experienced hunters successfully killed them all.
While Walker's men succeeded in adding the grizzlies to their take of the day, Merced County pioneer, Eleazer T. Givens, almost lost his life in a bear encounter. It was in the early morning of Oct. 11, 1850. Givens had wounded a grizzly and went back to the camp in Whitlock's Creek to get help. He returned with his friend, John W. Childs, and two other men, and found the wounded bear and her two cubs. They followed the bears for several hours until confronting them in a chaparral thicket, where Givens was badly bitten and lost about half of his scalp. The mother bear was killed by Childs, but her two cubs successfully escaped. This tragic encounter ended Givens' mining operation.
