Alas, I cannot bring back the California Grizzly Bear, which was last sighted in 1924 and declared extinct shortly thereafter. It was hunted to extinction after the gold rush caused ’49ers to encroach on the bears’ habitat.
I do have a couple of stories about the bear that first graced the flag of the very short-lived independent California Republic. That happened in 1846 … and apparently California has been dependent ever since.
Bear baiting, where bears were put into fights against bulls, were a big spectacle in the California of the 1800s. Horace Greeley, a newspaperman of great accomplishment, saw one of these fights and observed that a bear fought with a downward swipe while a bull countered with a horn’s upward thrust. This caused Greeley, it was said, to coin the terms of bear & bull markets for Wall Street.
This wasn’t fake news (joke! It’s a joke!), but it wasn’t true. The popular term (OK, not so popular with most) for a bear market has a very different beginning, which you can read about in Merriam Webster’s article, here.
California has plenty of wild spaces where grizzlies could thrive, but efforts over the last few decades to move up to 500 grizzlies back into California have not been successful. You can draw your own conclusions about whether California is wild enough to support the mighty grizzly bear.
The bears that I make are all from Black Walnut, and measure 19″ from nose to tail. They stand about 9-1/2″ high.
These bears and everything else that I make in the Woodshop are now available on my new site, MrMsWoodshop.com. Special offers for this one-time-only launch month are free shipping for any order over $50, and 20% off everything, site-wide, when you use the promo code “MrMsLaunch.”
Here’s the link to go straight to the page for these California Bears.
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