The Grizzly in the Southwest: Documentary of an Extinction by David E. Brown (review)

160 Western American Literature The Grizzly in the Southwest: Documentary of an Extinction. By David E. Brown. (Norman, Oklahoma: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1985. 274 pages, $19.95.) The grizzly in the Southwest is gone. Not just “threatened” or “endang­ ered,” as the big bear is in the rest of the lower 48, but—for all practical purposes—extinct. Suitable habitat remains. Yet the odds of Arizona, New Mexico or Colorado ever again seeing a wild grizzly are slim. So this useful work by David Brown comes to us as a historical study with implications for wildlife management. Brown pulls together a wide range of documents, early reports of federal trappers, interviews, anecdotes and historical photos which yield the most complete account assembled of the extermination of the grizzly in the Southwest. Among the most haunting of bear tales are Brown’s accounts of the hunters, men like Ben Lilly, skilled in the wilderness but without a vision of the future—the sad, familiar story of men who hastened the demise of the only life they knew. Brown uses insights from a background in wildlife management to point out that the primary predator in the Southwest was not the bear, but rather sheep and cattle who ate all the succulent grasseswhich constituted the bulk of the grizzly’s diet. By the time anyone questioned whether we should keep a few around, the grizzly was already on his way out in the Southwest. Brown sums up the mood of wildlife agents in the 1920s with this prophetic sentence : “His latter numbers appear to have been overestimated, and he was gone before anyone believed it.” This dangerous bureaucratic tendency is still prevalent today. Whatever misgivings I might have with The Grizzly in the Southwest arise from the moral tone left by the conventional wisdom of wildlife manage­ ment, a profession whose views Brown accurately reflects. After all, wildlife management in America is a business as much as a science, rooted in Christian dominion, male-dominated and still in the process of sorting out “good” animals from “bad” ones, with whose balance we endlessly tinker—hardly immune to the biases of culture. In an otherwise laudatory discussion on réintroduction of the grizzly, Brown divides the candidates into “wild bear” versus “park bear” and “manadapted bears” as opposed to “the wrong bears” categories, lumpings which are supported by no scientific data. This good bear/park bear dichotomy is derived from an assumption, never proven, often voiced by game managers, that hunting or otherwise harvesting and culling grizzlies makes them shier, more manageable, humbler and better animals. Fifty years ago we blew away the last grizzly here in Arizona because he didn’t conform to our idea of what a useful animal should be—one we could control without stretching our minds or changing our lives much. So what is new? DOUG PEACOCK Polebridge, MontanajCortaro, Arizona ...