The Bear Show

Your great grandmother didn't have to pull over and squint for a bear. She finished her supper, walked out to the seats, and the park brought the bear to her. It started by accident. By eighteen eighty eight, the talk went, the bears were coming down at night after the scraps from the hotel at Old Faithful, and somebody had to chain the swill barrel to a tree to keep them from carrying it off. In nineteen oh eight a traveler named Dumont Smith counted twenty four of them at sunset behind the geyser. When the Inn turned on its great searchlight, his party climbed up on the roof with a glass and watched the beam flash over them. Some of those bears paid it no mind and went on eating. Horace Albright is the man to keep your eye on. He ran Yellowstone, and he knew what the public wanted, and in nineteen nineteen he gave it to them. He set garbage dumps within walking distance of Old Faithful and Canyon. Every evening just before dark the bears came, and so did the people, hundreds of them, night after night. A wire stretched between posts marked the line. One ranger stood by with a rifle. Albright called it one of the most interesting features of the park, and by nineteen twenty five they'd built platforms for it. A stage, friend, for bears. Somebody put up a sign that read Lunch Counter for Bears Only. Along the roads they got bolder, and Albright kept his sense of humor. When a visitor came to him bitten, he'd explain that a bear bite was a unique souvenir to take home. One lady at Canyon fed a black bear all morning, teaching it to rear up for her, and when it dropped back down it tore the dress clean off her. She demanded the Park Service execute the bear. Everybody laughed. One wire and one rifle, and the whole country laughing. Then one evening at Old Faithful, in nineteen thirty six, a big black bear took after a little black bear, and the little one ran. Straight through the wire. Straight through the crowd, with the big one behind it. That, the way Aubrey Haines told it, closed the show at Old Faithful. They kept one going, at Otter Creek, a few miles on up this road near Canyon, until the summer of nineteen forty one. When that one shut, Horace Albright fought it. He'd moved on to bigger jobs by then, and the Service had moved on to a new idea, that a park ought to be left natural, and years later he was still protesting in print. It was his show. I don't think he ever understood what it was showing. Closing the seats didn't stop the trucks. They went on hauling the garbage out to the back country, out of sight, and the bears went on coming. A big dump sat in this valley, at Trout Creek. By the late nineteen sixties a good part of all the grizzlies in Yellowstone were living off that kind of supper. Eighty years of it, by then, going back to that swill barrel. Only the crowds had gone home. In nineteen seventy the park closed that last open pit, over the objections of the Craighead team, who knew grizzlies better than anybody, and those bears had to find out where a meal came from. There's a photograph from that last year, taken at Trout Creek. A grizzly up on his hind legs, and a garbage truck unloading in front of him. No wire. No rifle. No seats. Last act on the bill, playing to an empty house.