For 22 years, Monarch — the last California grizzly bear in captivity — never stopped trying to escape from his cage. He had been snared in the San Gabriel Mountains and shipped to San Francisco for the entertainment of the moneyed magnates, robber barons, and kings of capitalism atop Nob Hill. He wanted out.
Lately, I can better imagine the same wildness that the bear may have felt, with my feet pacing my now too-familiar floors of my apartment, the days and weeks having passed with irrelevant chronology. A long footnote in an already difficult year.
Monarch’s face is the one on the California state flag, the Bear Flag. I’ve seen it a lot recently, behind each announcement from the Office of the Governor about an ongoing pandemic. It’s a face I had grown accustomed to pledging allegiance to every morning at school. I’d never wondered if he was once alive and real until recently, now that I often have time for such thoughts and need a distraction to steady myself since the news makes me feel like the world is dropping away from my feet.
It’s hard to imagine the wildness that once existed on the land we now call San Francisco. This was once a peninsula thriving with antelope, bears, bison, jaguars, and Indigenous people coexisting since the end of the last Ice Age.
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The city had been a barren seaside desert tufted with dune grass. Then, in the late 1700s, came the Misión de San Francisco de Asis — Mission Dolores — that house of pain where the Spaniards held their blood sports: goading bulls to gore chained grizzly bears and burying more than 5,000 Ohlone native people in unmarked graves.
At the time, many Californios owned the land beneath their ranches and hunted wild game as the new alpha predators. More than 10,000 California grizzly bears roamed freely; each of the black-haired beasts provided nearly a ton of meat for vaqueros and rancheros, and the fierce omnivores quickly became trophy kills.
By the 1840s, before and after the Gold Rush kicked off, California became a place where dreams came true for newcomers.
A bear republic in the new world
By 1846, Alta California — now known as Northern California — was controlled by Mexico and home to hundreds of Mexican families, but more American and European settlers arrived every day. In turn, tensions grew, with both sides suspicious of each other’s intentions.
Whispers of a revolt took place. Over in Texas, the United States was already at war with Mexico. In June 1846, William B. Ide led a group of 30 Americans to invade a Mexican outpost in Sonoma, taking retired Mexican general Mariano Vallejo as a prisoner of war. It was less intense than you’re imagining; no guns were fired, and they simply had a few brandies with the guy before accepting his surrender.
Afterward, Ide declared California an independent and sovereign republic. The group of (drunk) men crafted a homemade flag from odds and ends, made from a cotton sheet and, likely, blackberry juice since paint was hard to come by. It included a drawing of a bear, a lone star, and the words “California Republic” at the bottom. From then on, the independence revolution was known as the Bear Flag Revolt.
History seems to debate who created this original flag. Some say it was “bear flagger” Peter Storm, an artist from Norway, while others claim it was William Todd, nephew of future first lady Mary Todd Lincoln. In an 1878 letter to the Los Angeles Express, Todd states that the bear was designed to be a symbol of strength and unyielding resistance.
The bear flag lasted for only 25 days. During that time, the Californios celebrated and a barely hung over William B. Ide drafted a proclamation of independence that now sits at Sutter’s Fort State Park in downtown Sacramento. He couldn’t decide whether the event had taken place on June 14 or June 15. On July 7, Captain John C. Fremont arrived at Portsmouth Plaza in downtown San Francisco, then the central hub of Yerba Buena, and raised the American flag, signifying the official start of the U.S. military occupation of the protectorate of California.
In 1848, the first nugget of gold was discovered, and the population exploded. More than 80,000 people moved to the town of San Francisco, then home to only a couple hundred people.
California entered the union in 1850. The original Bear Flag was given to the Society of California Pioneers for safekeeping and was later destroyed in the fires following the great San Francisco earthquake on April 18, 1906. (A replica is now displayed at El Presidio de Sonoma.)
The real Grizzly Adams
James Capen “Grizzly” Adams arrived in San Francisco in 1856 with a splash: debuting the Mountain Menagerie (143 Clay Street), a private collection of wild animals he had captured and trained. This collection included a large female California grizzly bear named Lady Washington — whom he had captured in 1854, along with two male cubs, while visiting the Miwok Tribe in Yosemite. One of the male cubs was named Benjamin Franklin and was so famous that when the bear died, he was given his own obituary as a “Distinguished Native Californian.”
It’s difficult to imagine how, for 25 cents, you could see this bizarre man with a dented skull, dressed head to toe in buckskins, wrestle with live, fully grown bears in downtown San Francisco — but that is exactly the scene at the Mountain Menagerie that Theodore H. Hittell described in his 1860 book, Adventures of James Capen Adams, Mountaineer and Grizzly Bear Hunter of California:
In the midst of this strange menagerie was Adams, the proprietor — quite as strange as any of his animals. He was a man a little over medium size, muscular and wiry, with sharp features and penetrating eyes. He was apparently about fifty years of age; but his hair was very gray and his beard very white. He was dressed in a coat and pantaloons of buckskin, fringed at the edges and along the seams of arms and legs. On his head he wore a cap of deerskin, ornamented with a fox-tail, and on his feet buckskin moccasins.
As California’s most famous bear hunter, Adams discussed the difficulty of bringing down a bear, claiming his approach was to shoot it with a rifle, then empty his Navy Colt revolver into the animal as it charged him, and finally, if the animal still didn’t go down, slit its throat with a bowie knife. Gruesome. An entire industry of “bear rifles” were made just to kill grizzlies.
Over the next decade, California grizzly bears would all but disappear from the state.
A monarch among kings of industry
In 1887, media mogul William Randolph Hearst was 23 years old with a lot to prove. His father, U.S. Senator George Hearst, had just handed him the San Francisco Examiner as payment for a poker debt. Hearst Jr.’s first business decision was to add a new motto — “Monarch of the Dailies” — which surely annoyed his neighbors, the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Call.
In an even greater marketing ploy, he came up with a wild publicity stunt in May 1889: capture a live California grizzly bear. He commissioned Allen Kelly, a writer and outdoorsman with no bear hunting experience. At first, Hearst reportedly toyed with the idea of simply buying a bear and faking the headlines — the problem was that California grizzly bears were regionally extinct in the San Francisco Bay Area. But Kelly insisted on capturing a bear for real, come hell or high water.
It took several months — and getting fired by Hearst via wire — but in October 1889, Kelly received a lead about a male bear trapped on Mount Gleason, near the Sunland-Tujunga neighborhood of Los Angeles, and headed there with his burro. There, he met a Mexican syndicate named Mateo who was desperate to get the bear off his hands.
Monarch the bear proved to be fierce and determined, biting and tearing at the logs used in the trap and gnawing at his iron chains to the point of breaking several teeth and leaving a trail of frothing blood.
Monarch refused to eat for a week and was interested only in tugging against his chains in an attempt to free himself. The bear proved to be smart and regularly challenged his captors in trying to force him to step into loops so he could be transported for the four-day trip down the mountain and the train ride to San Francisco.
Even so, Kelly sympathized with the animal:
Many of my prejudices and all my story-book notions about the behavior of the carnivore were discredited by experience, and I was forced to recognize the plain truth that the only mischievous animal, the only creature meditating and planning evil on that mountain — excepting of course the evil incident of the procurement of food — was a man with a gun. I was the only really dangerous and unnecessarily destructive animal in the woods, and all the rest were afraid of me.
By the time Monarch arrived in San Francisco, he was silent and despondent. Hearst offered the bear to Golden Gate Park, but it declined. Monarch’s grand debut on November 10, 1889, took place in front of more than 20,000 visitors within the bear pit at Woodward’s Gardens, a park located in the Mission District.
Kelly wrote that Monarch spent three or four years in a steel cell before he was transferred to Golden Gate Park and “devoted a week or so trying to get out and testing every bar and joint of his prison, and when he realized that his strength was over-matched, he broke down and sobbed.”
While in his cell, Monarch aggressively guarded the shavings used as a bed and showed interest only when a live animal was placed in his pit for food. He dug, scaled, climbed, and jumped over every cage designed for him. So Hearst hired Willis Polk, that famed architect who designed the former Flood Mansion cum Pacific Union Club, to create an impossible prison that Monarch could not escape. He gave up.
Barely anyone visited Monarch: San Francisco was busy shedding its Wild West past as it grew into a sophisticated and cosmopolitan city. This changed for a brief moment when Monarch was seen as the protector of the city following the great earthquake and fire in 1906. One of the few who visited, Herbert Fleishhack, would be so inspired by Monarch that he would begin building San Francisco’s first proper zoo in 1929.
Kelly felt remorse for his part in Monarch’s imprisonment. “He is independent and militant,” he wrote. “He will fight anything… and permit no man to handle him… Apparently he has no illusions concerning man and no respect for him as a superior being. He has been beaten by superior cunning, but never conquered, and he gives no parole to refrain from renewing the contest when the opportunity offers.”
After delivering Monarch to San Francisco, Kelly left for Yosemite National Park, which was established in 1890, to work as a state forester. “Yosemite” is Miwok for “grizzly bear.”
Monarch was given a Rocky Mountain grizzly bear as a mate, and they sired two cubs. He lived out the rest of his 22-year sentence at Golden Gate Park in a bear pit on Monarch Bear Hill, watching the wolf-gray fog blanket the groves of newly planted trees, stitching together the greenery carved from the impenetrable wasteland.
In 1911, the arthritic bear was euthanized and his remains given to Joseph Grinnell, director and co-founder of the University of California’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology in Berkeley. Grinell taxidermied Monarch’s remains and gifted the stuffed bear to the California Academy of Sciences.
The year of his death, the Bear Flag was officially adopted and updated with Monarch’s image. Then, 30 years after the last California grizzly bear was shot and killed in Sequoia National Park and the last of the Yelamu Ohlone people passed away — taking the last remnants of the Old World with them — an artist in Marin County named Donald Graeme Kelly illustrated the modified design for the official California state flag based on Nahl’s watercolor illustrations of “Grizzly” Adams’ beloved bears — Lady Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and General Fremont — and Governor Earl Warren approved it.
The Bear Flag has remained unchanged since that time in 1911. It’s the one now draped like a curtain behind every televised press event from the capitol building and in every Californian school. It features a maple sugar and seal brown–colored California grizzly bear with the lone star, tongue, and bottom stripe a deep brick red called “Old Glory,” recalling the old battles and blood sports that founded our Golden State, with a new addition: Irish-green grass — the return of nature, something wild, something beyond the reach of human scale.
