Grizzly Bear

Hard to Die:

The Grizzly Bear in Montana's History

The Bear on the Missouri

In the spring of 1805, the Corps of Discovery poled and towed its boats up the Missouri River through what is now eastern Montana, and the men began meeting an animal they had heard described but had not yet faced. The journals record the encounters in plain terms. On May 6, Meriwether Lewis noted that the party's curiosity about the animal was largely satisfied. He gave two reasons: the formidable size of the male bear killed the previous day, and the difficulty of killing such a bear even when it was shot through vital organs. Some of the men, he added, were still eager to hunt it (Townsend, "May 6, 1805").

Five days later, Private William Bratton shot a bear that turned on him and chased him a considerable distance. Lewis concluded that he "had reather fight two Indians than one bear" (Townsend, "May 11, 1805"). These passages are useful as testimony to what an educated observer of the early nineteenth century concluded after a few weeks of contact. The grizzly was an animal that did not die quickly and did not necessarily retreat from the men who wounded it.

When the expedition crossed Montana, the grizzly was a widespread species of the region. Over the next two centuries its range contracted sharply, and its recent history in Montana is largely a history of human decisions: how many bears were killed, how they were fed, and whether they were protected.

The Long Contraction

The grizzly's range once extended well beyond the Rockies. An Associated Press summary of federal estimates states that as many as 50,000 grizzlies once lived in the western half of the United States and that most were exterminated early in the twentieth century by overhunting and trapping (Brown).

A 2002 study in the journal Conservation Biology examined how grizzly range changed between 1850 and 1970. Mattson and Merrill found that bears persisted longest in the Rocky Mountains and in whitebark pine country, and that their disappearance was associated with larger numbers of people. They speculated that the link ran through food, because certain foods influence how often bears and humans meet. They also concluded that without a reduction in human-caused deaths after 1970, the core range that remains today would not have survived (Mattson and Merrill 1123–36).

The mountains of western Montana, then, were not a place where bears flourished undisturbed. They were a place where the pressure came later and more slowly than on the plains.

Hunting remained legal in Montana well into the modern era. Martinka's study of the Glacier National Park population, conducted from 1967 through 1971, recorded 32 grizzly deaths in areas adjoining the park. Fourteen were legal kills by hunters and eighteen were control actions responding to bears drawn to unnatural foods or to livestock depredation. Fourteen of the deaths occurred on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, apparently in response to livestock losses (Martinka).

Garbage and the Parks

By the 1960s the grizzlies of the national parks had acquired a new problem, which was food provided by people. Glen Cole, a National Park Service biologist at Yellowstone, compiled injury records for his park between 1930 and 1969. He concluded that human food and garbage had altered bear behavior and was basically responsible for 60 injuries inside developed areas. Injury rates in those areas rose from an average of 0.6 per year in the 1950s to 3.6 per year in the 1960s (Cole).

Montana was directly involved. Cole's paper records that a municipal dump within two miles of West Yellowstone, Montana, was closed by the U.S. Forest Service in the early summer of 1971, following the closure of the park's own Rabbit Creek and Trout Creek dumps in 1970 and 1971. Bears that had fed at these sites did not simply vanish. In the West Yellowstone area in 1971, Montana Fish and Game personnel carried out 23 control actions involving 19 bears, and twelve of those bears were known to have been killed. Of the twelve, one was judged excessively dangerous, four were destroyed after returning from transplants, three were illegally shot, three were legally taken by hunters, and one failed to recover from drugs (Cole).

Glacier National Park faced the same circumstances on a smaller scale. Martinka estimated the park's grizzly population at 175 to 230 bears, higher than the 90 to 130 estimated before 1967. He attributed the difference to a better census method, not to population growth. He also described an open dump at West Glacier that drew bears out of the park, with four control actions and one hunter kill linked to it (Martinka).

August 1967

Glacier National Park opened in 1910. According to Montana PBS, no fatal bear attack had been reported there until a night in August 1967 (Montana PBS).

On August 12, seven young park employees set out on overnight hikes. Julie Helgeson, 19, and Roy Ducat, 18, camped near Granite Park Chalet. Michele Koons, 19, and four companions camped at Trout Lake. During the night and early morning of August 12 to 13, a grizzly attacked Helgeson and Ducat and later killed Helgeson, and a different grizzly killed Koons at Trout Lake. The other campers at Trout Lake escaped by climbing trees (Montana PBS; Desch).

Both accounts agree on the setting. At Granite Park Chalet, guests had gathered regularly to watch bears feed on garbage, and the backcountry campgrounds held a good deal of refuse that summer (Desch). Rangers were sent to find and kill the bears involved. Ranger accounts published on the fortieth anniversary state that three grizzlies were killed at the chalet, including the sow believed to have killed Helgeson, and that the Trout Lake bear was a 19-year-old sow with glass fragments in her teeth (Desch).

The documentary's co-producer, Gus Chambers, later summarized the lesson in blunt terms: the problem started with people feeding bears and leaving garbage out (Montana PBS). Martinka's data support the practical consequence. Control actions in the park, which numbered four in 1967, fell in the following years, and he attributed most control deaths to attraction to unnatural food sources (Martinka).

Protection and Recovery

In 1975 the federal government listed the grizzly bear in the lower 48 states as a threatened species (Brown; Kendall et al.). Montana continued to allow limited hunting under an exemption to the federal protections, which permitted 14 bears to be killed each fall, until 1991 (Brown).

Scientific monitoring improved after listing. In 2004, researchers used hair traps, bear rubs, and captures in a noninvasive genetic sampling effort across northwestern Montana and estimated that 765 grizzlies lived in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem. That figure was more than double the earlier estimate based on sightings of females with young. They also found that the known human-caused mortality rate in 2004, 4.6 percent, was slightly above the 4 percent considered sustainable, and that the high proportion of female deaths was cause for concern (Kendall et al.).

A later analysis followed radio-collared females between 2004 and 2009. It estimated that the population was growing at a mean annual rate of about 3 percent and that more than 1,000 grizzlies lived in and adjacent to the recovery area (Mace et al.). The two studies used different methods and covered different periods, so their figures describe the same population at different points and should not be treated as directly comparable.

An Unsettled Question

As of early October 2026, the grizzly remains a threatened species in the lower 48 states. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has until December 28, 2026, to decide whether to remove the bears from federal protection, after a federal judge extended a court-ordered January deadline. Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho have argued that bear numbers have recovered since listing and that management should return to the states. Wildlife advocacy groups answer that bears occupy only a small fraction of their historic range, and some are concerned about the effect hunting could have on continued recovery. Until the agency decides, the bears remain listed as threatened (Juhlin).

The disagreement is not new in kind. Each period described above ended with a change in human practice: closing the dumps, improving garbage control, limiting hunting, and listing the species. In each case the bear population then changed in response. Whether the next change will be a transfer of authority to state agencies, a continuation of federal protection, or something else remains to be decided.

A Note on Sources and Verification

All web sources were opened and confirmed accessible on October 4, 2026. Several points rest on a single source and should be treated with that in mind. The Lewis journal passages were read through excerpts on the Discover Lewis & Clark site, which draws on Gary E. Moulton's edition, and not in the printed volumes. The 50,000-bear estimate, the 1975 listing, and the 1991 hunting details rest on Associated Press reporting, with the 1975 listing also supported by Kendall et al. The account of which bears were killed in 1967 rests on recollections published in one newspaper in 2007. Montana PBS and the Hungry Horse News article agree on the sequence of the attacks but differ slightly on the date, which is why this article gives the night of August 12 to 13. Population figures are estimates produced by different methods.

Works Cited

Brown, Matthew. "U.S. Might Lift Protections for Yellowstone, Glacier Grizzlies." Daily Herald [Arlington Heights, IL], Associated Press, 3 Feb. 2023, https://www.dailyherald.com/20230203/news/u-s-might-lift-protections-for-yellowstone-glacier-grizzlies/. Accessed 4 Oct. 2026.

Cole, Glen F. "Progress in Restoring a Natural Grizzly Bear Population in Yellowstone National Park." Research in the Parks: Transactions of the National Park Centennial Symposium, 28-29 Dec. 1971, National Park Service, 1976. NPS Symposium Series 1, https://npshistory.com/series/symposia/1/chap13.htm. Accessed 4 Oct. 2026.

Desch, Heidi. "Night of the Grizzlies - 40 Years Later." Hungry Horse News, 9 Aug. 2007. Whitefish Pilot, https://whitefishpilot.com/news/2007/aug/09/night-of-the-grizzlies-40-years-later-9. Accessed 4 Oct. 2026.

"Glacier Park's Night of the Grizzlies." MontanaPBS, https://www.montanapbs.org/programs/glacierparksnightofthegrizzlies/. Accessed 4 Oct. 2026.

Juhlin, Ellis. "Grizzly Bear Delisting Decision Pushed to December." Montana Public Radio, 4 Feb. 2026, https://www.mtpr.org/montana-news/2026-02-04/grizzly-bear-delisting-decision-pushed-to-december. Accessed 4 Oct. 2026.

Kendall, K. C., et al. "Demography and Genetic Structure of a Recovering Grizzly Bear Population." Journal of Wildlife Management, vol. 73, no. 1, 2009, pp. 3-17. U.S. Geological Survey, https://www.usgs.gov/publications/demography-and-genetic-structure-a-recovering-grizzly-bear-population. Accessed 4 Oct. 2026.

Mace, R. D., et al. "Grizzly Bear Population Vital Rates and Trend in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem, Montana." Journal of Wildlife Management, vol. 76, no. 1, 2012, pp. 119-28. U.S. Geological Survey, https://www.usgs.gov/publications/grizzly-bear-population-vital-rates-and-trend-northern-continental-divide-ecosystem. Accessed 4 Oct. 2026.

Martinka, Clifford J. "Grizzly Bear Population Studies in Glacier National Park, Montana." Research in the Parks: Transactions of the National Park Centennial Symposium, 28-29 Dec. 1971, National Park Service, 1976. NPS Symposium Series 1, https://npshistory.com/series/symposia/1/chap14.htm. Accessed 4 Oct. 2026.

Mattson, David J., and Troy Merrill. "Extirpations of Grizzly Bears in the Contiguous United States of America, 1850-2000." Conservation Biology, vol. 16, no. 4, 2002, pp. 1123-36. U.S. Geological Survey, https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/1016173. Accessed 4 Oct. 2026.

Townsend, Kristopher K. "May 6, 1805." Day-by-Day, Discover Lewis & Clark, Lewis and Clark Trail Alliance, https://lewis-clark.org/day-by-day/6-may-1805/. Accessed 4 Oct. 2026.

Townsend, Kristopher K. "May 11, 1805." Day-by-Day, Discover Lewis & Clark, Lewis and Clark Trail Alliance, https://lewis-clark.org/day-by-day/11-may-1805/. Accessed 4 Oct. 2026.