(upbeat music) - Grizzly bears once ranged over much of North America.

From the great plains to the high sierras, from Yellowstone to the desert southwest.

Today, there are an estimated 60,000 grizzly roaming the wilds, most of them in Alaska and British Columbia.

But once upon a time, they also lived in the North Cascades of Washington.

A few still might, sightings are extremely rare.

So the US government has considered whether to reintroduce grizzlies to this remote wilderness area.

Just what is the history of the grizzlies in Washington and what happened to them?

(bright music) Ursus arctos horribilis was well known to native peoples in the west long before they were given Greek and Latin names.

Bears featured in indigenous experience, art and stories.

Tribes throughout the northwest had distinct words for the grizzly and the more ubiquitous black bear.

Necklaces of impressive grizzly talons, much longer and more deadly than a black bear's claws, were highly prized and traded, masks and dances featured grizzlies.

They were part of the traditional diet of mammals of people's like the Upper Skagit.

Grizzlies were more widespread in what is now Washington, millennia ago.

They were hunted with spears and arrows long before guns came west.

(bright music) There's archeological evidence that 10,000 or more years ago, they were in Puget Sound country, as bones found on Whidbey Island attest.

Rumors of the great bear filtered back east but there were more legend than fact among Euro-Americans until the early 19th century.

When the Lewis and Clark expedition headed west overland to the Pacific, the Grizzly was about to become real to the rest of America.

Part of Lewis and Clark's charge was to gather information about the new species they encountered.

In the spring of 1805, after hearing stories about the grizzly bear's fierceness and seeing enormous tracks, the expedition finally started to encounter grizzly bears.

On May 5th, along the Missouri River in eastern Montana, (bear growls) Captain William Clark and another man killed a large grizzly, "A terrible looking animal," Clark wrote.

They recorded that the bear weighed 5 to 600 pounds and was over eight feet in length.

A most tremendous looking animal and extremely hard to kill, notwithstanding, he had five balls through his lungs and five others in various parts.

The wounded bear swam halfway across a river to escape before dying on a sandbar, roaring throughout his long death rows.

The explorers ate the bear and boiled its fat, finding that it hardened solid like lard.

Bear fat became the expedition's favorite cooking oil.

The expedition encountered and killed a number of grizzlies until they got over the mountains to Oregon and Washington where they encountered none on their way to the mouth of the Columbia River.

But their accounts of bears on their return east shaped public awareness with the impression that the way west was populated by a fearsome predator.

Researchers today have combed 19th century records of the fur trade to try and discover where the grizzly population in Washington was at that time.

The Hudson's Bay fur trading company accounts give a partial answer, Focusing on trading posts that bracketed the Cascades' ecosystem, Forts Langley and Thompson in BC, Colville, Okanagan and Nez Perces in eastern Washington and Nisqually on Puget Sound, researchers found that between 1826 and 1857, some 3,188 grizzly bear pelts were traded at these posts.

The vast majority, nearly 2,700, were from Fort Colville.

These records are incomplete, and some of the grizzly pelts might have come from farther afield, but they offer evidence that grizzly bears were in and around the North Cascades ecosystem.

They were already virtually absent from the western Washington lowlands however.

Fort Nisqually reported only two pelts in those same three decades.

As settlements spread and single shot muskets gave way to more frontier fire power, grizzlies were largely killed off by settlers, ranchers, and hunters.

Reading through the 19th century newspapers, the grizzly was often described as monstrous.

The last stand of the grizzlies seems to be east of the cascade crest in places like upper Stehekin Valley, Ross Lake, Entiat Meadows and Chelan.

In 1888, an account of a grizzly being shot in the foothills near the Nooksack River reported that grizzlies were quote, "Quite numerous in the mountain fastness of the Baker Range."

But by 1923, one report estimated that there were only 22 grizzlies remaining in Washington and Oregon.

The last known grizzly killed in Washington's North Cascades was in Fisher Creek Basin, south of Ross Lake, shot by a hunter in 1967.

In the 200 years of settlement, the grizzly was essentially extirpated from Washington, despite a few grizzlies in the northeastern Selkirk range on the Washington B.C Idaho border and a possible few in the North Cascades.

Not everyone would welcome grizzlies back.

The other apex predator, the wolf, has been reintroduced in Washington and some folks are not happy about that.

Bears and wolves can prey on livestock.

Some fear the outdoors will be made less safe for recreation.

The North Cascades are one of the only large wild areas left in the lower 48 with nearly 10,000 square miles of wilderness that could, in time, theoretically support a large population, perhaps as many as 250 grizzlies, more than are found in the Yellowstone National Park today.

That would be decades from now, but a recent report indicated that climate change might actually expand habitat for Grizzlies in that area.

Could a warming planet aid their comeback here?

The world is full of surprises.

(bright music) - [Narrator] For more on this episode, listen to the Mossback Podcast.

Just search for Mossback wherever you listen.