Category Archives: Bears

Polar Bear Mushing: 1923

Screenshot 2023-01-11 1.18.43 PMA hundred years ago this month, the cover of Popular Mechanics for January 1923 showed a self-explanatory transportation idea that, for some reason, never caught on. For the really big loads that sled dogs couldn’t handle, simply replace the dogs with polar bears! They’re fast and they’re strong, and they could haul sleds of unimaginable size.

“While the Eskimo is, by necessity, too busy with hunting and fishing to attempt training the bear in a serious way,” the manager of a fur company saw real potential in the idea. Of course, “in selecting the team, care would have to be exercised in eliminating animals showing  predisposition to temper.”

So even though the Inuit who had lived there since time immemorial didn’t seize the idea–simply because they were too busy–the fur company can send a man in to tackle the job.

The idea never caught on, and we’re guessing because the man sent in to tackle the job wound up as a tasty snack for one of the bears.



Night Watch Bear, 1914

BearWatchman

We recently read about a troupe of acting bears that visited Indianapolis 150 years ago. Another working bear made the news 100 years ago today, but not as an actor. “Boss,” a bear native to the woods of Maine, made the pages of the Philadelphia Evening Ledger on September 26, 1914. Boss worked as a night watchman in a Pennsylvania distillery. The photograph on the left illustrates his method for treeing an intruder. There is also an artist’s conception of Boss (left) apprehending a suspect (right).

 


Acting Bears Come to Indy, 1864.

ActingBears

150 years ago today, Hoosiers were undoubtedly excited by the soon to arrive circus. But this wasn’t just any circus. The acting bears depicted here (realistically, no doubt) were but one of the many attractions to be featured at what was billed as “positively the largest exhibition of the amusement world,” The Monster Equescurriculum! It was going to be an immense and unparalleled combination, heralded here in the September 19, 1864, edition of the Indianapolis Daily State Sentinel.

The bears shown here were “Old Grizzly Adams’ Troupe of Acting Bears, from California.”  Adams himself, it would appear, wasn’t traveling with the bears, since he died in 1860 from a succession of injuries caused by the bears (and in one case, a monkey).  The bear depicted on the California state flag is apparently one of Adams’ bears.  It is not known whether that bear was one of the bears to visit Indiana, although the bear wearing a top hat bears a strong resemblance to the one on the flag.

But according to the announcement, since the combination of acts is such as had never before been attempted by private enterprise, it gave notice that the management will be “pardoned for directing attention to the fact that this magnificent phalanx of exhibitions not only combines and infinitely greater degree of novelty, variety and effect within itself than can be found in any other place of amusement in the world, but also a nearer approach to perfection in every detail.” It also notes that the performance entailed such an enormous expenditure of money that only the most liberal patronage could render it remunerative.

Admission for one of the four performances was fifty cents, 25 cents for children under 12.