Why feeding Yellowstone bears was necessary, even heartwarming history

When I arrived in Montana in 1990, there was a “business” in my small town that had a chained bear patrolling an empty lot. I guess you could pay money to interact with it, though I never did. I silently cheered when it was confiscated on humanitarian grounds and taken to a rehab facility in Oregon.

I stayed silent because I didn’t want to impose my East Coast values on the small community I was hoping to enter. But it turned out those small-town values were evolving on their own. The confiscation was done by some local/regional authority, not a nationwide advocacy group.

This was a shift. Back in the 1950s, a semi-tame bear cub had been tied up at a local gas station; people fondly remembered buying it a Coke from the nearby vending machine.

Chaining up bears as pets had been a decades-long tradition all over the country. Gifford Pinchot, founder of the US Forest Service, described visiting Jonesboro, Arkansas, as a young man in 1891. “I wrote home about the nice people I had met, and in particular and in detail about how much I liked Betsy. Then, when I judged the family were sufficiently keyed up over the prospect of an Arkansas flatwoods daughter-in-law, I sent them a photograph of Betsy and me very close together, with the molasses bottle in full flood.” Betsy was a bear. “It [the photo] achieved an instant and unconditional success.”

Bears served as people’s pets even inside Yellowstone National Park. Part 1 of this trilogy featured some snapshots of 1920s pet bears Juno and Pard; this week’s image features snapshots of other park bear pets.

A century ago, bears could be pets, or even business resources. As a gas station owner, you might buy a bear and build it a dwelling so that people could interact with it and you could make money selling them Cokes. This trend brings some context to the stories of the last couple of weeks, of people feeding bears in Yellowstone and the authorities encouraging them.

It would be weird to be able to feed a bear in a nearby town but not inside the park’s boundaries. A national park stands for a set of national values, not just one consecrated place.

Indeed, the 1960s decision to enforce Yellowstone’s bear-feeding prohibitions proved to be an act of nationwide moral leadership. Once, you could treat a bear as a pet anywhere the bear would let you. Today, the essence of any bear is its wildness. Park leaders’ management decisions were part of a nationwide agenda-setting (with many other institutions involved, of course, and a time lag to widespread acceptance).

And I’d like to argue that the same dynamics were at work in the period from the 1890s to the 1920s. Park leaders were encouraging people to feed bears—to treat them like pets—because this was a remarkable humanitarian improvement from the previous culture-wide attitudes. Previously, people had seen bears as a representation of evil, and/or as a feature of the threatening wilderness that needed to be exterminated. It was all fear, no wonder.

So park leaders modeled a change in nationwide behavior. If the park superintendent could keep a bear chained up in his backyard, maybe a gas-station owner could too. Neither had to shoot the bear on sight.

You may want to argue here that a chained-up bear symbolized hideously macho white male dominion. That the bears’ “owners” were all about controlling these “lesser” creatures rather than loving them. That the Yellowstone tourist bear-feeding spectacle represented the same dynamic on a smaller scale—even more hideous because the tourists weren’t asked to take year-round responsibility for the bears or even see them in physical chains. Just enjoy the bear’s “performance,” and then go home.

I won’t disagree with you.

What I will say is that feeding candy to a semi-tame or chained-up bear gave people the opportunity to see bears up close. Up close, these creatures hardly resembled the rampaging Satans of myth. It was not just the owner who realized that bears didn’t need to be shot on sight—it was all of the many tourists graced by the encounter.

In an era when human activity was leading to the near-extinction of once-common animals such as the bison and passenger pigeon, the instinct to treat bears as pets may have helped save the species. If naturalists of the 1890s foolishly believed that loving bears meant feeding them, at least it was a more-loving alternative than exterminating them.

And if those naturalists further foolishly believed that animals would respond to love with docility and grace, then at least the bears’ response was varied. Some bears did temporarily exhibit an ability to be tamed… much as some people do. It may be traumatic, in both cases, or even monstrous. But it may also be a grimly wise coping strategy.

Only by going down this path—by feeding candy to a Yellowstone “hold-up bear,” or a Coke to a cub chained at a nearby gas station—could people get close enough to bears to realize how wrong were their previous attitudes. Only close up could you feel, and thus mourn, the tame bears’ loss of wildness. And only as those feelings rippled through the culture could that notion of untamable wildness replace the notion of tamability as the quality we most revere in wildlife.

Shocking as it may seem today, the practice of feeding bears in Yellowstone was more enlightened than previous policies. And it served as a stepping-stone to even more enlightened policies. When I think of historical progress, this—more than some clever mechanical invention or advance in systems of governance or hot new social-media trend—is what I have in mind.

End notes:

· I quote Pinchot from Breaking New Ground, p. 38.

· This is part 3 of a trilogy. Part 1: “The appalling stories of early 20th century tourists feeding Yellowstone bears” Part 2: “National park leaders were the worst offenders in last century’s Yellowstone bear-feeding” Thanks for following! And thanks to you paying subscribers for making this work possible.