Name: The bear on the California state flag lived in Golden Gate Park
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The bear on the California state flag lived in Golden Gate Park

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Man's cruelty towards one of the most magnificent beasts that walked the American continent can be summed up in the fate of Monarch, the California grizzly bear who started his life running free, snacking on salmon around the rugged Southern Californian coast, and ended it in a dismal cage in San Francisco.The state's last captive grizzly was captured in 1889 in a publicity stunt ginned up by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, and imprisoned for 22 years in a cage. Monarch would spend his final years in Golden Gate Park, where his stuffed likeness still remains and is memorialized on the official state flag.While simultaneously celebrating the symbolism of the grizzly bear in statues and on state flags and even naming state in their honor, European settlers slaughtered the animal in their thousands and wiped the California subspecies off the face of the earth.The contempt was clear right from the off — when formally classifying the grizzly bear in 1815, naturalist George Ord decided to characterize the animal as "horrible" or "terrifying" in naming it Ursus horribilis.The Californian grizzly, a subspecies of U. horribilis, had the run of the state before the Spanish settled in the region in the 18th century. Around 10,000 grizzly bears inhabited modern-day California back then, feeding on deer, salmon, berries and even beached whale carcasses.Early settlers described actual herds of grizzlies grazing in clover fields, with cubs in trees shaking branches for acorns, according to Susan Snyder, author of "Bear in Mind: The California Grizzly""In most other places where [grizzlies] live, it is a much harder life. They hibernate and it's a desperate struggle to gain the weight they need to survive. They don't have that abundance of food that grizzlies had here. It was really paradise," Snyder wrote.But the settlers' livestock on their new rancheros became easy prey for the bears and the horse-mounted Spanish herders soon started to hunt the grizzlies wherever they could find them. And because simply slaughtering innocent wild animals sometimes isn't enough fun, the vaqueros would often capture them and pit them against bulls in public battles to be gambled on. These bear baiting events became a popular past-time in the 19th century.The ultimate demise of the subspecies was precipitated by the Gold Rush, as tens of thousands of people poured into California to find their fortune. The new settlers gunned down and poisoned the bears, and bounty hunters killed them en masse.By the 1920s, almost every grizzly bear in California had been tracked down and killed. The last hunted California grizzly bear was shot in Tulare County in August 1922. A grizzly was spotted in 1924 in Sequoia National Park for the last time and thereafter, grizzlies were never seen again in the Golden State.Before the grizzly adorned the California state flag, the bear was used in a publicity stunt to sell newspapers.That's where Monarch comes in.Never one to eschew a headline-grabbing stunt at the detriment of others, William Hearst summoned San Francisco Examiner reporter Allen Kelly into his office in 1889 with a simple request: Go capture me a live California grizzly bear. Hearst wanted to present the living trophy to the city and could see the headlines already. Kelly spent months attempting to complete the unusual but apparently urgent ask and finally caught wind that a group of Mexicans had caught a handsome specimen on the coast in Ventura County.Kelly journeyed south and eventually found the captured bear. It was lured into a train cart with mutton and honey and brought to San Francisco as Hearst had requested. The grizzly was named "Monarch" and inspired the Examiner's tagline, "the Monarch of the Dailies."The paper ran several embellished stories on the struggle to capture the bear: "Sixteen Forty-Four Caliber Bullets Were Pumped Into Him And He Never Fazed" one headline read, describing the moment that a cattleman named Jeff encountered him, stating that Monarch, "looked at Jeff reproachably for the inhospitable reception, turned about and went away more in sorrow than anger."But this would just be the start of Monarch's sorrows.After the bear's successful capture and journey to San Francisco, Hearst's Examiner reported that 20,000 people came to see Monarch in November 1889, as the caged bear was presented at Townsend Street Station, at Eighth and Brannan in SoMa.But public interest in the captured two-ton curiosity soon waned.In 1894's Forty Niner Mining Camp exhibit at San Francisco's midwinter exposition, an ostrich exhibit drew more spectators than Monarch's cage.Far from the salmon-rich Southern California coastline where Monarch grew up, the incarcerated bear spent the final two decades of his tortured existence in a cage near what is now the AIDS Memorial Garden in Golden Gate Park. He was unfathomably presented as a symbol of wildlife conservation."There are some really, really sad pictures of him in our collection," Snyder wrote, "He's just sitting there. He looks really depressed and lonely. It's all concrete and bars, like in an old-style zoo."Monarch was skinned and stuffed after his death and acquired by the California Academy of Sciences. The taxidermied likeness of Monarch was used as the model for the California flag when it was standardized in 1953.Monarch now rests in storage at the museum, after last being seen on public display in 2012 as part of Altered State: Climate and Change — an exhibit that explored the role humans have played in the current mass extinction.It's a little hard to look at the bear on the California state flag as a representation of strength and courage as desired, and not a symbol of suffering, and a tragic reminder of how humans repeatedly, callously extinguish wonders of the natural world.Andrew Chamings is an editor at SFGATE. Email: Andrew.Chamings@sfgate.com | Twitter: @AndrewChamings

Man's cruelty towards one of the most magnificent beasts that walked the American continent can be summed up in the fate of Monarch, the California grizzly bear who started his life running free, snacking on salmon around the rugged Southern Californian coast, and ended it in a dismal cage in San Francisco.The state's last captive grizzly was captured in 1889 in a publicity stunt ginned up by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, and imprisoned for 22 years in a cage. Monarch would spend his final years in Golden Gate Park, where his stuffed likeness still remains and is memorialized...

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Writer. editor at @sfgate. also @theatlantic, @mcsweeneys , @vice, @thebolditalic. dm or andrew.chamings@sfgate.com if you have a story in your brainbox

Andrew Chamings

AndrewChamings

News. Culture. Sports. Opinion. All the journalism that matters from San Francisco & the Bay Area. Newsletters: http://sfgate.com/newsletters IG: http://instagram.com/sfgate

The bear on the California state flag lived in Golden Gate Park

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