The Grizzly Bear: The Narrative of a Hunter-Naturalist

From the Foreword—The Grizzly Bear by William H. Wright, first published in 1909, is one of the best all-around books ever written on the subject. It is both highly informative and entertaining. . . . Wright began as a bear-hunter, and an extraordinarily successful one. He pitted his own strength, endurance, ingenuity, skill, knowledge, and craftiness against that of the grizzlies. . . . His most remarkable achievement as a hunter was killing five grizzlies with five shots, which he called "the greatest bag of grizzlies that I have ever made single-handed." . . . His book shows a hunter becoming a naturalist: Wright first studied the grizzly in order to hunt him, then he came to hunt him in order to study him.

The Grizzly Bear treats the early history of the grizzly as recorded by the white man and the life and escapades of James Capen ["Grizzly"] Adams, and most important it recounts the true-life experiences of Wright himself. Although I have spent some eighteen years studying the grizzly, eight of them intensively, there are few points on which I would take issue with the accuracy of Wright's observations o his interpretations of what he saw—Frank C. Craighead, Jr.