Stuff You Should Know - Night of the Grizzlies

Episode Date: October 3, 2023

Grizzly bears had never killed a person in Glacier National Park until the night of August 12, 1967. That's when everything changed for National Parks moving forward.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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So just go to syskvinyl.com and order yours now, they ship out on October 20th. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey everybody and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Jerry's here too and this is stuff you should know. Let's go. Have you like that one? I did. I'd also like this title that Libby gave this one. Yes. It's very fun. Can I read it? Sure. The night that transformed bare human relations.

It's pretty straightforward and says everything you need to say. Yeah, it's actually It's pretty straightforward and says everything you need to say. Yeah, it's actually sadly very accurate. Yeah, and yet, despite it being that straightforward, there's a pretty interesting story hidden amid those letters. It sounds like a crossword clue. It does. I feel like we should tell that story now, or else really what are we doing here, Chuck? All right, well, I think this is one of those unfortunately we can't just sort of play out as a

teaser To reveal what happens. I think we kind of need to say what actually happened and then tell that story. Yeah All right Did you want to tease this thing out? No, okay? I'm just being difficult because what we're talking about is a very sad night, August of 1967, when two young women, two 19-year-old women were killed by two, and here's the kicker, two different bears in two different places in the same national park. If it was one bear that just went crazy or something and they were all camping together,

that would be obviously tragic, but not like, hey, we need to really look at what's going on here, and that's what happened because it was two bears in two places. Yeah, and the reason why it was such a kicker is because in the 57 years leading up to that, that Glacier National Park was a national park. Only three other people had ever been killed by grizzly bears. And then all of a sudden it went from three people in 57 years to two women in two separate incidents in one night. That is crazy. And it really did kick off this a national conversation about should grizzly bears stay alive as a species because we like living in national parks.

Do we have the right to do that kind of thing? It's a pretty interesting story. It's got a lot of facets to it. And I feel like we should talk a little bit about grizzly bears first, because I didn't realize that they were just a subspecies of brown bear, although that makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, grizzlies are brown bears. They are generally darker than brown bears and coloring. They're generally smaller. They can be, you know, a couple hundred pounds up to about 600. But they, and it's interesting here because I think it depends on where you live and who you ask. Like usually brown bears are called brown bears when they're more coastal. Like the ones you see, like grabbing that salmon out of the river, you would call a brown bear. I thought those were grisly.

Whereas if you live inland in your bear, a brown bear, you're called a grizzly. But then I also saw people talking about coastal grislies. So it may be one of those names has just sort of been tacked onto a lot of kind of brown bears. Yeah. I think it's just, you know, it's confusing. Yeah, but they're brown bears.

Yeah, they're brown bears, which makes them, you know, and they're relatively small brown bears. There's a type of brown bear called a Kodiak that gets up to 10 feet tall when it's standing on its hind legs. No, thank you. Grizzlies are not nearly that big, but they're still big enough. I mean, the males can get up to about 600 pounds. And there used to be a lot more of them than there are today.

The early 19th century, I think, around the time of Lewis and Clark, there was an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 grizzly bears. They went all the way from Canada down to Mexico. They were in every what's now states along the West, all the way from Canada down to Mexico. They were in every what's now states along the west all the way over to the Great Plains. There was a ton of them. And then as we started to move out there, we meaning white American settlers and colonists, part of what that whole westward expansion included was not just wiping out Native Americans, it was also wiping out large carnivores too.

Yeah, like when they talk about taming the west, that's what they mean. It's like, let's go out there and kill things. And they did this for a few reasons. Sometimes it was because they had cattle that they wanted to take care of, or occasionally, if they thought they were in harm's way. They might kill a bear, but a lot of it was just that sort of, I was about to say human nature, but really man's nature, at least some men, not me or you,

to want to kill big beautiful animals because they're big and beautiful, and I guess could be considered dangerous. Yeah, you gotta keep an eye on those people because they can very quickly become real like most dangerous game types. Right, that's right. So by the time 1967 rolls around

when the two 19-year-old women who died lost their lives, and I'll just go ahead and say their names are Julie Helgison, man, and Michelle Coons. By the time they died in August of 1967, Grizzly Bears had been wiped out so thoroughly that they had a territory that was about 2% of what it had once been. Mostly they were in national parks because those were protected areas. And there was something like under a thousand of them in the entire continental United States. Yeah, that's 2% is great when you're talking milk.

It's not great when you're talking about animal populations. Did you write that one down? I didn't, it just came. It's a tough one. It's a tough one. Very nice. Here's the weird thing though,

is and it seems rather counterintuitive. There were more, even though there were fewer bears, there were more human encounters with these bears for this very reason. And as we'll see, this is part of what led to this huge mess. And it's really hard to, if you are age and maybe obviously younger, you don't realize that national parks

weren't always these places where they really were smart about everything they did. Right. Because at the time, they would do some crazy things in national parks. They would try and get bears around. They would leave food out. There was one story here that Olivia found where, and luckily a park ranger kind of stopped this in the act. But these parents brought a bear over with some food with a candy bar and then tried to put their 18-month old on this bear's back to take a picture.

Yeah, there's a story in that same article about a guy who was trying to lure a bear into his car to get a photo of it behind the wheel. Yeah. Just people interacting with, again, 600- pound grizzly bears that can just take your head clean off if they want to but that's the thing They are really unpredictable and for the most part their vegetarians I think plants make up something like 90% of their diets and a lot of times they're I don't want to say docile But the 18 month old baby survived and so did the mom and so did the dad It if that bear had acted any differently. They wouldn't have survived The 18-month-old baby survived and so did the mom and so did the dad.

If that bear had acted any differently, they wouldn't have survived. So I saw that their personalities can best be summed up as unpredictable, but at the time in the 60s, that is not the impression people had of bears. They were kind of considered a lot more gentle. There was a park ranger who was quoted by Jack Olson who will meet in a little while, who said that on a scale of a danger scale where a butterfly is a zero and a rattlesnake is a 10, the grizzlies of glacier park would have to rate somewhere between zero and one. That is entirely wrong. He really should have said they rate between a zero and a 10,

and you have no idea which what it's going to be at any given moment if you encounter a bear. Yeah, and you know like a lot of large Animals like this when there is a And you know their accident so I'm going to call it an accidental killing Because bears weren't like oh human. Let me go eat them like you said they're mostly vegetarian and even when they ate Stuff that was non vegetarian. It wasn't like oh boy. Let me go eat them. Like you said, they're mostly vegetarian. And even when they ate stuff that was non-vegetarian, it wasn't like, oh boy, let me go chow down on that person. It was, let me go chow down on that person's steak by the fire or the fish that they're cooking or something like that. And so when there is an accident, it's usually one of a couple of things.

It's either the sort of familiar scenario where you stumble upon a bear and scare them or they may have their cubs around them, I'd be a mama with some cubs. Or it is that bear that's like, wait a minute, that's my food, you're eating that fish out of that river, I want it. So let's go. Yeah, apparently they defend their food. Like it's with the most jealous violence

that they need to, like that is their food, even if it's your food. Yeah, exactly their food, even if it's your food. Yeah, exactly, because that bear thinks it's their food because it's their territory. And the other thing that Livy was keen to point out, which is like, it sounds sort of funny at first, but it really is a thing that you need to pay attention to is the Yogi bear cartoon was a big thing.

And Yogi and Boo Boo as these sort of friendly bears going after the picnic basket, that came about because that's what it was like. It wasn't like someone said, I got this crazy idea. Let's take these ferocious animals and make them a hand of our bearer and let's make them into a lovable cartoon character.

It was like, no, that's when you went to these national parks. Like you said, people are luring bears around. They're like, ooh, take my pick and nick basket. If I can take a picture, a pick a picture? Pick a picture? Pick a picture? You're gonna make that into a click.

Pick and nick thing. Anyway, that's how things were. So that's why they made that cartoon. And that was just sort of what was going on like they literally at glacier at one Oh, I'm sorry. This is a Yellowstone that they were doing similar things in glacier at Yellowstone They put bleachers up around the open air dumps So people could show up and watch the bear show which was bears wandering into eat. Yeah

So a lot of people rightfully lay a lot of the blame for the deaths in 1967 at the feet of the administrators of national parks at the time because they were using the bears as entertainment, and at the very least, even if they weren't in some of the parks, they were not instructing the public on how to interact with bears and just how dangerous bears were. And that was a huge problem because, like you said, people were treating them like they were just these docile, general animals that wouldn't do them any harm. And then the other factor that kind of gets overlooked is that this is right after the national

highway system had really been developed and people were hitting the road. So these national parks were suddenly just swamped with tourists for the first time in their history. So people were, there were far fewer bears, but there were a lot more people all up in the bears' grills than there ever had been in human history. Yeah, and leading up to this specific incident, we'll, you know, we'll detail a little bit more of this after, I guess we'll take a break here in a couple of minutes, but at Glacier, they were sort of in the days leading up.

There were a lot of alarming incidences where bears were becoming way more aggressive, or if you're watching a cartoon way more friendly than they had been. There were fires that came through the park in the summer of 67, so that shrank their habitat some and kind of squeezed them into a smaller area. And there was one bear in particular that had been reported a few different times. I went back, I'm sure you did too, and read this great original sports illustrated article. Who was it that wrote that? Jack Olson. Yeah, Jack Olson is kind of the standard account of this horrific event. But this bear, it was an emaciated female who was underweight, had been reported a lot

going up to people, being very brazen, and you know, not like typically when you see a bear, if you ever watch these outdoor shows, you start yelling at the bear, like get out of here or clanking a pot, and the bear usually is going to leave. Bears are scared, they don't want to be around people. But this bear was not taking any orders and not doing any to the things that a bear would usually do. It would just come into a camp and start eating and not leave until they wanted to leave,

this skinny lady bear. Right. So we have in the Western national park system, a situation where bears have become acclimated to humans. They're totally fine with being really close to humans, kind of not scared of us. And then also they had become habituated on human food and garbage, and they now associated humans with food

and they were no longer scared of humans. There were a huge population of bears in the western parks with lots of humans coming to see them. All right, well, that sounds like a very natural place to stop. Thanks. I never come back. But we do, we have to tell this, this bad story,

so we'll be back right after this. Our first call is Mary in Lexington, Kentucky. Mary, welcome to the middle. Hello, and thanks for having me. If you really want to know what's going on in this country heading into the 2024 election, you have to get away from the extremes and listen to the middle. Hi, my name is Venkat. I'm calling you for Atlanta Georgia. On the new podcast, The Middle with Jeremy Hobson, I'm live every week, taking your calls

and focusing on Americans in the middle who are so important politically but are often ignored by the media. I did a lifetime democratic voter. However, I was raised by moderate Republicans from Michigan. Creating space for a simple conversation about the most contentious issues we face, from climate change to artificial intelligence from abortion rights to gun rights. I consider myself to be conservative, cis-colleen, but politically independent.

Listen to the Middle with Jeremy Hobson on the I Heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up everybody this is Suncane and Emilia Hartford. And this is our new podcast, Car Stories. We get to bring you guys into our world and our community, or maybe otherwise, you would never get to meet these incredible people. Including friends like Peter Brown, who did all the sound design for the Fast and Furious movies.

Cars are a fantastic opportunity to be an extension of the characters in the film. The more weird character that I can get into a car, the better. And then we also get to talk to Matt Farah, the Wikipedia of cars. This truck was wild. It was really a two-seater, but it had eight cup holders for two people. And we also have John Oates, Jordana Brewster, Jesse E. Wuji,

Rod Amory, and so many more. Listen to car stories with some king, and Amelia Hartford. On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Because even if you're not a gear head, everyone has a car story. I'm Mo'Raca, and I'm excited to announce season four of my podcast, Mo'Bitweries. I've got a whole new bunch of stories to share with you about the most fascinating people and things who are no longer with us.

From famous figures who died on the very same day to the things I wish would die like buffets. People actually take little tastes along the way with their fingers. Oh, they do. Oh no, I'm so sorry. Do you need a minute? This is the only interviewer I needed a spit bucket. I'm so sorry.

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a story of who you mentioned earlier, Julie, Helgison, man, that is really hard for some reason. It is. I want to say a different word, but it's Julie Helgison, she was from Minnesota and she was 19 years old. Along with her friend that we're gonna meet, who also lost her life, Michelle Coons, they were both working summer jobs at Glacier.

I imagine in the late 60s at Glacier, it was probably pretty great. I mean, Glacier's an amazing place even today. But back then, I imagine it was a pretty awesome summer job to have. Yeah, so I think Julie was working in the laundry facility and Michelle was working in a gift shop. And that makes the whole thing even more bizarre to me

because they knew each other. They both set out on separate hikes on the afternoon of Saturday, August 12th, 1967. And they knew each other well enough that Julie and her crew invited Michelle, or no, vice versa, Michelle and her crew of five other friends and a dog named Squirt invited Julie and her friend. I'm getting boyfriend vibes Roy Dukeet To join them. But Michelle and her group were going somewhere. I think they were going to Trout Lake, and Julie and Roy had been to Trout Lake

the weekend before. So they wanted to go in a different hike to Granite Park, Shell A, and they all set out. And these were experienced hikers. They knew what they were doing, and they were also have a good weekend overnight camping trip out in the woods, in the back countries, what they call it, but the back countries,

in other word, for wild territory. That's right. I imagine they, you know, we say they knew each other. Imagine it was a pretty tight-knit group back then. There are many, many more employees now at these national parks and they're were back then. And, you know, they were the same age and they were teens working this like amazing summer job. So we're talking about Helgison and DuCott at this point. They hitchhiked to the, and if you've ever driven

down this road, it's amazing. It's called that going to the sun road. It's a main roadway. Well, it is, but it's really great. Well, it's really not because you don't actually go to the sun. Oh, I guess so. Going toward the sun road would be what it should be called. But they went to spend the night at the chalet initially, but the chalet was full. And so back in the days where when you could be surprised by something like that.

And when they got there, they saw it was full and they said, all right, well, we'll just go camp about 500 yards away. We'll go camp in the woods, sort of the immediate back country. And they ate dinner. They watched the sunset off that road and they take it, they didn't have tents because they thought they were going to be the chalet. So they just bedded down and they're sleeping bags on the ground outside. I've seen sleeping bag. Oh, that's why I took it to possibly be her boyfriend. But they could have zipped him together. That'll move.'s one thing that, I guess so, I forgot you could do that.

There's one thing we should say about the Shalai granite park Shalai that they hiked to and were camping near. That was the site of a purposeful feeding area that the managers of the Shalai were throwing out food scraps to attract the bears for the entertainment of their guests. And just four days before this, some Rangers had visited Grand Park Shalai, saw what they were doing, and we're like, you can't do that. Stop doing that. And the manager were like, sure, sure, we'll definitely stop doing that. So these guys are open air camping about five football fields away from that very Shalai.

That's right. about five football fields away from that very shell A. That's right. So, after they're in their bags at night, just after midnight, a bear arrived, a grizzly bear to their camping spot. And some of this stuff has come out later in different forms, whether it was interviews with survivors after the fact or that sports illustrated story or them writing about it years later. And they've tried to piece it together as best they can, but I did see some of the details or that sports illustrated story, or them writing about it years later.

And they tried to piece it together as best they can, but I did see some of the details kind of varied here and there among the accounts. But what we do know is that DuCott said later on that Julie had seen the bear and woke him up and said, hey, there's a bear here. And from what I read in sports illustrator, it was about 10 feet away, but it was definitely a bear. And so she's like, play dead. The bear did not fall for that and began mulling Ducat, got to his arms, his legs, and

his back. And then left him alone and then dragged poor Julie Helgison off. Yeah. And so Ducat ran and there were other people camping nearby. And, you know, the Shally was five football fields away, but there was probably help there. So they were screaming they were using their flashlights to flash SOS. And they managed to get the attention of some people who called for a helicopter. And they came and got Ducat. And he said, well,

don't forget Julie. She's out there somewhere. Apparently, a ranger who would have been in charge of sending out the search party waited about two hours before he finally said, okay, let's go out and find her because he was concerned about putting other people's lives in danger, additional lives in danger, searching for her because we might run into that bear. I don't know if that caused her death, I mean, the bear caused her death,

but that might have helped seal her fate. Two hours. Yeah, that was two hours. They finally found her. This happened just after midnight, remember, and they finally found her and got her to the chalet at 3.45 a.m. and she died at 4.12 a.m.

She had puncture wounds to her throat and lungs, but she probably had died largely of blood loss and it entered shock. And that was it. So I don't, you can't really say, yes, she definitely would have survived, but perhaps her chances of survival would have been higher had they gone out and searched for and found her a couple hours earlier. Yeah, I think for sure, initial reaction was to be like, what the heck with this Ranger?

But again, this is 1967. It was a different time. They didn't have the resources. I'm sure now if there's any kind of bear situation, they know exactly what to do and exactly how to handle it. And B, they have, I would imagine they have all kinds of tranquilizers or just more guns and stuff to deal with this kind of thing, that they didn't have back then. I mean, it sounded like if they would have gone after this bear, it might have been one park ranger who maybe had a pistol, maybe didn't. And then a bunch of other people with, you know, baseball bats or something, like they

weren't prepared. So I tried not to judge too harshly. This guy said, hey, let's wait, because they had never encountered something like this before. And I think rightfully so, like people don't usually make decisions out of cowardice. It's normally there's some other line of thinking that in hindsight proved to be a bad decision.

Agreed. So that was the unfortunate death of Julie Helgison. She was very terribly mulled and died of blood loss and wounds to her lungs and throat. Michelle Coons just hours later, essentially around the same time that Julie Helgison was dying in a makeshift operating room at the the chalet. A bear was wandering up to Michelle and her groups sleeping bags that they had set up around a campfire in a beach because that same bear had already visited them all the way back at 8 p.m. and caused them to split. Yeah, the bear came up. This bear came back a few times. It was a very kind of thing.

There's kind of one of the things. Again, in hindsight, you're like, they should have gotten out of there, but you know, what kind of detail all the reasons why? They had gone fishing. They set up by this great lake, not capital great lake, but this amazing lake. They went fishing. One of the guys that was with them was just 16 years old. These were kids. He caught one fish.

He caught a rainbow trout. Augmented that meal with some hot dogs, grilled it up, and that grizzly, like you said, at 8 p.m. came wandering around and they took off. They watched this bear from a short distance, eat that food, and then grab one of their backpacks and take it away. And this is a point where they could have gotten the heck out of there, but they were like,

it's getting dark. We don't know what to do. This bear left, it got our food, so it's probably fine now. Also, if we're going to get out of here, we've got to go through this berry bush field that's tall, bears love those berries. That bear may be there, there may be more bears. Let's go down here to the beach area.

Let's build a huge fire to try and help keep the bear away. They build a log barricade between that fire and their old campsite. And then line their sleeping bags up around this campfire. But very key here, they did bring some food. They brought some cookies and some cheeses to that new campsite. So is that the idea that that was what attracted

the bear back again? The food? Yeah, the cheesets. I mean, it was food and they were after food, so. Okay, we should also say one other thing. As they were, before they even reached Trout Lake in the afternoon, when they were on their hikes few, they passed some other hikers who said that they had

been recently chased up a tree by a grizzly around that area. And they were like bears. Nuts to that, we're gonna keep going. around that area. And they were like, nuts to that. We're going to keep going. And that same bear, they believe also, it turned out actually that not even, they didn't believe it. Like it was that same troublesome bear that had been chasing girl scouts around and had been a problem all summer because it was underfed and emaciated.

And apparently that's a really good way for a bear to start acting and behaving very oddly and aggressively as when it's underfed. That's right. So this same bear that has been overly aggressive toward everybody it means it seems like came back again after the eight o'clock visit, came back at 3 a.m. in the middle of the night.

One of them wakes up, sees that that fire Then after the eight o'clock visit came back at 3am in the middle of the night, one of them wakes up, sees that that fire has basically doubted out and he jumped up, thinks the guy who caught the trout, jumped up to go start rebuilding this fire again really quickly, and apparently set those cookies down on that log barrier that they had between it and the old campsite. So now it's 3 a.m., they all decide, the bear takes these cookies and goes away, and they all decide, listen, we're gonna stay awake for the rest of the night,

because now we're out here in the middle of the night, we're genuinely stuck, like we can't just hike off and in the darkness. And so they decide to all stay awake together. So, man, I would have been quite scared by this time. This is the second time the bear visited, right? Yeah, eight o'clock PM, three AM constantly just taking this food. And then, now we get back to 4.30 AM when the bear returns a final time.

And this time, it just goes straight up aggressive. I don't know if it was because they ran out of food and the bear didn't like the fact that they didn't have any more food or what. But it bit one of the guys sleeping bags, it caught it a sweatshirt. So now we get back to 4.30 a.m. when that bear returns a final time. And I don't know if it was because they had run out of food and the bear didn't like that very much, but it became more aggressive than the other times.

And it actually started attacking the kids in this camping group. One of them had a sleeping bag bitten, which if a bear is attacking you and it bites your sleeping bag, this kind of best case scenario, plotted a sweatshirt. And I think there was other bear encounters in this event, right? Yeah, so that was Paul Dunn. He starts screaming, he runs away and climbs the tree, this bear is chasing him. He runs away and he climbs a tree, this kid's 16. So he's up this tree in a matter of seconds.

Apparently he did get all cut up and stuff though, because he didn't have a shirt on and he was climbing like a person, scared of a bear. So he gets up in this tree and from up in this tree, he looks down and this bear is sort of circling below him. His friends are at the camp. They have obviously woken up at this point

and they see the bear circling the tree. So they use that as their opportunity to get away. They grab that dog first of all, squirt. And yeah, they grab squirt, squirt, when this thing first started happening. They grabbed it and put it inside the sleeping bag and literally like had their hand over this dog's poor dog's mouth like to try and play dead. But so they finally get away as well. They run away while this bear is circling the tree below Paul done and except for one person. And that was Michelle Coons.

She, they hear, they're literally, you know, 30, 40 feet away from this bear and their friend, and they hear her screaming. They're like, you know, get out of there, get out of there. They hear her yell, I can't, he's got the zipper. They hear her yell, he's ripping my arm, he's got my arm, my arm is gone. And then they finally hear her yell, oh my God, I'm dead. And this bear carries her off in the sleeping bag still. Right. Right in front of them. Yeah. So they are, they have no trouble staying

awake for the rest of the night at this point. They a couple hours later, the sun came up. And after did, and they saw that the bear was gone, they took off for help, right? Yeah. That was a, you know, in these parks, I'm sure they still have stuff like this. It's called seasonal rangers that were maybe just there for the summer. There was a guy named Bert Gildart. He said at 6.30 in the the morning he was at West Glacier at this point in his little apartment. He got a knock from another ranger named Norm Hagen and guild art was the one who knew

about that previous killing earlier in the night and I'm not sure how, but somehow he managed to go back to sleep and he's the one that like got the emergency responders there. Hagen shows up and says that there's a young woman who is maled at tr at trout lake and he was like, no, no, no, you're confused. This was over at the chalet. And then as, you know, this Hagen guy keeps going, it dawns on him like, my God, what has happened? This has happened twice in a matter of hours. Yeah. So he very quickly got himself over to trout lake. I read that he essentially ran four miles from the trailhead to the lake. And there was another ranger already there named Leonard Landa. And two other men arrived by helicopter and they formed a little search party and very

quickly Leonard Landa discovered Michelle Coons body. And you had said earlier that like, like, grizzly verses generally don't see humans as prey or as food. And one of the things that makes them so unpredictable is they'll do that sometimes. Sometimes they do see us as prey and food. Like sometimes they'll attack one one person in a party. See them as food and then attack the other people to defend that first person that they see as food. And that seemed to be the case also with Michelle Coons, because when her body was discovered,

the bear had begun eating it. And another dead giveaway usually is that the bear will eat some and then go essentially bury the body under some dirt and twigs and stuff like that and then sit around and protect it. I don't know if I don't think they found the bear around her body, they just found her body, but she had been essentially partially eaten. Man. Alright, I feel like we should take another break.

That is the sad story of what happened that night and we're going to talk a little bit about the aftermath of what happened right after this. Our first call is Mary in Lexington, Kentucky. Mary, welcome to the middle. Hello, and thanks for having me. If you really want to know what's going on in this country heading into the 2024 election, you have to get away from the extremes and listen to the middle. Hi, my name is Venkat. I'm calling you for Atlanta Georgia. On the new podcast, The Middle with Jeremy Hobson, I'm live every week, taking your calls and

focusing on Americans in the middle who are so important politically but are often ignored by the media. I did a lifetime democratic voter, however I was raised by moderate Republicans from Michigan. Creating space for a civil conversation about the most contentious issues we face, from climate change to artificial intelligence from abortion rights to gun rights. I consider myself to be conservative, physically, but politically independent. Listen to the Middle of Jeremy Hobson on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Mo'Raca, and I'm excited to announce season four of my podcast, Mo Bituaries. I've got a whole new bunch of stories to share with you about the most fascinating people and things who are no longer with us. From famous figures who died on the very same day to the things I wish would die like buffets. People actually take little tastes along the way with their fingers.

They do. Oh, no, I'm so sorry. Do you need a minute? This is the only interview where I've needed a spit bucket. I'm so sorry. We'll tell you about the singer who helped define cool and the sports world's very first superstar.

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That's harpsore, because that is with me. Brian, a father of five, who's endured a public divorce and a string of unhealthy relationships, and Sharna, a self-proclaimed serial monogamous, have been in a whirlwind romance since meeting in 2020. Now they'll tackle the challenges of blended family life while dealing with relentless paparazzi. With the help of their friend Randy, they share their life lessons, pondering the meaning of it all in the world of the oldish.

And even though this Hollywood couple finally found each other, they don't have all the answers. Oh, don't a second! Oh, that's where I come in. I'm prepared to guide you, our listeners, through some of life's funniest, awkward, or difficult moments. Listen to Old-ish on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And one of the first responses among park officials was we need to go find these bears that did this. And not only that, we might have a problem with any bear that eats human food.

So, a gilder in landa formed a, like basically a death squad looking for bears, especially the one who killed Michele Coons. And they had, they were basically instructed to shoot any bear that didn't run away from them. And the first day they didn't find any bears. They stayed overnight at a patrol cabin at a place called Arrow Lake. And when Gildert went out to use the bathroom the next morning, he saw a bear and he called for Landa to bring out the rifles.

And Landa did, and as they were standing standing there giving the bear a chance, right? Because none of these people wanted to kill bears. There wasn't like vengeance necessarily. And even if there was, I think actually that's not true. I think Gilder had a sense of vengeance and then eventually kind of had a change of heart. But some of the other ranges were not happy about this job of killing bears.

And even if they, however they felt about it, you were supposed to still kind of give the bear a chance. If the bear took a step towards you, that was a dead bear. If it ran away from you, that bear could live to, you know, be examined another day. This bear started coming toward them, so they had to kill it. That's right. And this was the bear. The bear was 17 years old. The bear was under 300 pounds. And I know he said their range can be a couple hundred and up, but I get the idea that this was a larger bear that was under 300 pounds and like clearly underfed and emaciated.

They opened this bear's stomach, JA, movie style, and found some big ball of blonde hair undigested inside the bear. And also found this, which, and this is, this is all, it's a tragedy for these humans. It's a tragedy for these bears, because they had been, you know, fed human trash for so long, and were used to people. It's not their fault. But they found glass embedded in the molars of this bear. So this bear had been eating glass food that was probably in glass from trash and made it difficult for this bear

to eat probably, probably made the bear very uncomfortable and grumpy. And that probably all contributed to what happened to Michelle Coons. Yeah, I think it's really important to remember that none of this was the bear's fault. The bears were acting like bears, and they were being essentially mistreated by humans in the park, park administrators by allowing them to get habituated to human food because it was destined, this was destined to happen essentially, the way that people were behaving in the parks So they had the they had definitively the bear that killed Michelle Coons

I mean they didn't test the hair or anything like that, but it was just her Yeah, they were still looking for Julie Helgison's fair and And they actually never definitively identified it, but another ranger named Dave Shay, who was among a group of four who shot a bear and her cubs that were feeding at the Chalet garbage pit. He was convinced that that was the one that killed Helgison because that bear had blood on her claws. And I don't believe Julie Helgison

had any feeding done to her. So it's not like that could have been an innocent bear that just came along, was like, oh, I'm gonna have a bite of this, but didn't kill her. It was almost certainly the bear that killed her. And even if it wasn't there, an orgy of grizzly bearer death fell over glacier in Yellowstone and the other national parks

that had grizzly bears in the ensuing weeks, months, and years after the night of the Grizzlies. Absolutely. Like you said, the media got hold of this. And all of, of course, all of a sudden, everyone then got an opinion. Everyone thinks that they know exactly why this happened. Some people were like, well, there were thunderstorms and lightning nearby that could have agitated them. The idea that bears are attracted to menstrual blood was brought up. I think they now say that that's maybe true with polar bears only.

Well, they've never experimented with polar bears. Polar bears showed a preference for that and like seal blood or something. And then they've never experimented like that with grizzlies, but somebody did like a once over of grizzly attacks and didn't find any pattern necessarily. So we don't know experimentally, but we do know anecdotally, that's probably not true. Right. But at any rate, that doesn't keep the media from reporting something like this. Sure. And then it showing up in Anchorman as a joke years later. But it was coincidence. There was never any link between these two.

It was just a really bad coincidence, a horrific example of bad human luck that night between these two young women. Jack Olson wrote that story, the Sports Illustrated Story, which is a really fun read in three parts and three separate issues that you also get the benefit of the ads of 1967 magazine. It's always fun. I'm sorry, this was 1969 when it finally came out. Right. The summer of love, right?

That's right. One of them. This was when everything started to change. People started, there was a biologist named Gardner Moment who said, you know what, we should, and it's interesting that this was a biologist, but this guy came out and was like, hey, you know what, we need to finish what our forefather started, and we need to make them extinct in the United States. And not only that, but the common rat and the fire ant, some kinds of sharks, the

C-C-Fly. This guy was like, let's wipe out anything that bothers humans or is a potential threat to humans. If a biologist can be a hack, Gardner moment was a hack biologist. Agreed. That's just a terrible idea. And it's not like that was just like the zeitgeist. People arguing it like Gardner moment introduced it to the zeitgeist, people arguing at like Gardner moment, introduced it to the zeitgeist, or at least kind of stoked any existing feelings in the public.

And so now all of a sudden there is like a push to like get rid of grizzly bears because they wouldn't behave around the humans that had invaded their areas. Yeah, luckily that didn't happen, right? I think there were more people, or I don't know about more, but there were people beating the drum on the other side

of like, no, this is not something we should do and they won out. Yeah, real biologists, grizzly biologists, they're known as the father of grizzly, fathers of grizzly biology. There were twin brothers, Frankenjohn Craighead. And they became the filishaffly of the movement to eradicate bears.

They just almost single-handedly got in the way of that and managed to swing public sentiment back toward conservation. And it was a real accomplishment because when Jack Olson wrote Night of the Grizzlies, which by the way, it was called the Grizzly Bear Murder Case in Sports Illustrated, right? Oh, wow. I'm glad they switched it.

When he wrote the actual book in 1969, he was a disinterested observer. He was a reporter, but he concluded like, that was the fate of the Grizzlies. They were gongers. Like the public had turned against them so much that it was all but already done. The Craighead brothers managing to turn public sentiment, that was a big deal. They did it by saying, there's just a few common sense things we need to do.

If we do them, you're going to basically get rid of human bear interactions or deaths by grizzly bear. Yeah, and they actually had research. They weren't just saying, you know, this is what we think. They had a full decade of human grizzly interaction and they could point to actual stuff and say, no, no, no, this is what we have found and they cited this research.

And this is a great quote. I think it was John that said, you know, getting rid of all these bears, he said, would be as tragic as the leveling of Yellowstone Canyon because somebody fatally fell from its branch. Like you don't go knocking down the mountain because someone fell off of it and you don't go killing all the grizzlies because they killed somebody. Jack Kerouac said, you can't fall off a mountain. Did he really? Yeah, I was in the Dharma Bums.

I don't know that one, it's been a while. So the common sense stuff that they pointed out where like keep humans out of some parts of the park, it's like, sorry, this is bear territory, just leave it to the bears, don't go back there, it's too dangerous for you. Step one, yeah, at least. Another is just like actually monitor bears,

like start tracking the bears in the park, know them, get to know who they are. And then also, like when they're moving around, you should probably have a good idea of where they are and win and who's around them. And basically just teach the public that yogi bear is fictitious, not a real bear. He lives in jelly stone, you're in yellow stone. Big difference, right? And if they do that, but also teach the public like, yes, they're a risk. You're at greater risk outboding on one of the lakes, but they are still a risk. So treat them as such. They're a wild animal, but yes, go see them and take in their majesty, but from afar, you, like that would definitely reduce encounters

and thus the chances of bears killing humans. Yeah, and if you've been to a national park at all in the last, well, since this, really, then what you see are bear proof garbage cans. I actually bought these for my camp. I have bear proof stuff at my camp. Bear proof garbage cans. You're going to see where your cooking area should not be where you sleep. You're going to see

these cables strung between trees or your encourage and they teach you how to do it yourself so you hang up your food high off the ground, suspended between trees at night. You can't just loop it over a branch because I'll climb up that tree. You got to suspend it to paint in the butt, but you got to do it. And you know this stuff now. You can't go to a national park or go back country camping without seeing signs and just knowing everything that we know now has all been in place literally because of this night that all came out of this that you shouldn't have food around your camp. You cannot entice bears, don't get that candy bar near your windshield. Like this is not how we should be treating bears.

Yeah, and I think also a general idea that your bad behavior might not result in your death, but you're increasing the chances that it could kill someone else. So there was a collective responsibility that was put upon visitors to the park too. And I think that was super helpful. Like we said, there was a, there was a, this change over wasn't just without fault.

Apparently yellowstone was just, they just shut down the garbage dumps. They were like no more garbage for bears. Smart. I mean, that's what you would do in response to something like the night of the Grizzlies. But the Craighead brothers had said, like, don't do that. Like, yes, shut them down, but do it gradually and start supplementing their food that you're taking away from them with actual food of theirs, like elk or something like that. And they didn't do that. And as a result, the bears were now made more appearances at campgrounds looking for food because the dumps have been shut down

and it ended up in more bear deaths and the death of a camper in 1972. Yeah, I mean, it's basically saying, it's basically like having a food store for a wild animal that they know is always open and then they just shut that food store down all of a sudden. The bear doesn't know that. They're going to keep coming back there.

They're going to be confused. We'll take them a long time to learn that there's not food there and to go elsewhere, which is why the Craighead said to do it gradually. It makes sense. But just rash decisions were made. Like you said, in 72, another camper was killed. This was an illegal campsite, I think. And, you know, had left their food out.

So that's what happened. They still killed a lot of bears. I think 189 bears were killed between 68 and 73. And by 1975, between those killings and then the lack of food, there were only 136 grizzlies left in Yellowstone, prompting them to be placed on the endangered species list and covered by the endangered species act. They made a very nice recovery, I believe they have six recoveries on starting in the early

90s, one of which was in Glacier and one around Yellowstone, where they, you know, we're trying to have reintroduced these bears. And now they are up to a couple of thousand, I think, in the US. Yeah, yeah, I think nearly 2000. Yeah, I mean, such that there are people now that are saying, like, hey, we should let people hunt bear again in the US. Yeah, yeah, which is a great idea. Do it, of course.

We should really get that instinct of killing a large trophy animal for bragging rights back as soon as we possibly can. That's sarcasm. Yeah, and so that didn't do away, like it's not the end of bear killings among humans, like it does happen. And actually 2023 has seen four different deaths

from three different baritacks just this year alone in I think national parks in the United States. That's pretty significant because it is really, really rare despite events like that. The National Park Service estimates that if you visit a national park, you have a 1 and 2.7 million visits chance of being injured, not killed injured by a bear. But if you stay in the developed areas, like the roads and everything, and don't go into

backcountry, you have a 1 and 39.6 million chance of being injured by a bear. But it cuts both ways, because if you do go back country camping overnight You have a one in 554,000 overnight visits chance of being injured by a bear So it really depends on where you go and what you do and if you put yourself out there in bear country You you have to come prepared. Yeah, I've done a I mean, you know, we've got my little black bears at my camp that I've called my camp camp. Sure. But these are the, you know, the little guys in Georgia and they've, no one has literally

ever been killed by a bear in Georgia. But I've done a lot of camping in that country camping out west over the years and I never saw a bear. You know, it's, if you're, if you're smart, it doesn't mean it can't happen, but like you said, the chances are very remote, but you've got to be smart. You've got to do the right thing with your food and your trash, be good steward of the land. Back in the late 60s, it was, I think at one point, Olivia said that they were starting

to clean up a little bit then, and they got three helicopters worth of trash just out of this one area of glacier. People, this is the time when people just go back country camping, not everyone probably, and just lead their stuff. Another man reference. Yeah, and just lead their garbage. And it's thankfully, we've come a long way since then. And even though that still happens, I guarantee you, every time there's a bear incident in the United States, it is highly scrutinized and studied and they're still trying to learn from it. Yep. Uh, you got anything else?

I got nothing else. All right. Well, if you want to know more about bear attacks, go familiarize yourself, especially if you're going to a national park. And since I said that, it's time for a listener mail. I'm going to call this one Hammond Clock. Remember we talked about the Lawrence Hammond episode? He made those clocks? Oh yeah, the tickless clock.

Yeah, Tim and Sarah have one, and it's beautiful. Hey guys, listening to the Lawrence Hammond episode and had to write in, my wife's parents owned a Delhi in Brooklyn and had a Hammond electric clock hanging up for many years. And when they passed on the clock came to our possession, not in the greatest shape, I was able to clean it up and discover that it also had low voltage light bulbs on the inside. It took some time to find them, but I got that working too.

My wife never knew that the face lit up all those years. That's super cool. During my online searches for bulbs, I had read about the uniqueness of the Hammond electric clock. One thing he did differently from all the other Electric Clock manufacturers at that time was his clock requires a restart when the power goes out and comes back on. The other people's clocks start right back up automatically and Hammond designed it at way on purpose and I agree 100% with the design decision, we know exactly what time

the power went out. Think about it, even if the clock automatically restarts after a power outage, you still have to adjust the time anyway. The man really did have an analytical mind and thought of just about everything. And I think I agree, Tim. That is from Tim and Sarah. Nice, Tim and Sarah. Thank you very much. That was a great email.

Is they sent a picture of the clock all lit up? They sent a picture later because I was like I get, is they sent a picture of the clock all lit up? They sent a picture later because I was like, why didn't you send a picture? Well, I want to see it. Do they send it to both of us? I'm not sure, but if not, I'll forward it to you. That's very kind of you.

And that was Sarah. That was in the Sarah. And Tim, yes. Thank you guys again. And if you want to be like him and Sarah, you can send us an email too. Send it off to stuffpodcast.iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio.

For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Okay, Katie, quick, rapid fire. What do you think about when you think about black stories? Tony Morrison. Long novels. Zines. Very complex stories. Movie Night with popcorn. Lineage and history. BT Awards. Hood Motifs. I'm reliable narrators. So it's hard to condense a narrative that's so big into such a small space. But that's why we have the podcast.

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