Roping Grizzlies

The last live California grizzly bear was seen in 1924. Before that time, adapting from its ancestral prehistoric line, the Grizz roamed freely and never more so than in the appropriately called Cañada de los Osos in central California.

Supply ships like the San Carlos from Las Paz were sketchy at best and in the ealy 1770s the missions and presidios were rapidly starving when Franciscan priests Junipero Serra and Juan Crespi remembered “the valley of the bears” from the Portola Expeditions of 1769. The bear meat could save them.

It is strictly an American thing, indeed, it is a strictly California thing. The first use of leather riatas to lasso bears originates here – among the soldados de cuera – and later adopted by vaqueros and rancheros as sport.

Several hundred pounds of bear meat were brought back to Monterrey and San Francisco on muleback from the valley of the bears. Low on gunpowder, but expert wih horse and cattle, the soldados de cuera, the leatherbacks, devised a method forcapturing and killing a bear without firing a shot.

Once in the open from a thicket or bramble, the beat was lassoed around a paw or the neck and drug behind the horse until it flipped on its back. The other horsemen closed quickly and lassoed the remaining paws until they could stretch the bear out and then one man could cut its throat.

Hundreds of grizzly bears were killed that way to help feed the soldiers of Spain and the priests and indio neophytes of God. Listening to the stories of the old men on adobe porches inspired the next generations to try bear roping for sport and the thrill.

Bears were roped and captured often and brought chained on a carreta to The Pueblo. Los Angeles loved its bear and bull fights with wagers almost as high as for horse races. A wild toro, its horns sawn in half, fighting gladiator-style against a chained grizzly bear. Sometimes multiple bulls would be released into the arena. One rarely predicted the outcome.

An anecdote tells of a Norte Americano cowboy who had heard tales of roping a bear and decided he was cowboy enough for it. Eventually, he found a grizzy and promptly roped it around a forepaw. As the cowboy grinned to himself at the ease of it all, the bear sat back on its haunches and began reeling in the rope, pulling horse and rider within range of its fangs and claws.

Cowboy cut rope. What he hadn't realized is that the old vaqueros waxed their leather riatas to prevent bear claws from snagging.