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Chapter 2 Range and Habitat

Historic Range

Ask the average person where grizzly bears live and you’ll probably hear some variation of a three-word answer: in the mountains. While that observation is true, grizzlies also roam across open expanses of tundra in the far north. Although it may come as a surprise to many people, grizzly bears are as suited to living on the plains as in the mountains. Prior to European settlement of North America, these great bears were common residents on the Great Plains, where they hunted bison and elk alongside wolves.

Members of the Lewis and Clark expedition encountered grizzly bears far east of the Rocky Mountains on their westward trek to the Pacific coast. In April 1805, as the explorers journeyed through central and western North Dakota along the Missouri River, they discovered tracks of “the white bear of enormous size” and sighted a few grizzlies. After subsequent encounters in eastern Montana, where the corps learned that grizzlies were incredibly fast, unpredictable, and extremely hard to kill, grizzly bears became one of the most feared hazards of the journey. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) estimates that around 50,000 grizzly bears roamed the western United States at the time of the Lewis and Clark expedition, ranging from the Pacific Ocean to the Great Plains.

As settlers moved onto the plains and into the Rocky Mountains, grizzly bears were eliminated through hunting and trapping. Prior to the animals’ extermination by humans, the large, clawed footprints of grizzly bears marked the soil in the interior of what is now the United States as far east as Ohio. Grizzlies were also present in the coastal mountain ranges along the Pacific Ocean, ranging southward through California and into northern Mexico. A grizzly bear adorns the state flag of California, although the last surviving member of the state’s historic population was killed in 1922. East of California these mighty bears roamed across the American Southwest at least as far east as central Texas.

By 1922 biologists were aware of only thirty-seven intact grizzly bear populations in the contiguous United States. In 1975, when grizzly bears in the lower forty-eight states received protection as a “threatened species” under the Endangered Species Act, only six of those thirty-seven populations remained.

In the north historic grizzly bear populations spanned a range from the western coastline of Alaska eastward to the western shores of Hudson Bay in Canada and everywhere in between. Grizzly bears were found in abundance in the western provinces of Canada, namely British Columbia and Alberta.