The Case For The Boring Bear Story

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Hell-Roaring Creek is the kind of water you hear before you see. It spits and churns as its narrowest parts pass over rocks obscured by spray and underbrush, running down the southwest edge of the Whitefish Mountains before gathering with the ancestral waters of the Salish, Ktunaxa, and the Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla Peoples in Whitefish Lake below.
Air thick with the sound of river hitting rock which feels disproportionate to the source as it competes with the occasional passing car, it is easy to imagine that you are in the presence of an unseen Bear. Perhaps this is why Fred Shattuck didn’t hear her. 1

Fig. 1: “He Took Water,” The Kalispell Bee. (Kalispell, MT), Jun. 29 1901. Courtesy of the Montana Historical Society, Helena, MT, for Chronicling America via the Library of Congress. Public Domain.

Unsurprisingly, much of the discussion surrounding “changing the narrative” around human-Bear conflict at the 7th International Human-Bear Conflicts Workshop (IHBCW) in Kalispell, Montana this past October came down to Bear stories. The predominantly present-day incidents which flicked by in discussion as images, maps, graphs, stories, bone, Guardian Dog barks (and slobber), fur, art, and even fossil all served as reminders that historical humans and animals lived and experienced each of these stories in diverse ways.

While well understood that we must think deeply about narrative, it is equally well understood that it is hard to categorize story, and harder still to categorize human-animal relationships (not to mention risky). I have spent much of the past three years shaping, reshaping, and writing about a GIS ontology I initially developed for my GIS project, the Predator Microhistory Network which I which I now use in my doctoral work to historicize the extirpation of the California Grizzly (Ursus arctos californicus) through the lens of human-Bear conflict. The opportunity to introduce Bear experts to an interactive map which situates the interconnection between predator animal microhistories in geospatial context and place their (varied) levels of ecological detail in dialogue with one another was nothing short of a delightful experience.2 Examining this species’ history within the seasonal rhythms of multi-species relationships across the food webs and extractive landscapes of northern California has illuminated many questions which I feel are more broadly important to other historical work which examines large bodies of microhistorical animal encounters in the archive for their entangled land relationships and interlinkages. 

What I found most delightful about the reception for this work at IHBCW lay in how interested fellow attendees (who had also gathered to discuss human-Bear conflict relationships), were in the microhistories which were less correlated to violent outcomes. Though my ontology certainly made space for representing violent incidents of human-Bear conflict, I was pleased to notice that the tracks of the historical populations I had mapped also seemed to draw significant interest. Often, it was here folks stopped to “play” in the data and interactive map, examining historical sightings, depredation events, track length data and den site locations associated with the California Grizzly, a population of North American Brown Bear now considered extinct. The conversations which took place alongside inspired new questions which caused me to linger upon Shattuck’s encounter with the mother Bear and her cubs. 

Of significant discussion at the IHBCW was the recent article “Relationship to Select Standardized Bear Management Terms” (2025), in which Lackey et al. provide an updated list of set of twelve definitions used in the fields of Bear management and Bear biology to discuss human-Bear conflict (HBC) and propose standardization of their use “among everyone in the bear community.”3 The authors argue that the use of consistent language will allow for more “effective and consistent” communication, messaging, and visibility pertaining to new research regarding HBC, so allowing more comprehensive “analyses of best management practices” to take place and better serving the goal of “ultimately [reducing] human-bear conflict” shared across this discipline. What do historians consider human-Bear conflict, and how can we better historicize it? Can our efforts to do so apply similar frameworks to those used by the sciences?

My goal in this essay is to preliminarily explore the complicated relationship animal historians will have with this call, examine how these terms might behave within the historical landscape, and examine the possibility of applying standardized language rooted in modern wildlife management, such as those proposed by Lackey et al., to analyze historical datasets and populations. 

Fig. 2: William Henry Smead’s Land of the Flatheads (1905), Public Domain, 108.

Rethinking Human-Bear Conflict Through Story

What might today be better recognized as the low bridge where a blind curve wraps the road around a corner of the lake’s northeastern shore than by the creek beneath it has even less a chance of being recognized as the site of a brief encounter between a man and three bears in 1901. Yet the presence of story here is a tremendous example of the broader historical significance of many others like it. As local Grizzly communities faced cascading pressures from extractive industries and extirpation efforts, Bear stories became (by some accounts) less common in the Flathead Valley region of Montana by the early twentieth century, leaving settlers increasingly skeptical of those that emerged. “But when they do arrive in town,” qualified The Kalispell Bee (referring to another encounter reported in the same, 1901 issue), “they are usually good ones.”4

Having at this point read through thousands of the “Bear stories” which appear in print media of the nineteenth century for my doctoral work, I can attest that “good” often means “dead.” To clarify on slightly more palatable (if still broad terms), many “good” Bear stories relied on specific, bloody relationships to what would today be recognized as human-Bear conflict. Men who lived to tell the tale of a encounter with a Bear or other large, wild predator — whether “good” or pushing the margins of believability as might a fish story today — reveal historical realities of the animal communities with whom they experienced HBC events.

What made Shattuck’s encounter a “good” enough Bear story to publish lies in how close he (moreso, in this case, than the mother Bear or her cubs) came to death and escaped only with an entertaining story. That we now understand about human-Bear conflict challenges us to expand beyond this rather binaried historical frame. Only under certain conditions do human encounters with these animals come down to even the risk of bloodshed, still fewer actually end in physical contact. Conflict is taxing for bears: energy is life, and expending calories on the danger of unnecessary conflict is both dangerous and poor future planning. Though brown bears possess an extensive capacity for communication which they use to avoid conflict or otherwise dictate terms of engagement, the nexus of energy exchange and extraction remained in constant flux and intense inter-species negotiation across the landscapes of the nineteenth century American and Canadian wests. 

Bear stories which aren’t as “good,” though they might stick in our memory, don’t adhere as well to historical ideas of what conflict is. Fred Shattuck’s story is not the tale of Hugh Glass. Yet these stories are just as important to getting a more accurate picture of the landscape of conflict beyond historical binaries. Though much lacking in the sensational bloodshed which more typically spring to mind when such stories come up in both historical and modern contexts, stories like this contribute to a greater landscape of detail concerning human-Bear encounter. Though well prepared to address diverse encounters like these, many of animal history’s best-problematized frameworks better prepare us to address bloodier (and more historically-visible) conflict events than those in which a man and a Bear walk into a stream. Both scientists and historians often privilege historical instances of violent physical contact with predator animals in our readings and analyses: after all, these are the stories wherein corporeal collisions reshape the bodies and identities of nations and societies, and with them, their environmental histories. For multifactorial, practical reasons which aim to prioritize harm reduction and improve community understanding in a landscape of limited funding and climate crisis, the study of violent human-Bear conflict is a sensible move across many fields working towards healthy multi-species outcomes. 

Yet that we tend to privilege incidents where the blood of “charismatic” mammals (in this case, ursine and human) is spilled with historical attention leaves patterns which may be present in less boisterous conflict events less well problematized across historical communities and landscapes. While the urgency of work which addresses the devastating outcomes of the former cannot be overstated, I fear a research landscape in which the “boring bear story” doesn’t have its day. Compared to the global visibility of violent, romanticized human-Bear conflict events, the “boring” bear story challenges the assumption that all human-Bear interactions were violent, and challenges us to consider the greater timeline, ecological and social context involved in humans and megafauna grappling with conflict relationships over time. Against a precedent which leaves the details of an incomprehensibly-vast archive of stories perhaps less Revenant in social memory quite out of dialogue with more nuanced conversations about historical human-Bear conflict, questions of visibility are of key concern. Without deliberate action to explore the greater arcs which thread through such stories as Shattuck’s, the boring Bear story (and all it can teach us) risks relegation to the distant margins of historiographic intervention.

To this, the push to standardize the language could make many of these “boring” bear stories more historically visible. Modern paradigms hold “conflict” in ways which may make microhistorical HBC events like Shattuck’s visible and complicate our ideas of what constitutes conflict within historical landscapes. Though a definition for HBC which, among other statutes, includes “any situation” wherein “threat” or “damage” to “human life or property” occurs will no doubt see the question of when a basket of half-dead, wild-caught fish sitting on the banks of a river becomes human “property” become the subject of considerable debate, the mother Bear indeed “obtained anthropogenic food,” and exhibited behaviour which caused Shattuck “to take extreme evasive action.”

Fig. 3: Extractive practices shaped landscapes local to the Flathead Reservation and Flathead Valley, and so, Grizzly habitat, in the early twentieth century. Photographs included in William Henry Smead’s Land of the Flatheads (1905), Public Domain.

In this respect, Lackey et. al.’s 2025 updated definitions, in large part, feel accommodating to diverse historical applications. The terms are poised to respond inclusively in ways which benefit historical interpretation. That “vehicle” (developed from Hopkins et al. (2010) and Lackey et al. (2018)), for example, refers to “all types of transportation, including cars, trucks, and trains”, for example, would accommodate the application of this term to vehicle–Bear mortality incidents on wagon roads in the Sierra Nevada mountains and improve visibility of these histories. There is familiarity in the language of HBC to that of the animal historian (we, for example, might also argue against the unqualified use of terms like “problem Bear,” which shifts blame for a violent outcome onto an animal agency).

Yet standardization of HBC vernacular by “everyone in the bear community” with respect to historical HBC is a complicated ask. Other language, a bit cold on the ankles, reminds you that you are still in the river. How might we read “habituation” in a historical population; what might we consider it in a nineteenth century landscape? The language of legality in the “harvest,” or hunting, of bears in historical contexts complicates historical readings of what does, and does not, constitute “legal” acts on stolen land whereupon ideas about lawful behaviour were socially constructed to privilege certain land relationships. What classifies as “substantial negative consequence” in hazing a food-conditioned animal where what is considered “substantial” is historically contingent? Where practices like “hazing” to “immediately modify” “undesirable” ursine behaviour and create “negative association” with humans and human-use areas might be historically-legible, historical interpretation of “food conditioning” might be subject to greater debate.

Although the framework has clear benefits towards visibility of important histories, I would be remiss not to acknowledge this as a landscape of risk. Where our failure to adopt these terms may limit how we participate in these conversations, adopting universalized frameworks could lead to oversimplifications or ahistorical practice. Likewise, inaction might perpetuate the “invisibility of” certain animal groups and behaviours and lessen communication between fields at a vital political moment for intersectional cooperation. Beyond the debates of the field, there is tremendous difficulty in applying modern wildlife management terminology to describe relationships between historical animals and humans. Historical records written through distinct human lenses were shaped by different priorities and paradigms, and as such,reflectdifferent understandings and expectations of animal behaviour than those we have today. This in particular makesthe concept of universalizing language used to describe historical animals fraught with debate. A wide breadth of literature attends the relationship between the sciences and animal history which reflect these debates: at best, our fields inform one another incompletely; at worst, we cannot see past each others’ failures, or there is no willingness to learn from them. Even the most well-defined terms carry different connotations in contemporary contexts.

Adhering to these terms may improve historiographic relationships with the histories they represent and facilitate work which makes the “boring” Bear story visible. As useful as I have found Lackey et al.’s glossary, and I believe that historians can take an active role in historicizing these categories, I will be the first to admit that we cannot realistically commit to being able to implement all of them in ways which remain perfectly faithful to their original definitions. Though I have found preliminary success implementing Lackey et al.’s terms, for my particular questions, they function best alongside my system for categorizing the historical presence and absence of predator animals conveyed by story, and the corresponding categories which elucidate the social and environmental interlinkages between these stories. Being willing to play with these modes of thinking, however, will make us part of the conversation where adapting them helps us better understand environmental history. And, it is worth saying, I have been particularly encouraged to find that these terms seem promising in their potential to stories like Shattuck’s. While they may serve different objectives in historical data sets, there is utility to these terms in making visible some less “good” Bear stories. Heretofore, I had not decided on how to frame the relationship this microhistory has to HBC, and I feel that now (however imperfectly), I can do so more comprehensively. 

Paradigms designed to understand human-Bear conflict illuminate the boring Bear story for the compelling historical case studies they often are and prompt other questions. How do these frameworks catalyze further discussion in the animal agency debate landscape? Shattuck’s encounter with the mother Grizzly with two cubs can so be interrogated as more than an interrupted fishing trip. The regional, generational patterns I have seen in historical data sets complement other questions. How would examining her history alongside those of her community support other historical wonderings? Was the suggestion that the mother Bear emerged as if to deliberately surprise and scare Shattuck off an anthropomorphizing act of editorial sensationalism, nothing more than a chance encounter,  or had factors far beyond her control impacted her willingness to risk conflict given a decreased availability of high-value food in other salmon-bearing rivers? I like to imagine that, in one version of the story, she had learned that fishing is a little simpler when you make the unsuspecting primate do it for you. It was worth the drive from Kalispell to stand in the sound imagining it on the side of the road.

Fig. 4.: Overlooking Whitefish Lake. October 2025, Caroline Abbott.

The survival of stories like that of Shattuck and the mother Bear in a landscape often painted in the language of particular, socially-constructed ideas of conflict is enough of a reason to do so: on this day, in this place, a Bear and two cubs stood on these banks with a fisherman. The language of HBC might challenge us to see conflict narratives beyond the traditional lens through which we view the utility of their stories towards advancing our own purposes. The stories we overlook might prevent us from losing the trees for the forest, the Bear for its sleuth, the salmon for the river,  the river for the glacier,  the glacier for the pole, the pole for the atmosphere, the atmosphere for the planet,  and with it, a sense for the place of the human-animal relations on the pale blue dot. “An overview perspective of our planet can be helpful,” as Jonatan Palmblad recently wrote, “but it is clearly not enough. Whether witnessing or thinking it, we must nevertheless return to the actual Earth around us—the ground on which we stand.”5

You can’t rush bears, and you can’t rush microhistory. You have to sit there and watch for a while, one story at a time.

Notes:

1. “He Took Water,” The Kalispell Bee. (Kalispell, MT), Jun. 29 1901. Courtesy of the Montana Historical Society, Helena, MT, for Chronicling America via the Library of Congress; Caroline Abbott. “Walked away with her head in the air:” T.GB.1901.1.” Predator Microhistory Network. Accessed November 14 2025.
2. 7th International Human-Bear Conflicts Workshop (IHBCW) Programme Agenda, 11 Sept. 2025, “Changing the Narrative around Human-Bear Conflicts,” Kalispell, Montana, USA, October 5-9, 2025.
3. “Changing the Narrative on Human–Bear Conflicts by Standardizing Bear Management Terms.” International Association for Bear Research and Management, Carl Lackey, Dave Telesco, Kim Annis, Dave Battle, Hilary Cooley, Paul Frame, Lindsey Mangipane, Colleen Olfenbuttel, Mark Vieira, Tammy Waldrop, April 25, 2025.
4. “He Took Water;” “A Hungry Silver Tip,” The Kalispell Bee. (Kalispell, MT), Jun. 29 1901. Courtesy of the Montana Historical Society, Helena, MT, for Chronicling America via the Library of Congress.
5. Palmblad, Jonatan. “The Inhuman Condition: Rethinking Anthropocentrism.” Springs: The Rachel Carson Center Review, February 17, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5282/RCC-SPRINGS-19654.

See also: Staying Safe in Bear Country, presented by John Hechtel, Stephen Herrero, Grant MacHutchon, Andy McMullen, Jane McMullen, and Phil Timpany, for the Safety in Bear Country Society, in cooperation with the International Association for Bear Research and Management, YouTube video, uploaded March 5, 2021, accessed 14 November 2025.
Feature image: Caroline Abbott, Hell-Roaring Creek from the Road. October 2025.
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Caroline Abbott

Caroline (she/her) is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge, where she is a member of Girton College. Her doctoral work will produce an environmental history of human-Bear conflict in northern California with particular attention to extractive landscapes and the California Grizzly. She directs the Predator Microhistory Network and holds an (M.Res. 2019) from Glasgow University. She is managed by a small gray rescue Manx and a formerly-feral house panther.

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