The deliberate use of extinction to achieve political ends may seem shocking today, but in fact extermination was a common goal of government wildlife management until as recently as 75 years ago. Although the Hudson’s Bay Company and later generations of trappers failed to exterminate the beaver from the Beaver State, other species were not so lucky.

As Ogden and his trappers followed Bear Creek north toward the Rogue, they startled herds of pronghorn antelope, who raced off across the level grasslands of the valley floor. To the south, bighorn sheep butted heads among the polished peaks of the Marble Mountains. Along the coast, sea otters were common, floating peacefully on their backs among the kelp, or vigorously hammering at mussels balanced on their chests. California condors soared over the coast, and probably inland as well. Gray wolves were common throughout the state, and Ogden encountered grizzlies in the Klamath Basin and the Rogue Valley. All these species are today extinct in the Klamath-Siskiyou.

There is indeed a fascinating possibility that more than one distinctive form of the grizzly may have inhabited the region. In his classic work The Mammals and Life Zones of Oregon (1936), Vernon Bailey wrote: “Captain [Oliver] Applegate says that there was a big brown bear not quite as large as the grizzly in the Rogue River Valley that was powerful and savage enough to be a terror to the early settlers and regarded as more aggressive than the grizzly. It was so aggressive in fact that its duration in the pioneer settlements was brief. The Klamath and Modoc Indians have three names for the bears, Wetam for the black bear, Loke for the grizzly, and Kanocka for the big brown bear. Unfortunately, there are no specimens known to show what this bear was, whether another species of brown grizzly or merely large, morose, and uneducated individuals of the cinnamon- or black-bear bear group. The general keenness of Indians in recognizing specific differences would seem to indicate another species of grizzly with no name but the one they gave it.” Such passages attest to how profound is our ignorance of the lost world of the Klamath-Siskiyou.

The most famous grizzly of the Klamath-Siskiyou was “Old Reelfoot”, a huge silver-tipped bear who had been left lame by a trap. Some accounts claim that this bear’s range encompassed almost the entire Klamath-Siskiyou region: north to Roseburg, west to the coast, east to Klamath Lake, and south almost to Redding. While this may seem implausible, male grizzlies are known to have home ranges as large as 1,000 square miles.