The story of the California grizzly bear. Once arguably the most powerful and terrifying animal in the California landscape, it now lives in the imagination, a disembodied symbol of the romantic West. The book is also a portal into one of California's great resources, the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. More than 150 images from the library's archives and collections - newspaper illustrations from the gold rush, paintings from early scientific expeditions, photo albums, sheet music, settlers' diaries, fruit-crate labels, and more - accompany the bear stories of Indians, explorers, vaqueros, forty-niners, and naturalists, among others.
"Bear in Mind proves the truth of that story about the canary in the coal mine, except that this canary weighed a thousand pounds. It seems like they've been gone forever, but it really hasn't been that long. An absolutely wonderful book."-John Nielsen, National Public Radio Environment Correspondent.