From the Book jacket:
For more than half a century, grizzly bears roamed free in the national parks without causing a human fatality. Then in 1967, on a single August night, two campers were fatally mauled by enraged bears-thus signaling the beginning of the end for America's greatest remaining land carnivore.
Night of the Grizzlies, Jack Olsen's brilliant account of another sad chapter in America's vanishing frontier, traces the causes of that tragic night: the rangers' careless disregard of established safety precautions and persistent warnings by seasoned campers that some of the bears were acting "funny"; the comforting belief that the great bears were not really dangerous-would attack only when provoked. The popular sport that summer was to lure the bears with spotlights and leftover scraps-in hopes of providing the tourists with a show, a close look at the great "teddy bears." Everyone came, some of the younger campers even making bold enough to sleep right in the path of the grizzlies'
known route of arrival. This modern "bearbaiting" could have but one tragic result
Yet for all its ferocity, the grizzly held a special place in the hearts of conservationists, especially the men of the Park Service, to whom the great beast-like the fierce bald eagle-was considered an American hero, who should be allowed to roam free and unfettered. As Olsen writes: "Such heroes carry within themselves the stuff of tragedy; people break rules for them, make concessions to them, until sometimes the heroes wind up destroying themselves." Man was moving in on the grizzly, and no powerful carnivore, least of all the proudly independent grizzly, will go gently into the dark night of extinction. That dark night provides the climax of Night of the Grizzlies, a superb story of nature, survival, outdoor lore ...and terrible tragedy-tragedy for which man himself bore no little part of the responsibility.
