If you’re of a certain age, you’ll almost certainly remember The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams on the telly. I never watched it myself, but, by cultural osmosis, I still know about John Adams and Gentle Ben. What I certainly didn’t know is the real story behind the tv show – or, indeed, that there was a real Grizzly Adams.
As it turns out, just as Thoreau’s real-life Walden was a short walk from the suburban rail from New York, whence his mother and sister regularly commuted to do his laundry and bring him fresh food, the real story of John Capen “Grizzly” Adams was not quite as portrayed in popular culture.
John Adams was born on October 22, 1812 to Eleazar Adams and Sybil Capen Adams in Medway, Massachusetts. The oldest of seven children in a family of farmers and shoemakers, he received no formal education as a child. Instead, as a teenager he began work as an apprentice shoemaker.
But young Adams was always taken with animals. In his early 20s, he managed a small troupe of exotic animals. But, wild animals they still were, and an attack from a Royal Bengal Tiger nearly killed him.
Adams was bedridden for months. After a year recovering, he not unsurprisingly returned to the slightly less deadly trade of shoemaking. He married, had two daughters and set up business in Boston with his father.
In 1849, fire destroyed the family business and Eleazar committed suicide. So, John headed west to join the California Gold Rush.
At first, life in California was prosperous. After working various jobs, Adams bought land and set up a sluice operation. But a canny businessman he was not. Regularly conned by his business partners, in 1852, aged 40, he said to hell with it all and trekked 200 miles into the Sierra Nevada.
According to JSTOR Daily, this was where the image of Grizzly Adams truly began to take shape. He grew a thick beard, ate primarily nuts and berries, and dressed himself in various animal furs.
By Adams’ own account, “In the fall of 1852, I abandoned all my schemes for the accumulation of wealth, turned my back upon the society of my fellows, and took the road toward the wildest and most unfrequented parts of the Sierra Nevada, resolved thenceforth to make the wilderness my home, and the wild beasts my companions.”
Unlike other mountain men of his time, Adams reportedly developed a close relationship with the Native American tribes in the region. Other mountain men were self-proclaimed “Indian hunters,” mostly down-on-their-luck gold miners who found the offer of five dollars per Native American scalp they could deliver more tempting than the less than a dollar per day they earned in the mines.
Instead, Adams befriended and traded with local tribes, and often hired Indigenous men and boys to help him track and tame wild animals.
And Adams discovered good, old, American showmanship. With his famous bears, as well as many other dangerous animals, in tow, he hit the road as a travelling menagerie, entertaining gawping city slickers with his tales of himself as an expert trapper and tamer.
Except that reality didn’t quite measure up to the hype.
“Lions escaped and ate Shetland ponies,” [historian Jon T Coleman] wrote. “Grandstands and tents collapsed, pinning women and children in the crush; caravans dropped through bridges, wrecking wagons and drowning specimens.”
The shows, in short, were disastrous, and Adams was anything but kind to the animals he kept. In addition to rewarding them for good behavior, he regularly beat his bears to keep them in line.
And the bears occasionally returned the dubious favour.
Despite his marketed fondness for them, Adams once described being “beaten to jelly, torn almost limb from limb, and nearly chewed up and spit out by these treacherous grizzly bears”.
And “Gentle Ben”?
Shockingly, Adams obtained his most famous bear, Ben Franklin, by killing its mother before the young cub could even open its eyes, then forcing a greyhound to suckle the bear. In order for this to work, Adams had killed all but one of the greyhound’s pups.
In the end, the bears had the last laugh.
He sustained a serious head injury during a wrestling match with one of his bears in 1858.
When his prize bear, Ben Franklin, died of a sudden illness, Adams sold what remained of his menagerie to PT Barnum and, after working with Barnum briefly, returned home to his family.
In 1860, Grizzly Adams died of complications from his injuries in Boston, where he was staying with his wife and one of his daughters. He was 48.
All That’s Interesting
Why does real life have to suck so much in comparison to TV?