A 1920s Colorado Grizzly Hunt That Cost a Cowboy’s Life

The account comes from a cowhand who spent more than twenty years hunting big game across North America with rifle, longbow, and camera. The most dangerous moment of his life, he writes, came by accident during the late 1920s, when an aging silvertip grizzly crossed paths with a working cattle outfit in southwestern Colorado.

The Order From the Old Man

It was a Saturday evening at the Quartercircle C Bar N bunkhouse, with ten cowhands scrubbing up and dressing for a trip to Thurston, a small mining town then in the middle of a short boom. The mirth stopped when C. L. Nelson, the ranch owner, burst in on a blast of cold air and told the crew to quiet down.

Nelson had a job. He wanted two hands to load a pack horse with four or five days of grub and head up to the valley above White Owl Creek. A wolf trapper named Chink Jillings, then up at the house thawing out a couple of toes, had spotted the ranch’s whitefaced cattle in that valley, plus horse tracks, as many as six to eight head with colts, down in a box canyon about two miles below. Nelson believed they were the breeding mares and colts he had bought in Montana and spent ten days searching for in November.

The urgency was the bear. Jillings had cut the trail of what he called a very large grizzly and left the country fast, carrying nothing heavier than a .22. “I dropped a big wad of jack for ’em and they’re way too good to make a meal for one of those hog silvertips,” Nelson said of the mares. The plan was simple: move the stock into the corral so they could reach a stack of grass hay, then one man would stay while the other rode back for the rest of the crew.

Two Riders Head Out

No one volunteered. Nelson settled it himself, naming Barney Two-Pony, a full-blooded Cheyenne and the outfit’s undisputed top hand, who had already decided against going to town. Then the Old Man turned to the youngest hand on the crew, the narrator, called Mac.

“You, Mac, get them fancy duds off and take a ride up there with Barney,” Nelson said. “The experience will do you a world of good, besides being just what you need.” He softened it with a nod to Mac’s taste for hunting, adding that Jillings had described a whopping big bear waiting in the valley.

Mac could have quit, but jobs were scarce, and it was the middle of winter. He went.

Two men rode up toward White Owl Creek that night. Only one came back.

The post A 1920s Colorado Grizzly Hunt That Cost a Cowboy’s Life appeared first on AllOutdoor.com.