Today, the Sunland neighborhood looks like many other Los Angeles suburbs: single-family homes on the streets mixed with apartment buildings, national grocery chains, drive-thru restaurants and golf courses. Although Sunland is technically part of the city of Los Angeles, it feels completely separate. The neighborhood is located in the northeast corner of the city, near Lake View Terrace and Tujunga, and is separated from the San Fernando Valley and the rest of the city by the Verdugo Mountains and Interstate 210. Behind it lies the vast Los Angeles National Forest.
More than a century ago, a few grizzly bears still roamed the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains that surround Sunland’s northern border. That is, until a disgruntled farmer killed the last one in Southern California, unknowingly contributing to the species’ extinction in the state.
California was once grizzly bear country. Before the Gold Rush, an estimated 10,000 bears roamed the Golden State, but white settlers eventually slaughtered these large mammals in large numbers to protect their property or simply for sport. By 1924, the species was considered officially extinct between Oregon and Mexico.
Cornelius Burkett Johnson put the final nail in the coffin.
A newspaper clipping from 1916 shows Cornelius Birket Johnson with the last known grizzly bear in Southern California. (Los Angeles Times/Newspapers.com)
In 1916, Johnson, a Sunland farmer, set out to capture a bear chewing grapes in a local vineyard. An article in the Los Angeles Times at the time noted that other townspeople also participated in the hunt, “particularly when a valuable apiary was severely damaged as the brown bears searched for honey.” The 300-pound bear was trapped in a bear trap before Johnson found and shot it. The newspaper headline read, “Tasting Grapes and Honey Kills,” and below it was a large photo of Johnson, shotgun in hand, standing behind the bear and looking stoically ahead, surrounded by jungle undergrowth. The October 29, 1916 newspaper also noted that the Sunland community planned to celebrate with a “bear barbecue” in the park.
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The bear was reportedly originally a cinnamon bear (or a black bear), but that changed when Johnson took the bear’s remains to a taxidermist, who quickly confirmed it was a grizzly bear and called it the last of its kind in the state. Grizzly bears were so rare by then that Johnson had probably never seen one before. Taxidermist Andy Booth expressed disappointment, not at the loss of the species but at the lost opportunity to sell the bears alive.
“Had the trapper kept the animal in captivity instead of killing it, he would have made $800,” Booth told the local newspaper. “The hide is worth $200, but any zoo in the state values a live bear at $1,000.”
A grizzly bear swims in a swimming pool at the Oakland Zoo on April 16, 2020 in Oakland, California. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
According to historical accounts published in the Journal of Natural History in 2014, a battle soon ensued between taxidermists Booth, Joseph Grinnell (the founding director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at UC Berkeley) and Frank Daggett of the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science and Art. According to the report, Booth repeatedly tried to sell a skull that he falsely claimed was from a Sunland grizzly bear to two museum directors, and successfully pawned a polar bear skull at the Los Angeles County Museum.
The real skull eventually came into the hands of Grinnell and the University of California, Berkeley, in 1921. But it turns out the Sunland grizzly isn’t the last such skull in the state. This was probably the second-to-last grizzly bear killed in California, with the last grizzly bear actually being killed in Fresno County in 1922 (although another sighting was reported near Yosemite National Park in 1924).
Today, there is little sign in Sunland that the community played an important role in California’s bear history. Black bears do occasionally descend from the foothills into residential areas, but that’s about it. Other areas of Southern California have established monuments to their last grizzly bears. A marker in the Santa Ana Mountains in Orange County titled “The Death of a California Grizzly” tells the story of the area’s last grizzly bear, which was killed in 1908. In San Diego County, the Valley Center Historical Museum displays a massive 1,200-pound stuffed grizzly bear as a reminder of the large animals that once roamed the area. Things are quieter in Sanglan, or at least they always have been.
Last summer, City Councilmember Monica Rodriguez, who represents the community, introduced a motion calling for a permanent memorial to California grizzly bears in Sunland Park (although the motion noted that the monument would likely require grant or donated funds). It’s unclear when or if such a memorial will appear (Rodriguez’s office did not respond to a request for an update before publication).
Until then, the grizzly bear will continue to hover in the backdrop of Los Angeles history and appear in the foreground of every state flag. While the annihilation of California’s grizzlies ushered in a brief era without any bears in the Los Angeles area, that era ended in 1933 when a car salesman trucked bears from Yosemite National Park and released them into the San Gabriel Mountains.
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This article was originally published on California’s last grizzly bear dies in quiet suburb of Los Angeles.