Booksology “Bear With Me: A Cultural History of Famous Bears in America”
By Daniel Horowitz; Duke University Press, 2025; 290 pages; $29.95.
In 2023, the movie “Cocaine Bear,” which one should hope marked the nadir of cinematic ursine representation, hit the big screen. The film, which according to historian Daniel Horowitz the Guardian compared unfavorably to “Snakes on a Plane,” is just one of the ways that the creature has been seen through an endless parade of popular imagery. This is what he unravels in the cleverly titled “Bear With Me,” an entertaining and enlightening examination of how humans — especially the American variant — perceive a creature we both fear and love.
Horowitz, an emeritus professor of history at Smith College and author of many books, tells us in his introduction that this one was something of a pandemic project wherein he went rooting through our history of interactions with bears both fictional and factual, and how this has badly skewed our understandings of the animals. Sometimes fatally so — see: Treadwell, Timothy.
Bears have long been a subject of Western writings, he tells us at the outset, appearing in the Bible, Aesop’s Fables, Grimm’s Fairy Tales and elsewhere. And from the start, it was human characteristics that were projected into them
It was beginning in the 19th century, however, that bears began taking pride of place in children’s fiction. “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” originated as a yarn about a temperamental old woman’s encounter with three bachelor bears, but soon incorporated a young girl and turned the animals into a family. The folktale has been evolving since, and today is adapted into more versions than ever.
“From the story of Goldilocks’s three bears in the 1830s to the most popular books today,” Horowitz writes, “bears have been more conspicuous in children’s literature than any other animal.”
In decades past, this could sometimes be quite racist, such as with Rudyard Kipling’s Baloo in “Jungle Book,” or in Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus stories. But more commonly they’ve become passive and friendly characters like Winnie-the-Pooh and Paddington Bear, as well as bumblers like Papa in that once politically correct and now Evangelical Christian Berenstain Bears series.
Among adults however, it’s real bears that tend to intrude, and then things get murkier. Consider Hugh Glass, famously attacked in 1823 and the subject of the book and film “The Revenant.” Initially as the story spread, his mauling was secondary to his thirst for revenge on his fellow explorers who abandoned him. But as time rolled on, the retellings gradually shifted the balance of drama to the bear.
Grizzly Adams, immortalized on film and television as a mountain man who forsook civilization, becoming a friend to all bears, was in factuality a complex individual who hunted, trapped, tortured, and killed many grizzlies. Others he trained through abusive means. He was also far from the hermit he’s known as, spending his final years on the East Coast entertaining urbanites with live shows featuring his captive menagerie.
This led to circuses in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, where bears were whipped into mimicking human-like behaviors and other tricks to thrill the masses. Public zoos were also then coming into popularity, and there the treatment wasn’t much better. Horowitz traces the slow improvement of conditions for displayed bears, but they still aren’t living natural lives. Their role is to be there for human observers.
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Meanwhile, what Horowitz calls the “Bear Industrial Complex” was taking form. Much of the credit — or blame depending on how one sees it — is owed to the Walt Disney Co., which has trotted a long string of bears across the silver screen for juvenile audiences. But they’re hardly the only ones who popularized bears for postwar viewers.
Those of us of a certain age will recall the original “Wild Kingdom,” which we thrilled to as children, and often mock now as adults — “Watch Jim as he drops from a helicopter onto a Kodiak bear’s shoulders, grabs its ears, and rides it like a horse!” Despite its many flaws, the weekly program was a pioneer in promoting conservation efforts, a trend that has only grown with the less exploitive “Wild America,” and more recently the rise of Fat Bear Week, where online viewers can vote for the most obese bear on the Brooks River in Katmai National Park.
Still, the animals purpose is to entertain us, not to pursue their own lives, a relationship partly driven by fictional bears and those that are safely cuddled.
Horowitz untangles the history of Smokey Bear, who was created as a cartoon animal to promote fire safety in forests and only subsequently retrofitted as a real bear when an orphaned cub was rescued from a wildfire in New Mexico and dubbed with the name. Though still beloved, Smokey has been criticized as an emblem of colonialism, while forest fire suppression efforts fueled by his image were so successful that undergrowth thrived and much larger fires resulted.
Teddy bears have been ubiquitous children’s companions since before they were named for President Teddy Roosevelt, who killed his share of bears. More than 100 years and countless millions of sales later, they’re the preferred comfort toy for children. And increasingly, for some adults. Among other uses, they assist doctors and therapists in connecting with sick, injured, or traumatized young ones in need of treatment.
Horowitz also explores the rise of gay bears, a subculture in gay communities. They’re men who, in a reversal of human projection, seek to assume the characteristics of bears instead. Especially body hair and girth.
The book ends with the doomed Treadwell, widely reviled in Alaska for triggering the death and consumption of himself and Amie Huguenard in Katmai in 2003. Horowitz sensitively but honestly documents how the deeply troubled man both acknowledged the danger he placed himself in, and downplayed it by assigning names and human traits to the bears he erroneously considered friends.
“In the imagined world,” Horowitz writes, “the blurring of relationships between humans and animals is complicated.” In “Bear With Me,” he shows readers many of the ways this is true.
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