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On September 8th, 1916, 61-year-old Frank Welch was trekking his way through the pass with a large load of oats and hay. The haul was destined for campers nearby, as fodder for their horses. He was an avid hunter and an experienced outdoorsman, familiar with the wilderness of Yellowstone, but that didn’t mean Mother Nature didn’t have a few more lessons to teach him.
Early fall brings out the hungry in grizzlies, and this one was no different. They are trying to pack on fat for hibernation and are driven by hyperphagia, but, likely, that word hadn’t been invented in Frank’s day. He just knew they were hungry and were apt to eat anything they came across.
In recent years grizzlies had developed a cantankerous and intolerant attitude toward the presence of humans appearing in their frontier. Given there were few, if any game wardens or park rangers around to keep the peace, if you will, residents were left to their own devices when it came to protecting themselves from the grizzlies.
Now, Frank didn’t know it but there was a big ole hungry grizzly making his way through Sylvan Pass at the same time as him. This bear had been roaming from place to place, digging up rodents and dispatching entire berry patches of their few remaining fruits as he went. Once that griz caught a whiff of Frank’s oats at his camp, its mind was made up, and it wasn’t good for Frank.
Details are scant as to just how the bear ambushed Frank, but the results were grim and nauseating to those who found him afterward. His camp was laid out in a way that allowed the bear to attack from cover and poor old Frank never stood a chance, even though he packed a firearm. Bear spray was almost 100 years away from being invented so his rifle would be all he had for defense next to his knife and luck, which he was apparently running short of.
After his buddies assembled a search party for Frank and the missing oats, they wasted no time in tracking him down. Finding his corpse tattered and torn, they knew they had to dispatch this beastly bruin before being battered themselves.
Today the possession and sale of dynamite is closely controlled but in 1916 the town store handed them out like free samples at Costco. Invented about 50 years prior, area miners used it to open or close mine shafts, but what these bear avengers had in mind added one more use to its long list.
Those crafty hunters rigged a big ole surprise for that grizzly when he returned to Frank’s camp and the oats it had fed upon. They stashed some sticks of dynamite beneath a bag of oats and trailed a long fuse away from it. They then concealed themselves in the bushes, hoping they would remedy this problem bear.
After a few hours, the griz showed up and started munching on the oats it had killed Frank for. The fellas lit the end of that fuse and watched it burn and sparkle its path toward the unsuspecting bear and its ill-gotten cache.
As soon as the fuse disappeared beneath one of the bags of oats, an ear-shattering explosion sent the bear sailing into the air. Medium-rare bear bits pelted the ground around the men a few seconds afterward.
Now rid of the man killing grizzly, the men examined the bear’s carcass to assess the damage done by the explosive. There wasn’t much left to look at and what was left wasn’t worth the effort of burying. Unceremoniously the men left the carcass to deliver the news of Frank’s demise and their vengeance upon it.
Given that the grizzly was blown to smithereens, there is no verifiable evidence of its size, health, or sex. We know it wasn’t defending a food cache and was not surprised by Frank’s appearance. There was no source indicating that cubs were a possible cause for the attack.
Speaking of cubs, our cub tier membership on Patreon, linked below will give you ad-free early access to our episodes and the $3 per month goes a long way in helping me continue to produce educational and entertaining content like this.
Today, the grizzly bear population in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem has rebounded to between 700 and 1100 grizzly bears, thanks to conservation efforts. However, the risk of bear encounters remains, and modern management practices have drastically reduced the number of fatal attacks through better education, bear-proofing strategies, and regulated camping practices.
