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CALIFORNIA COASTAL (WHITE) BEAR
Monterey
Some
Black Bears are actually white, or blonde or silver cream colored.
In the Pacific
House Museum,
the old Customs House of Monterey, now a
California historic park, you can find a white California Coastal Bear,
once plentiful in the coastal hills and woodlands along the Pacific,
feeding on the aromatic juniper and pine when settlers first came to
shores of California. Now he's stuffed and mounted, a reminder of what
once was. The white bears are pretty much gone now in California, though
some remain on the northern Pacific Coast, sometimes called "Spirit
Bears" by the native Indian peoples.
Monterery was
once capital of Spanish and Mexican California, before the Bear
Flag Revolt in 1845. During the days of early statehood after 1850
in the days of the Gold Rush, bears and bulls used to be made
to fight for prize money by the
gold
rush
miners
and
adventurers
of the 19th Century. Crowds would gather
in the square before the docks in Monterey of Sundays for the fights,
with people cheering at the brutality. It was a harsher time and folks
had less care about animals than they do now. This is probably an old
ancestor relative of Leander's. At least he thinks so.Can you see the
resemblance. He's
also pretty sure the bear won most of the time.
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