The Real Grizzly Adams Was A Mountain Main Who Became Famous For Training Grizzly Bears, But He Spent Most of His Life As A Shoemaker
If you’ve ever heard of Grizzly Adams, your knowledge was most likely gleaned from a film and television series from the 1970s called The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams.
Both fictional adaptations are loosely based on a real person named John Adams. In the film and TV show, Adams was depicted as a rugged mountain man who fled to the wilderness after being accused of a murder he didn’t commit. He ends up befriending a bear and is quite the nature lover.
The real Grizzly Adams was also a mountain man who became famous for training grizzly bears, but for most of his life, he was actually a shoemaker. And his dealings with the bears weren’t always so friendly. In fact, the true story is much less pleasant than it has been portrayed.
John Adams was born in Massachusetts in 1812. He grew up in a family of farmers and shoemakers and began his career as a shoemaker when he was just a teenager.
From a young age, Adams had a knack for handling animals. He kept a small herd of animals for a circus for a short while, but after an incident with a tiger that left him severely injured, he quit the circus business.
Upon his recovery, he returned to shoemaking and eventually opened his own business making shoes. He also got married and had two daughters. Life seemed to be going smoothly.
However, in 1849, a fire destroyed his business. Afterward, he headed west to California, following the hordes, hoping to strike it rich in the gold mines. He left his wife and daughters behind, but strangely, none of them were ever mentioned in his promotional materials for his Grizzly Adams character.
In California, he spent the first three years of his time there mining, farming, and investing in real estate. He earned enough money to start another business, this time becoming a landowner. Unfortunately, he frequently fell for scams, and at age forty, he decided to call it quits.
He traveled to the Sierra Nevada, grew a thick beard, dressed in furs, and lived off a diet of mainly berries and nuts. He ended up developing a relationship with local Native American tribes and even hired indigenous boys to help him train wild animals.
lucaar – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only
After a few years in the wilderness, he once again began to seek out ways to make money. He cultivated a name for himself as an entertainer. He traveled around, putting on exotic animal shows, and declared himself to be an expert animal trainer.
Although he may have painted a pretty picture of his pursuits, it was anything but. A historian wrote that lions often escaped their enclosures and devoured the Shetland ponies. Tents would collapse, resulting in the injury of many women and children.
Adams also treated the animals with cruelty. For example, his most famous bear, Ben Franklin, was obtained by killing its mother before the cub could even open its eyes. Then, he forced a greyhound to suckle the bear cub by killing all the pups in the dog’s litter except for one.
He kept the bears from acting out through frequent beatings but was never able to truly tame his bears. He described himself as being “beaten to jelly” and “torn almost limb from limb” because of the bears.
In 1858, he suffered a serious head injury during a wrestling match with one of his bears. The next year, he ended up bankrupt after Ben Franklin died suddenly. So he sold his collection of wild animals to P.T. Barnum and worked with him briefly before returning home to his family.
A year later, Adams died at the age of 48 due to complications from his head injury.
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