Samson, King of the Grizzlies

Native Americans were awed by him. Grizzly Adams captured him. P.T. Barnum showed him. Abraham Lincoln visited him. The California state flag immortalized him. And then he disappeared.

"He" is Samson, the biggest brown (grizzly) bear ever recorded from the continental United States.

Bears are amazing animals. They're adaptable, smart, and really magnificent-looking.  Indeed, bears have the largest and most complex brains of any large land mammal relative to their size, and their intelligence, while hard to test, probably overlaps that of the higher primates. A bear  in California learned how to bounce on the roof of a Volkswagen Beetle and pop the doors open.   Show bears have been trained (if historically with unacceptable methods) to do amazing things. Also, they're big. But Samson was one of a kind. 

John "Grizzly" Adams was California's most famous bear hunter. Among other things, Adams kept good relations with Native Americans wherever he was. It was they who told him of a gigantic grizzly bear no one dreamed of trying to hunt. Adams had seen hundreds of bears, but he'd never seen the like of Samson. He reminisced that, "He looked like a moving mountain and my heart fluttered at the prospect of being discovered." Admas decided not to shoot the animal but to build a trap with a pen of logs, something he'd done for smaller bears..Samson was wary, but eventually took the bait.

Samson was shown in Adams' menagerie, established in San Francisco in 1856. There Charles Nahl painted him, and he became the bear on the California state flag. Samson was moved with the other animals (Adams' close companion, the famous grizzly Ben Franklin, had just died) to New York in 1860. At this point, Samson, while he carried some "cage fat," nonetheless was a monster: he was weighed on a hay scale at 1,510 pounds, whereas an animal half that weight is now considered a very big bear. He was billed as the biggest bear ever that ever lived in the United States, and he quite possibly was (noting the U.S. did not own Alaska back then.)

There are few photos of Adams, and I've found no  information about whether Samson was photographed. I'd think he probably was at some point.  

Photo of Adams with a smaller bear

Adams sold the collection to P.T. Barnum in 1860 and was hired to show the animals. Adams, who had a terrible head wound from an old bear attack that could not be treated with 1860 medicine, died on October 25 of that year. Barnum's American Museum mention Samson as a live exhibit several times. Abraham Lincoln would have seen Samson when he brought his family there in 1863. Barnum, of course, couldn't resist boosting his star bear's size. An ad in the New York World (February 21, 1861) reads, "OLD ADAMS’S CALIFORNIA MENAGERIE OF AMERICAN BEARS, GRIZZLY BEARS, &c.THE GREAT MAMMOTH BEAR, SAMSON, Weighing near 2,000 pounds." 

The mystery: despite searches and a 2021 blog post, I've never found a source that said when Samson died or what happened to him. (Other bears have been named Samson: one died in the Toledo Zoo in 2023.)

One source says he had "been removed" just before the 1865 fire, and the New York Times expanded on this by saying he had been sold in New Orleans. I have so far found nothing later. Whenever he died, he was probably not stuffed for exhibit (or at least there are no accounts of it in online archives) but it seems strange the mammoth skeleton was not saved. Does it still exist? Is it in a museum? Or is Samson, like its species in California, gone for good?