Maybe Hearst Should’ve Sent a Cub Reporter

Mike Barnicle, Patricia Smith, Allen Kelly.

The first two, of course, are the prize-winning Boston Globe columnists recently bounced from their jobs for making up quotes, people, events--everything but their bylines.

But it was Kelly who pulled off one of California’s most colorful journalistic flimflams--an expedition that yielded the last California grizzly bear to be held captive anywhere.

It happened in the mountains of Ventura County more than a century ago--but who ever set a statute of limitations on a good yarn?

This one comes to us courtesy of the Ventura County Museum of History and Art, which recently reprinted Charles Outland’s “Mines, Murders & Grizzlies,” a rambling collection of back-country sagas.

The Santa Paula historian died in 1988, but the museum’s library has his book notes, which are punctuated with acid references to what he called “the great cover-up.”

The story began, as did many others, in the office of William Randolph Hearst, publisher of the San Francisco Examiner. He was just 26 then, and so shy that his voice was once likened to “the fragrance of violets made audible.”

But Hearst also was the ringmaster of a fabulous journalistic circus--and star reporter Kelly was to become one of his most famous acts.

In the spring of 1889, Hearst gave Kelly a blank check and a daunting assignment: Find a grizzly bear and bring it back alive.

Even then, a good bear was hard to find. Grizzlies were on the verge of extinction in the state that features one on its Great Seal, sniffing a pile of grapes. If Kelly could pluck one from the wilds, he would be a hero, Hearst would be a visionary and the Examiner could claim the entire state as its empire.

Incredibly, Kelly emerged from the boondocks five months later with a huge grizzly named Monarch--after the Examiner, which called itself “the Monarch of the Dailies.” A crowd of 20,000 cheered him at the train station.

Monarch was hauled in chains to a cage in Golden Gate Park. He was to become the first acquisition of the San Francisco Zoo, where until his death in 1911, class after class of wide-eyed children came to view the mangy, sluggish, dissipated brute from Ventura County.

But there were some problems. In his book, Outland pulls no punches:

“It was bad enough that this grizzly, one of the last of his breed, was doomed to spend 22 years in a cage for the edification of those who were responsible for the extinction of his race in California. This magnificent animal must then suffer the final indignity of having the circumstances of his capture enshrouded in historical mystery by the damnedest pack of liars that ever set forth on a bear hunt.”

Lies?

In a newspaper?

Outland takes the historian’s stiletto to Kelly’s account--a story to which the Examiner modestly gave over nine columns of its front page.

Kelly did set out from Santa Paula for the bear country of the Sespe with a crew of local guides and hangers-on, including a Ventura newspaperman.

But his thrilling account of the hunt--complete with rattlesnake attacks, a dead man and a quarry much, much smarter than your average bear--raised questions even at the time.

In Ventura County, it was well known that Kelly was an easy mark for his guides, who were boozing it up on what amounted to an all-expenses-paid camping trip. To avoid the trouble of following a trail, they planted false bear tracks near the camp. They even hid in the bushes and made bear noises as Kelly diligently sought his prey.

Suspicions were raised even higher when the Ventura reporter, DeMoss Bowers, accepted another job shortly after the expedition ended. It was on the Examiner staff.

But the final blow to the story’s credibility was struck by Kelly himself.

Fourteen years after the hunt, Kelly unburdened himself in a book called “Bears I Have Met--and Others.” In it, he admitted his big story was false. As reporters have done since Gutenberg invented movable type, he blamed the editors:

“Picturesque features were introduced where the editorial judgment dictated, and mere facts, such as the name of the county where the bear was caught, fell under the ban of a careless blue pencil and were distorted beyond recognition.”

The real story, he said, was that he had fired his loafing assistants and set out to find a bear on his own. His quest ultimately took him to Mt. Gleason in the San Fernando Valley, where he bought Monarch from a “syndicate” that had trapped him.

Along the way, Kelly and Monarch had remarkable adventures. The bear barged into cabins and tormented a corralled bull. A rancher and his son set brush afire to flush Monarch out, but he chased them up a tree and watched from the shade as the flames drew closer.

Outland pointed out a minor flaw in the elaborate account: Except for the name of places and people, it was lifted word for word from a story that had appeared 14 years earlier in a publication called True Flag and then in the Ventura Democrat.

So where did Monarch really come from?

Drawing from other accounts at the time, Outland thinks Monarch was trapped on the slopes of Mt. Pinos in the Ventura County back country. But Kelly, miffed by his treatment at the hands of the Santa Paula locals, wanted to place the capture elsewhere, Outland theorizes.

The capture embarrassed Kelly in an even deeper way, according to Outland. The reporter initially had claimed that he used a steer carcass to lure Monarch closer and closer to a sturdy log trap.

But Outland points to several inconsistencies in that account and speculates that the bear was lassoed in the traditional way by Mexican cowboys.

To preserve his job, Kelly couldn’t reveal that “these uncouth and uneducated cowboys accomplished in a matter of minutes what he, Kelly, had been unable to do in over four months of educated bear-trapping,” Outland writes.

Kelly remained at the Examiner three years after delivering Monarch. He left after questioning the paper’s ethics.

To steal a line from Dave Barry, I’m not making this up.