Next to the whitetail deer the black bear is the commonest and most widely distributed of American big game.It is still found quite plentifully in northern New England,in the Adirondacks,Catskills,and along the entire length of the Alleghanies,as well as in the swamps and canebrakes of the southern States.It is also common in the great forests of northern Michigan,Wisconsin,and Minnesota,and throughout the Rocky Mountains and the timbered ranges of the Pacific coast.In the East it has always ranked second only to the deer among the beasts of chase.The bear and the buck were the staple objects of pursuit of all the old hunters.They were more plentiful than the bison and elk even in the long vanished days when these two great monarchs of the forest still ranged eastward to Virginia and Pennsylvania.The wolf and the cougar were always too scarce and too shy to yield much profit to the hunters.The black bear is a timid,cowardly animal,and usually a vegetarian,though it sometimes preys on the sheep,hogs,and even cattle of the settler,and is very fond of raiding his corn and melons.Its meat is good and its fur often valuable;and in its chase there is much excitement,and occasionally a slight spice of danger,just enough to render it attractive;so it has always been eagerly followed.Yet it still holds its own,though in greatly diminished numbers,in the more thinly settled portions of the country.One of the standing riddles of American zoology is the fact that the black bear,which is easier killed and less prolific than the wolf,should hold its own in the land better than the latter,this being directly the reverse of what occurs in Europe,where the brown bear is generally exterminated before the wolf.
In a few wild spots in the East,in northern Maine for instance,here and there in the neighborhood of the upper Great Lakes,in the east Tennessee and Kentucky mountains and the swamps of Florida and Mississippi,there still lingers an occasional representative of the old wilderness hunters.These men live in log-cabins in the wilderness.They do their hunting on foot,occasionally with the help of a single trailing dog.In Maine they are as apt to kill moose and caribou as bear and deer;but elsewhere the two last,with an occasional cougar or wolf,are the beasts of chase which they follow.
Nowadays as these old hunters die there is no one to take their places,though there are still plenty of backwoods settlers in all of the regions named who do a great deal of hunting and trapping.Such an old hunter rarely makes his appearance at the settlements except to dispose of his peltry and hides in exchange for cartridges and provisions,and he leads a life of such lonely isolation as to insure his individual characteristics developing into peculiarities.Most of the wilder districts in the eastern States still preserve memories of some such old hunter who lived his long life alone,waging ceaseless warfare on the vanishing game,whose oddities,as well as his courage,hardihood,and woodcraft,are laughingly remembered by the older settlers,and who is usually best known as having killed the last wolf or bear or cougar ever seen in the locality.
Generally the weapon mainly relied on by these old hunters is the rifle;and occasionally some old hunter will be found even to this day who uses a muzzle loader,such as Kit Carson carried in the middle of the century.There are exceptions to this rule of the rifle however.
In the years after the Civil War one of the many noted hunters of southwest Virginia and east Tennessee was Wilber Waters,sometimes called The Hunter of White Top.He often killed black bear with a knife and dogs.He spent all his life in hunting and was very successful,killing the last gang of wolves to be found in his neighborhood;and he slew innumerable bears,with no worse results to himself than an occasional bite or scratch.
In the southern States the planters living in the wilder regions have always been in the habit of following the black bear with horse and hound,many of them keeping regular packs of bear hounds.Such a pack includes not only pure-bred hounds,but also cross-bred animals,and some sharp,agile,hard-biting fierce dogs and terriers.They follow the bear and bring him to bay but do not try to kill him,although there are dogs of the big fighting breeds which can readily master a black bear if loosed at him three or four at a time;but the dogs of these southern bear-hound packs are not fitted for such work,and if they try to close with the bear he is certain to play havoc with them,disemboweling them with blows of his paws or seizing them in his arms and biting through their spines or legs.The riders follow the hounds through the canebrakes,and also try to make cutoffs and station themselves at open points where they think the bear will pass,so that they may get a shot at him.The weapons used are rifles,shotguns,and occasionally revolvers.
Sometimes,however,the hunter uses the knife.General Wade Hampton,who has probably killed more black bears than any other man living in the United States,frequently used the knife,slaying thirty or forty with this weapon.His plan was,when he found that the dogs had the bear at bay,to walk up close and cheer them on.They would instantly seize the bear in a body,and he would then rush in and stab it behind the shoulder,reaching over so as to inflict the wound on the opposite side from that where he stood.He escaped scathless from all these encounters save one,in which he was rather severely torn in the forearm.Many other hunters have used the knife,but perhaps none so frequently as he;for he was always fond of steel,as witness his feats with the "white arm"during the Civil War.
