Michael Godwin - Superblog 3

https://calisphere.org/item/b743f26fed4bc369ed779c7ae1c89860/

This first image is a photograph of the California grizzly bear known as Monarch who is actually the grizzly bear that California has adopted as its "mascot" or symbol which we see today on the state flag. This photograph was taken while Monarch was still living back in 1889 in captivity in Golden Gate Park. This was during the peak of grizzly bear hunting in California which was the period where grizzly bear populations in California began to reduce dramatically. I thought that this image is very symbolic of the state of the California grizzly bear during the late 19th century in how a once dominate and abundant animal was now under the total control of humans as Monarch was helplessly wasting away in captivity while the remaining grizzlies were being hunted down. 


https://www.californiamuseum.org/museum-news/bear-mind-story-california-grizzly-opens-california-museum

This next image is actually also the grizzly bear known as Monarch over a hundred years after the previous image was taken. In this photograph, Monarch's body has been stuffed and preserved for an exhibit about the history and legacy of the California grizzly bear. I thought that this image is significant because it recreates the image that we see on the California state flag with the actual body of the grizzly bear that has been depicted on our state flag for over a hundred years. When this image is compared alongside the previous one, we can see the journey that Monarch as well as the rest of the California grizzly bears have been through over the years and how now their image is used to symbolize the state which hunted them into extinction. 


https://www.naturalhistorymagazine.com/features/182751/the-sunland-grizzly

This photograph is of a Californian farmer named Cornelius B. Johnson in 1916 who trapped and shot the last known grizzly bear in Southern California which was also the second-to-last known grizzly bear in all of California. This is a significant photograph because it is plain and obvious evidence of one of the last remaining California grizzlies laying dead with its hunter posing above it. This is also a symbolic image where Johnson's pose with his foot on top of the dead grizzly symbolizes human dominance and power over nature as well as the final nail in the coffin for the California grizzly bear as human capitalist and urban development began to expand into what was previously the grizzly bear's habitat. 


https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/grizzly-bears-might-return-to-california-is-the-state-ready

The image above is a map of North America which displays the populations of grizzly bears throughout the history of the continent. This map clearly shows the dramatic loss of grizzly bears throughout the United States and how they used to inhabit large portions of the country including most of the state of California. This also shows how humans were the main factor in the grizzly bear being pushed into extinction in the U.S. while the majority of the surviving populations are only in the most northern parts of the west coast. 

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