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Book: “Night of the Grizzlies” by Jack Olsen
Publishing Info: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, June 1969
Where Did I Get This Book: I own it on Audiobook.
Where You Can Get This Book: WorldCat.org | Amazon
Book Description: Jack Olsen’s true account, traces the causes of the tragic night in August 1967 when two separate and unrelated campers, a distance apart, were savagely mangled and killed by enraged bears.
Review: Given that I have tried to read more non-fiction this year, I thought that it could be fun to devote one day of Horrorpalooza to a horror story that is true. After all, true stories can be scarier than fictional ones, and while I didn’t really want to do a true crime story for Halloween as it seemed a LITTLE ghoulish, I was inspired by the Tooth and Claw Podcast to instead do a book about the horrors of nature. I decided to go with “Night of the Grizzlies” by Jack Olsen, which is the story of two horrifying grizzly bear attacks in 1967 in Glacier National Park, in which two women were brutally killed by two separate bears in two separate incidents on the same night. It’s probably one of the more well known American animal attack stories, and certainly one of the most well known when it comes to grizzly bears, and it had been on my list for a long time. After listening to the Tooth and Claw episode about the attacks, I decided that the time to read it had come.
“Night of the Grizzlies” is very straight forward in its narrative, telling the story of the two grizzly attacks in Glacier National Park in that one evening, starting with bear incidents that went generally ignored in the park in the weeks leading up to it, and then focusing on the night of the attacks itself, ending with the aftermath. We follow different people and the roles that they play, from naturalists who work for the park to other visitors to the Chalet to park rangers to the victims themselves. Olsen isn’t particularly sensational with his language and storytelling, though he does make the story very easy to read and incredibly gripping. I knew the story going in, but still found it engaging and suspenseful. I liked how he would follow different characters and give us their backgrounds, and I felt like I got to know them without him making any assumptions or taking liberties in their stories. It’s written in a way that is very narrative non-fiction, and it was a quick read that kept at a brisk pace. The stories of the two women killed by these bears are deeply upsetting at their core, as their deaths were shocking, violent, and probably due to the way that the park would throw garbage out for the grizzlies to feed them, which made the bears not only unafraid of humans, but also associating humans with food sources. I also appreciated that before we even get to that story, Olsen gives a lot of straight up facts about grizzly bears not only in Glacier, but in the United States, and the history of them being encroached upon by huge throngs of humans as colonizers moved west and started to spend more and more time in their habitats without having any clue on how to do so safely.
But something to keep in mind about this book is that it is almost sixty years old, and therefore it’s a BIT out of date when it comes to the facts about nature, bear behavior, and other scientific things. There is also some outdated language, and I ALSO felt that Olsen may have been a little harsh on the National Park Service as a whole when it seems like Glacier’s lax policies about bears and feeding bears garbage were a Glacier problem versus the Park Service as a whole. Definitely don’t let bears eat garbage, people. And I will say that that the National Parks do a GREAT job of being informative about the fauna in the parks and how to be safe around them. This is really just a matter of reflecting the time that it was written, and should be absorbed with that in mind. AND ALSO, Olsen sure seems convinced that the rangers killed both bears responsible for the attacks, but I am NOT in agreement based on what we know now about bear behavior and even based on what they found out about the bear after its death. But still, I did find myself thinking perhaps an updated edition could be good, though the demand is probably not exactly clamoring for that…
All in all I found “Night of the Grizzlies” to be absolutely harrowing, interesting, and a scary true story that just solidifies my ‘no thanks’ approach to camping. I’m glad I finally read it!
Rating 7: A gripping and straightforward timeline of the infamous bear attacks at Glacier National Park that changed ideas about the grizzlies there, “Night of the Grizzlies” is well done, thought also a bit outdated.
Reader’s Advisory:
“Night of the Grizzlies” isn’t on any relevant Goodreads lists (the one I found was a general ‘bears’ list and had the likes of “Little Bear” and “The Berenstain Bears”), but it would fit in on “Animal Attacks”.
The Library Ladies 