The Shoemaker Who Became a Bear

John "Grizzly" Adams was a cobbler from Massachusetts. He was not a particularly good one. A fire destroyed his shop in 1849, and the Gold Rush destroyed what came next — business partners swindled him, creditors took his ranch, and by 1852, at the age of forty, he had failed at essentially everything.

So he walked into the Sierra Nevada and decided to live with grizzly bears instead.

He tamed a female grizzly named Lady Washington and trained her to carry his pack, pull his sled, and let him ride on her back. He raised a cub he called Benjamin Franklin, who once saved his life during an attack by another bear. He captured a 1,500-pound grizzly named Samson, one of the largest ever taken alive. San Franciscans grew accustomed to seeing Adams strolling the city streets with two grizzlies at his side, as though walking a pair of very large dogs.

A grizzly attack left Adams with a silver-dollar-sized hole in his skull, his brain tissue visible to air. That bear became the subject of an 1855 painting by Charles Nahl. That painting became the model for the California state flag.

Adams never knew. He died in 1860, back in Massachusetts, at forty-eight. The bear on the flag of the world's fifth-largest economy belongs to a man who couldn't keep a shoe shop open.

One suspects the bears were easier.