http://www.lewisandclark.montanainfo.org/names.htm
Trappers and Indians warned Lewis and Clark of a great bear they would encounter, one of incredible size and ferocity. But Lewis discounted their warnings, and before he ever laid eyes on his first grizzly he penned, “The Indians may well fear this animal, equipped as they generally are with their bows and arrows or indifferent fusees, but in the hands of a skilled rifleman, they are by no means as formidable and dangersous as they have been represented.”
The party encountered its first grizzly on April 29, 1805, in what is now Montana’s Missouri River Breaks. One of the party’s hunters managed to kill it, and Lewis made as detailed a description as had ever been made. In the following weeks, Lewis’s opinion on the bears changed dramatically as they encountered even more grizzlies. Every time a hunter made an attempt to kill one, it charged him, even when badly wounded. In one account of a grizzly encounter, it took 10 shots including five to the lungs to kill the bear.
On May 6, Lewis summed up the Corp’s feelings toward the grizzly. “I find that the curiossity of our party is pretty well satisfyed with rispect to this anamal,” he wrote.
The grizzly’s reputation may well have been its demise. The bears were driven to near extinction just 100 years after the Corps first encountered one. The bears are still listed as an endangered species. Montana has the largest grizzly population of any state in the lower 48.