The story of Old Ephraim

              The story of Old Ephraim told by George R. Hill
This is Thanksgiving evening 1954.  George R. Hill and Mom, Elizabeth Odette McKay Hill, have had a delicious Thanksgiving dinner at the home of their children and grandchildren and Pop is going to tell the six grandchildren at the Hill house the story of Old Ephraim.When Frank Clark took his sheep up on the new sheep allotment in Right Hand Fork he hadn’t been there a week until a bear came around, a big bear, with a footprint larger than a man’s shoe.  The old bear got into Frank’s sheep that were bedded down on a big brush-covered knoll and he scattered those sheep something awful and he killed 2 or 3 of them and ate part of 2 or 3 of them.  Frank was furious and he went to town and he got a great big bear trap weighing about 50 lbs and he got a log chain and he brought ‘em up to try and trap the old fellow, but the old bear wasn’t there.  But he came again in about a week, over to John Nebeker’s sheep in Long Valley, and he did the same thing with them.  About a week later he did it at Joe Peterson’s sheep in Blacksmith Fork, and he did the same thing again.  About a week later, he came back to Frank Clark’s sheep again.  After a few visits, he found that Old Ephraim had a pattern.  He loved to bathe in a little seep spring.  He’d scoop it out and let the water get in there, and then he’d lie down in the muddy water till he got thoroughly soaked and then he’d walk leisurely up over the divide into Blacksmith Fork.  They got to calling the seep spring that he used to bathe in “Old Ephraim’s Wallow,” and the trail that he used to walk up “Old Ephraim’s Trail” and the sagebrush covered knoll where Frank bedded down his sheep and where he’d like to get into them and raise havoc among them “Old Ephraim’s Knoll.”  In vain they hunted this chap, but nobody got a chance to even see him, neither at John Nebeker’s or Joe Peterson’s or Frank Clark’s.  They tried baiting him with poisoned honey in a can.  He was too good for them.  He wouldn’t take it. They tried putting the trap in the seep springs where he’d wallow so that when he came back again he could step in it.  He’d come back after having a feast on sheep, would wallow in the spring again, but before doing that, he’d throw the trap out and then with a stick, snap the trap and let is spring off.  They hunted him all that summer.  They hunted him in the summer of 1912 and well into the summer of 1913.  One day Frank was startled when he saw his herder Sam Welsh come dashing down to the camp with “Frank, I’ve seen him! I’ve seen him!”  “You’ve seen who?” “I’ve seen Old Ephraim.  Why that fellow’s as big as a cow.” “Do you mean that you saw Old Ephraim and didn’t take a shot at him and finish him off?  The old bear that we’ve been hunting all these years?”  “Oh, but, Frank if you’d seen him you wouldn’t have taken a shot at him either.  I was sitting on that big rock overlooking Ephraim’s Knoll when out from the aspens came a bear.  Oh, he was big and he just calmly stopped and looked me over.  He was about 50 yards away and after he looked me over for about 2 or 3 minutes he just naturally sauntered on up the trail and after he was out of sight, I came down to tell you.” “Oh, you’re chicken – you’re frightened – let me get my eye on him and he wouldn’t get away.” Well, they hunted him that year and the next and the next and the next and the next. They trapped, uh-h, a great many brown and black bears, but never did they catch sight of Old Ephraim once.  In 1921 Old Ephraim didn’t show up a’tall.   That was the tenth year that they’d been trying to catch him, and they concluded that he was so old that he’d died of old age. In 1921, however I mean, 1922, however, Frank hadn’t been onto the range more than a week –and he usually got on about the last of July – when there was a slaughter in his herd.  Old Ephraim came, and that time he was much more ferocious than he had ever been before.   He killed 20 or 30 of the sheep and he’d take a bite out of the breast of each and that’s all.  Frank was thoroughly disheartened at that.  One day as he rode his old grey mare up Aspen Fork, came at the head of Right Hand Fork to Old Ephraim’s Wallow and there was a trail of water running up towards Ephraim’s Knoll along Ephraim’s Trail that hadn’t even dried, he hadn’t been gone long enough for the drippings of the water to dry.  Frank said, “Ah hah, Old Ephraim, I’m gonna get ya this time.”  And he rode right down to the mouth of Trail Hollow and got the old trap.  He came back to his cabin and he got the two springs that he used to - , the two clamps that he used to set the trap with because they were, - the springs, - were so strong that he couldn’t set them without the clamps.  He wired the log chain to the trap very securely, threw it over the saddle horn of his old grey mare, and rode up Right Hand Fork to Ephraim’s wallow that was about a half mile above his camp and he cut down an aspen log.  That aspen log was nine inches in diameter at one end and six inches in diameter at the other and was nine feet long.  Around the middle of that log he wrapped the chain and wired it securely so that he couldn’t get it off and then he set the trap, climbed on to his horse and rode up to the seep spring.  He dropped the trap, into the spring without getting off his horse a’tall, so as not to leave any more man-scent around there than he could.  The log was there with the chain wrapped around it; he took a willow and he smeared mud all over the chain where it came out of the water all over that log.  And he rode back down, and he said “Ah hah, Old Ephraim, I’m gonna get ya this time.” He rode back up the next afternoon, but Old Ephraim wasn’t there.  He’d been there, though and he’d carefully dragged the trap out of the spring and he’d dug a new wallow and he wallowed in it and had gone.  But he made a fatal mistake that time, for the first time he hadn’t poked sticks in the trap until the trap had been set off, and there it was set open all ready with great big jaws and meshing teeth, and all that Frank had to do was to take a stick and inch it over until he got it into the seep spring and it sank out of sight in the muddy water, and he turned around and he went back and he said, “Old Ephraim, I’m gonna get you this time.”  He hadn’t gotten off his horse a’tall.  There wasn’t a chance for new and fresh man-scent around there. That night, it was a starry night and it was cold, but there was no moon.  And about 2:00 o’clock or three in the morning, uh-h-h, Frank heard an awful – (loud growl/scream) – a scream, that sounded like a cross between a wild bull’s bellow and an African lion roar.  And he said it waked him up in his sheep camp, and he sat bolt up-right in bed and he said “What in the world have I caught up there? That’s no bear sound. I guess he’ll be good though with that great log and the chain wrapped around it.  I’ll get up there first thing in the morning and settle him off, whoever it is, and whatever it is.” He had just dozed off to sleep again, when – (loud growl/scream) – and he sat bolt up-right again and he said, “Well, Frank, you’re gonna let it get on your nerves.”  So he laid down and tried to go to sleep again.  He was just about to doze off, when – (loud growl/scream) – and that time he found that whatever it was, that it was coming right down that trail, toward his camp and that it was just about in the middle of a bunch of brush which was a quarter of a mile in diameter and soon as it got through that bunch of brush and with a hundred yards, it’d be in his camp.  Sheep-herder-like, he’d pulled off his boots and his jumper and climbed into bed, so as to be ready to pull on his boots quickly the next morning and go out after his sheep.  He thought, “I’ll settle that old fellow in short order.”  So he got up and pulled on his boots, he didn’t take time to slip into his jumper; and he grabbed up his gun and started up the trail that he knew just as well in the night-time as he did in the day-time, he’d ridden it so much.  But he was on foot and he came up to that bunch of brush and he walked through, and uh – he looked and looked and looked and pretty quick he came out the other side of the bunch of brush and he realized that whatever it was, he’d passed it!  Right there!  In the night!  And so he leaned on to the top of his gun barrel and folded his arms and waited – oh – 14 or 20 minutes.  I presume the old fellow thought that he’d gone on and all at once – (loud growl/scream) – there came a scream from that old bear and he was down in the brush, just a little ways.  Frank looked up the side of the hill and he saw a Douglas fir tree, and he lit out to get to that Douglas fir tree ready to climb it and he expected the old bear right after him.  So he sat down to wait and to watch and to keep guard till daylight came. It was cold that night.  It froze the water solid in a two-quart lard bucket that he had down at his camp and he didn’t have his jumper with him and he just about froze.  But when the grey dawn came the next morning and he could see, he picked up his gun, but his fingers were so numb he could hardly hold on to it.  But they warmed up as he walked down to the edge of the brush and there he went through the brush, very carefully, very carefully, until he came out the other side of the brush and then he knew that whatever it was that was in there had gone on through the brush, with him up there sitting guard.  Then he was stumped and just as he came inside of his sheep camp, he heard the scr-r-ream again, down in a bunch of willows.  He immediately crossed Aspen Fork and went down a little trail to get a good sight of the chap, and there over the tops of the willows he saw a bunch of fur.  So he shot into the fur.  Imagine his surprise when an old bear, head and shoulders above the top of the willows, stood up – oh-h, he was mad.  His mouth was just as read as fire and frothing and his teeth, his incisors.  Around his right front leg, the chain was wrapped just as neatly as one could ask to have it wrapped and there was the trap on his foot.   He saw Frank and he came at him, walking right through those willows just as if they were so many weeds.  Frank waited until he got through the willows and then he shot right through the fellow’s heart.  Down went the chap, but instantly up again and coming and “bang,” he shot again and down he went again, but up and he was coming and he shot him again, three times, right through the heart and down he dropped again, but up and was coming and that time, he got to the edge of the willows.  There was just a little hill about six feet high that separated the trail that that old bear was coming on and the trail that was leading down Aspen Fork that Frank was on and when he started to scramble up that little hill, Frank stepped back up through the next sheep trail to get a better (purchase).  As soon as the old bear got to the top of that hill, he reared up on his hind feet, coming again, his eyes were green, his mouth was just panting, oh-h-h he was angry and Frank shot again, right through the heart.  Four times within a two or three inch span, right through the old bear’s heart and he dropped again, but up he was coming.  He said I knew he was critically injured because the blood was coming out of his mouth in spurts, but he was coming with all the fury that a bear could possibly come.  I never wanted to see a man so bad in my life.  I just decided I had to see a man those four shots with the one I’d shot into the fur were all that I had in my gun, though I had another in my overall’s pocket, but to see that man, I must get to John Nebeker’s two miles away.  So I started for John Nebeker’s ranch up Long Valley as hard as I could run and the old bear right after me. Somehow I became aware of the fact that my dog had lit in after the bear as soon as he started to chasing me and the old bear had stopped and dropped to all fours to get at the dog.  And I had unloaded my gun and had slipped that one other shell that I had into the chamber and I turned around and I shot him right behind the ear, and that time he dropped and I didn’t go back to him a’tall.  I’d seen all that I wanted of bear that morning so I went down to the little horse pasture that I had about a quarter of a mile below to get a horse to ride to Joe Peterson’s, but my horses had smelled and heard the fracas and there wasn’t a horse in sight.  As long as I hobbled the old white mare the other horses would stay there, but she’d gone too, but I could track her because of the hobbles, and I tracked her down to the mouth of Trail Hollow and then up Trail Hollow about two miles where I found her.  Her foot was caught in an aspen root and she was trembling just like a leaf.  I took the hobbles off from her and made a rope hackamore and put it on her, patted her a minute and rode her on up Trail Hollow and over the Blacksmith Fork Divide and over to Joe Peterson’s. And when Joe saw me coming he said, “For Heaven’s sake, Frank, what’s the matter?” “Joe, I’ve killed him, I’ve killed him.” “You’ve killed who?”  “I’ve killed Old Ephraim.”  “Well, isn’t that what you’ve been trying to do for the last 11 years?”   “Yes, but it wasn’t like I thought it was gonna be.  Joe, you’ve got to come and go with me and let me put my foot on that old bear’s neck and realize that he’s dead so that I can get hold of  my nerves.”  “Not much.  If the sight of that old bear affected you that way, you won’t get me around him.”  “Oh, Joe, you’ve just got to!” Well, finally after breakfast they went over and saw the old bear lying in the trail.  They couldn’t get the bear trap off from his foot until they got the clamps, and so they rode up the trail down which the old bear had come and he had been on his hind feet all the way.  He hadn’t dropped to all fours once, except that night he was in the wash, the trail went through that bunch of brush just to the left of the wash, and at the point that he was closest to the wash.  At that point Old Ephraim had dropped down on all fours and crouched and as Frank went by, he could have reached up and swatted him and that’d been the end of Frank, but he didn’t.  They followed him up to the uh-h-h, Ephraim’s wallow and what did they find?  Why they found the aspens all chewed to toothpicks.  They found the log chewed almost in two, in two places, and in the third place it had, he had chewed it until it broke off and he got the chain off. They went down and measured the old bear.  He was the length of a 5 foot shovel and handle plus two double spans, from the tip of his tail to a point midway between his ears.  So they figured that he was over 9 feet long and that he weighed over 1200 pounds.  One of his tushes [teeth] had been broken out by biting that trap so hard.  They found that the others were just as long as a man’s finger and the shaft and uh-h-h… that it was very difficult even though they tied the horsed to keep them there while they took off the trap and skinned the old bear.  It was in the summer time and the fur was shedding, but they skinned it and that skin today is in Frank Clark’s backyard in Malad. The rule in the Forest Service is that an animal that dies within 50 feet of a water course has to be buried completely or he has to be drug so that he’s more than 50 feet away from the water.  They lassoed the bear and tried to drag him away, but the horses were so skittish, that they wouldn’t pull and so they dug a hole and buried him, but the bear smell was so strong, that they couldn’t keep a horse on the place.  So Frank uncovered the bear and got a lot of dry willows and set him afire to burn up the bear scent and the bear.  And the willows blazed up and they melted the fat in the old bear’s carcass and this caught fire and burned with a blue-green flame, flickering up all night long and there Frank was in his camp, 50 yards above, where he could see that eerie blue-yellow flame and he couldn’t sleep. The next day he went down and covered the old bear up thoroughly and he tried to sleep the following night, but he couldn’t, so he had to send and get his brother to come and watch his sheep for the rest of the season, while he went out to Malad to recuperate. That was the story of Old Ephraim as it was told to me the night of August 12, 1922 at Tony Grove Ranger Station by Jack Mortimer.  He told it to me when I went down to telephone that the scouts had made a successful hike to the top of Mt. Naomi and were camped just above Tony Grove and were having a fine time.  I could telephone their mothers who would be anxious about a lot of boys that had never been away from home at night.  About a week later, I went down to the Intermountain Forest and Ranger Experiment Station in Ephraim Canyon, and I told that story to Dr. Sampson.  He said to me, “don’t waste any time without writing that to Dr. C. Hart Miriam.  Dr. Miriam is writing a monograph on the grizzly and he has found grizzly skulls extending from Mexico up to Alaska, but he never yet has found an authentic skull from the Wasatch Mountains and he believes that they weren’t in here.  You must write that to him at Laguna Beach, California immediately.”  So, I came back to Logan and wrote Dr. Miriam that story. The letter went down to Laguna Beach, but he had left for the Smithsonian Institution at Washington, D.C. in the meantime and the letter was forwarded to him there.  There came, just at the time of school opening, a letter from Dr. Miriam stating I must have that old skull because if it’s a grizzly’s skull I’ll pay $25.00 for it.  I usually pay that amount for the grizzly’s skull, but I have never yet had a skull sent to me from the Wasatch Mountains and if that is a grizzly bear, I must have it put into my story of the grizzlies in North America. I went to a Boy Scout executive conference at Blue Ridge, North Carolina, when I got back home, I was so busy with school that the letter was left unanswered until another letter came begging me to get Mr. Clark or Jack Mortimer or some other man to ride up there and to dig up that skull and to send it to him.  I telephoned Frank Clark.  He said, “What, go up to there for that skull?  Not for $25.00 or $2500 would I go up there.”  I tried Jack Mortimer and Jack Mortimer said, “Oh I haven’t the time and I don’t know exactly where he was buried.”  And I tried Hop Rice who was another ranger that knew that country very well, and he wouldn’t go. On election night, 1922, I told that story to my troop of Boy Scouts, Logan Troop #5, and they immediately sent up a chorus “Why don’t we go up there and find that old skull and send that to Frank Clark.  We owe a big bill of money on our garage that we’ve tried to pay off, but we still owe $75.00 on it and that’d pay off a third of it.” So it was arranged that the following Friday afternoon Troop 5 would go on a hike on their scout rambler up to the Boy Scout camp which was about five miles as the crow flies from the point in Right Hand Fork where Old Ephraim was killed.  It was 11 miles around the way you’d normally go to get to it.  We went there and camped and the next morning a group of the boys decided to go right through the Right Hand Fork, which was a box canyon overgrown with brush so thick that there was no trail through it a’tall.  But the boys decided that they could worm their way through the brush at lots less time and effort than hiking around the 11 miles to come in to the place from above.  We worked our way through and it was very difficult and when we got within a half a mile of the top of the box canyon it started to rain.  I then sent the younger boys back and with five of the older boys, who were just about ready to become assistant scout masters, we hiked along through above the box canyon, it’s about 2 miles to the mouth of Aspen Fork and I knew that somewhere along our sheep-trodden trail, that old bear had been buried.  We carried a lunch along with us in a large cracker box and a shovel and as we came to the mouth of Aspen Fork we strung out and each boy took up the trail each watching for charred willows, as an evidence that there had been a fire, and that was probably the place where Old Ephraim was buried.  I followed up the rear and finally sticking out from the side of the trail, I found a willow that was about 2 or 3 inches above the soil and the end of it was burned off and I said “Fellows I believe we’ve found the place.”  They dashed back and started digging and sure enough, they found the place and they dug up Old Ephraim’s skull.  My but it was ripe.  It had had 4 months to become thoroughly rotten and smelly, but we dug up the skull and then had to go on beyond that place for an eighth of a mile so we could eat our lunch away from the stench.  Then we moved back and put the skull in the cracker box and tied it up securely and with a willow, an aspen, that was about a rod long, we slipped that through that box and I got on one end of it and another boy got on the other so that we were at least 8 feet away from it and carried it on our shoulders and finally got back to the Boy Scout camp. We put the skull in my garage all winter, but wrote to him, to Mr. Miriam, that we had been up there and secured the skull, and just as soon as it was in a condition that it could be shipped without being destroyed, we would ship it to him.  The next spring we shipped it to him, and in about two weeks there came a letter back with a check to “Logan, Utah Troop #5, Boy Scouts of America – one old male grizzly skull - $25.00.” That summer I was taking the troop up to the scout camp again and ran on to Dallas (Lor) Schaub in his frock coat.  He was a special lecturer at the UAC summer school.  He said, “Where are you going?” I said, “We’re going on a scout trip up to the Boy Scout camp.  Would you like to go with us?” and he said, “You bet I would.”  So we took him along with us.  That night around the camp fire, I told the story and he said, “Won’t you please let me have that story as you’ve written it, as you’ve told it and I’ll publish it in the Nature Magazine.”  So I wrote it to him and he went to the Smithsonian Institution.  He found the skull.  It was numbered and in the Smithsonian Institution, it had been burned, charred, you could tell that that was the skull.  He published the story in the October 1927 number of Nature Magazine. The following year, 1923, I wanted to, later than this trip with Dr. Schaub, I got Ray B. Croft, professor of Forestry, and another young chap and as we hiked up to the spring where Old Ephraim had been killed, and we found Frank Clark just below, he told us the story again.  We went up there, we got the three pieces of that log that were there, brought them down to the scout room as trophies.  Measured the height to which the chap had left his tooth mark, the highest in there and it was 114 inches above the ground that his clear-cut tooth marks had bit into an aspen tree.  We went down and examined the chain and the trap and had Frank tell us the story again and said to him, “Frank, there’s a group of (…).”  Later on, on the 23rd of August, the fathers and sons had an outing up there and I led the troop of boys up the 11 miles around to the place where Frank Clark had had the experience.  We ran onto Frank Clark, he told us the whole thing about it.  The boys were wide-mouthed.  We went up to the spring, we came down and then I said to Frank, “Won’t you please come down to the father and sons camp tonight and tell that to those men and boys?”  “Oh,” he said, “I’d be frightened to death.”  “Oh,” I said, “you must do it.  That’s a wonderful story,” and so just at dusk I looked out and there came Frank on the same old grey mare to the Boy Scout camp. That night it was rather cool and we had a big fire in the fireplace in the scout lodge and the boys and men were seated all around.  It would hold about a hundred people, and on the balcony the boys were seated with their feet hanging over and there was that firelight flickering on Frank Clark’s face.  He told the story to those boy scouts and you never saw boys with wider-mouthed wonder listening to a story than to Frank Clark as he told the story of Old Ephraim.

(December 6, 1996, story transcribed from audio tape donated by Emily Monson, great-granddaughter of George R. Hill by Beverly Murri; retyped and corrected November 2008 by Becky Skeen)