Grizzly Adams’ Bear Samson On The

California State Flag

For many years it was erroneously considered that the grizzly bear on California’s state flag depicted a bear named ‘Monarch’ that once belonged to William Randolph Hearst. The promoted story was that in 1889, the newspaper mogul hired a hunting party that included one of his own reporters—and the party captured a grizzly bear alive in the wild and brought him back to San Francisco.

Once there, the bear was named ‘Monarch’ and he remained in captivity in the Golden Gate Park Zoo until he died in 1911, the same year California’s state flag was officially adopted. After his death, Monarch was mounted and preserved at the Golden Gate Park Academy of Sciences. Thereafter, the Hearst-promoted legend grew about, ‘the last captured California grizzly bear that ended up on the California state flag.’ This legend, however, was never actually true.

Obscured by Hearst’s self-concocted promotion, it was overlooked that Monarch’s transposed image never actually appeared on the flag. In time the correction was made by the California State Historical Society, when it confirmed the bear image on the flag had actually been rendered from an 1855 painting done by famous Gold Rush artist, Charles Nahl, his subject being Grizzly Adams’ most magnificent bear, ‘Samson.’ Charles Nahl came to know Grizzly Adams well in the 1850s, and did many illustrations of the famous mountain man beyond his iconic painting of Samson—the grizzly bear depicted on the California state flag.