Harper’s Weekly, November 10, 1860
The telegraph has announced the mere fact that James C. Adams, better known as “Old Adams,” or “Grizzly Adams,” is dead. Born in the very eastern woods of Blaine, brought forth in a forest where not even a hut was ready to shelter him, he passed naturally through a rough youth into a wilder and more uncivilized manhood. In 1848, he being then forty-three years old, he went to California, and there ten years hunted among the mountains of that coast. His tastes led him to cultivate the society of bears, which he did at great personal risk, but with remarkable success, using them as pack-horses by day, as blankets by night, as companions at all times. Taking a collection of them, he came to the East, arriving in this city last spring. His menagerie was stationed for some time on Thirteenth Street, and few of our city readers have not seen the strange old man taking a morning airing with a bear or two, accompanied by a limited but noisy band, composed of a bass drum and a piccolo flute. He had frequent personal encounters with his bears, and after a time people began to feel a want of something in their daily paper if the chronicle narrated not how Old Adams had lost a leg, an arm, or part of his head on the day before, through the petulance of his chief grizzly. The gray-bearded, sharp-eyed, rough old hunter finally, however, succumbed to his destiny. He could conquer the passing obstinacy or ugliness of his animals, but the strife left its marks, and repeated attacks of bear were at last too much for him. Almost for the first time in his life, he spent the closing hours of his pilgrimage in the quiet repose of a civilized country home, dying with his friends.