Tracking the History of Grizzly Adams in
American Pop Culture
Above: Director-Actor, John Huston portraying “Grizzly Adams” in 1972
By Tod Swindell
©2018 The Grizzly Adams® Company
After Grizzly Adams became famous in San Francisco during the gold rush years, a full century would pass before his name would surface in modern American pop culture, albeit in a somewhat fictionalized way.
It wasn’t until recent decades that more people began to realize a real Grizzly Adams once existed. This was mainly because his brief period of celebrity was forgotten by the advent of the Civil War. That does not, however, negate the western historians who still refer to Grizzly Adams as, “California’s greatest mountain
man ever.”
In pop-culture today, the name, ‘Grizzly Adams’ is most often associated with burly outdoors-men sporting substantial beards. As well, the catch-phrase “get your Grizzly Adams on” translates to “toughen-up” when it comes to can-do attitudes exhibited by men and women of all ages.
A fairly recent example of this can be found in David Letterman’s 2017 eulogy of his late mother, Dorothy Mengering, wherein the legendary Late Show host recalled an incident when his mother happened on a snake in her garden. To his surprise, with her trusty hoe she was fearless with its disposal, causing Letterman to later comment, “my mother is Grizzly Adams for God’s sake!”
Grizzly Adams, the iconic mountain man of the 1850s, did not enter the realm of modern-day pop-culture until the 1960s. He did so slowly at first, by way of Richard Dillon’s 1966 biography, The Legend of Grizzly Adams: California’s Greatest Mountain Man.
Author Dillon was a native of San Francisco who specialized in early early Western Americana. He authored several well-received books including his renowned biography on Meriwether Lewis, that marked the first modern viewpoint to peer into the complicated psyche of the man, who with his partner, William Clark, led the 1804 to 1806 “Lewis and Clark expedition” into the newly acquired northwest territory. Their arduous journey, of course, was famously commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson after he executed the Louisiana Purchase.
Richard Dillon’s work on Lewis led him to examine the incredible life story of Grizzly Adams as well. Only a few years after California became a state in 1850, Adams mounted his own expeditions that traversed the entire north to south American west territories well beyond what Lewis and Clark had managed. Thus it made sense for Dillon to compare Adams’ adventurous spirit and fearless stature to that of the Lewis and Clark team, especially when it came to the historical process of settling the western frontier.
Above: David Letterman resembled his remark about ‘Grizzly Adams’ while referring to his late mother, Dorothy Mengering.
It is clear the real John C. “Grizzly” Adams is due more credit there than today’s historians recognize. As Dillon began one of his lectures during his 1966 book-tour, he referred to the inordinate magnitude of trekking Adams did in the 1850s by saying it was, “all but impossible for a venturesome traveler in the west to avoid cutting Grizzly Adams’ trail.” He also referred to Adams as, “…perhaps the greatest individualist California ever produced.” That was quite a statement—especially about a place that has produced such an enormous number of noteworthy, ‘individualists.’
Above: Richard Dillon’s 1966 biography of Grizzly Adams. Next to his 1965 biography of Meriwether Lewis
In 1966, author Richard Dillon referred to Grizzly Adams as, “perhaps the greatest individualist California ever produced.”
Richard Dillon’s book about Grizzly Adams, as good as it was, only made a minor splash when it was published, but it exists today as the first modern historical account of Adams’ famous western exploits. A more archaic profile about Adams mountaineer life published in 1860, is found in a book authored by a young San Francisco journalist by the name of Theodore Hittell, who came to know Adams in the 1850s.
Hittell’s offering was based on numerous interviews he conducted with Adams. Yet some of his descriptive narrative is hard-to-believe, (and sometimes to digest by today’s standards) and separating fact from fiction in its pages is also a difficult exercise thanks to Adams’ self acknowledged habit of over-embellishing his adventures.
Above: Inside the cover; a rare first edition of Theodore Hittell’s 1860 book about the real Grizzly Adams, who Hittell unwittingly referred to as “James” since Adams identified himself to him that way. And another 1861 publication emphasized the way Grizzly Adams was known for embellishing his mountain man exploits—that left those who studied his life story having to separate fact from fiction.
“And it was in the mountains that I successfully worked out for myself the great problem which other men have to work out, each in his own way, before they can say that they live.”
– Grizzly Adams
The term GRIZZLY ADAMS is a registered trademark of The Grizzly Adams® Company.
The Grizzly Adams® Company
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Beverly Hills, CA 90211
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