The Mission To Kill Old Ephraim

[FIELD ETHOS]

The Mission to Kill Old Ephraim | Field Ethos

By Caleb McClain As his horse crested the hill, Frank Clark saw the buzzards circling up ahead. The…

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By Caleb McClain

As his horse crested the hill, Frank Clark saw the buzzards circling up ahead. The odds were that another of his sheep was dead. He wiped the sweat from his brow, cursing the bear-infested wilderness, then pushed on into sweltering Utah summer heat. Upon arrival at the remains of the mangled carcass, he noticed a familiar grizzly track with only three toes on one foot—a common occurrence at his sheep kills.

He made another hashmark on his log of sheep lost to bears, then continued down the trail. He would finish that first summer in the Cache National Forest with 154 marks in his log.

Frank Clark moved from Idaho to Utah in 1911 to get into the sheep business. As part owner of the Ward Clark Sheep Company, he had a vested interest in the unusually high predation on his livestock. Within two years, he would make it his life’s mission to track and kill one of the last grizzlies in the area.

Cunning Old Ephraim​

Just a few miles away sat Old Ephraim, the three-toed bear with a belly fully of sheep. Men claimed he was 10-feet tall and weighed over 1,000 pounds. That, of course, was pure legend. What was not legend was the rate at which he could kill sheep, having once killed 50 sheep from a single pen. Furthermore, he had an uncanny ability to avoid every trap and hunter in the region. Little did he know that there was a man just down the canyon whose entire livelihood was staked on his death.

When the hunt officially began in 1913, Clark already had significant knowledge on Ephraim’s habits, including the trails he used, where he rested, and where he drank. After setting traps throughout the area, he would often come to find them moved and disturbed but never holding “Old Eph,” as he called him. Still, in the first year, he would kill 13 bears. Occasionally, Clark would see Ephraim in the distance, but he would vanish in an instant like the ghost he was. Once, he even caught Old Ephraim in the act of killing a sheep. Despite laying down all the rifle fire he could, the bear escaped unharmed. Meanwhile, the death toll climbed, as it would continue to do for the next decade.

After another summer of death, Clark pitched his tent in Logan Canyon, just outside of Logan, Utah. In the middle of the night, he heard a loud commotion. Not knowing the source of the noise, Clark grabbed his rifle and set out. Just outside of his camp stood the old brute. Perhaps Ephraim was hunting Clark.

The Final Showdown​

Despite the trap on one paw and a chain wrapped around his leg, Ephraim charged. Clark leveled his .25-35 Winchester carbine and fired. The small caliber lacked the stopping power of something like a .45-70; the bear kept coming. Clark fired again and again, six times in rapid succession, Old Ephraim seeming to grow stronger with each shot. He was down to just one last shot. Carefully, he aimed at the charging monster. When the shot broke, the bullet buried deep in Ephraim’s skull. He collapsed on the spot and was buried there.

The Smithsonian paid a local Boy Scout troop $25 to exhume the skull, and they held it on display until 1978, but it now lives at Utah State University. Today, if you hike the 20-mile round trip to see the spot he died, you will see an 11-foot-tall slab of rock with the following poem on it:


“Old Ephraim, Old Ephraim, your deeds were so wrong,
Yet we build you this marker and sing you this song.
To the king of the forest so mighty and tall,
We salute you, Old Ephraim, the king of them all.”

 

[leslie hetrick]

i don,t know how big old ephraim was. but if he was related to the bear in the middle, i would not have been carrying a 25-35.