By Shirley Willard, Fulton County Historian

This image of Rochester's Giant Short-faced Bear is seen in front of the mammoth skeleton display and also on the brochures of the new Indiana State Museum. Photo by Bill Willard.

Only one Giant Short-faced Bear skeleton has been found in Indiana, and that is the one unearthed south of Rochester on west of Nyona Lake on Chet Williams' farm. It has become well-known in scientific circles because it was the biggest most-nearly complete skeleton of a Giant Short-faced Bear found in America.

Since unearthed in 1967, Rochester's Giant Short-faced Bear has been studied by many scientists, painted by artists, written up in various magazines and scientific journals, and is now exhibited in three museums! The original bones are in the Field Museum, Chicago. The new Indiana State Museum, Indianapolis, and the Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre, Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, Canada, have casts made of the bones.

Rochester's famous giant bear is seen and/or mentioned on several web sites.

But it had never been in the Rochester Sentinel nor did hardly anyone in Fulton County know about the giant bear. It has indeed been Rochester's best-kept secret. And a monstrous secret it was, labeled by many scientists as an Ice Age Super Predator!

An article about the big bears of Indiana was published in Outdoor Indiana in 1983, and the author, Ron Richards, described the bones in drawers in the Field Museum, but he did not mention they were from Rochester.

In 2000 I was contacted by a school teacher, Franklin Snocker, Scottsbluff, Nebraska. He asked what I knew about Rochester's Giant Short-faced Bear so I xeroxed what I had, a single South Bend Tribune article in 1987, and sent it to him. He send me two packets of information on the bear from books and web sites. One thing he was looking for was a book entitled: Giant Short-faced Bear, Arctodus simus remains from Fulton County, Indiana.

A few weeks ago I called Ron Richards at the Indiana State Museum to inquire about the mastodon bones there. He said they made a cast of Rochester's Giant Short-faced Bear and it is exhibited in the new museum. The cast was made by Field Museum for $35,000. He has a copy of that book we were looking for about the Giant Short-faced Bear from Fulton County and sent me a xerox copy for the Fulton County Museum. In fact, Richards is the author. I sent Snocker a copy and he gratefully sent me six more packets of material about our famous giant bear to share with local schools. Any teachers or students interested in the Giant Short-faced Bear are welcome to contact me at home at 223-2352 or the Fulton County Museum.

The Yukon Beringia Interpretative Centre and Museum in Canada also paid $35,000 for a cast of Rochester's Giant Short-faced Bear. I brought up their web page and emailed them to ask why they wanted a cast of this bear when they already had others. John Storer, paleontologist for the Yukon government, answered, "Because the Rochester specimen is the best preserved specimen and is a relatively large individual. Alaska and Yukon haven't produced anything as complete, though we do have some odds and ends of large individuals." He told that they had a taxidermist make a fleshed-out version of the giant short-faced bear for a diorama. An artist did a painting of the bear. If you look at the www.beringia.com, you can see Rochester's famous bear.

There are no Giant Short-faced Bears alive in the world today. What made them die off? The evolution theory poses the ice age as the killer of the giant bears, elephants, elks, ground sloths, beavers, and other beasts that were much bigger than today's versions. But all the religions of the world state that a world-wide flood was the cause. Which is more logical, water or ice? You will have to judge for yourself, as scientists, historians and clergy argue back and forth.

Whatever killed them off, we know this much. The skeletons are all located near sources of water or formerly muddy places that dried up after tile was used to drain the county's low areas in the early 1900s. Did the huge aniimals get bogged down in quick sand or mud and, unable to get out, die a slow death of starvation or suffocation?

An interesting idea on what caused the extinction of the Giant Short-faced Bear is found on Texas Park & Wildlife Department's web page: a theory that man invented the atlatl to protect himself from this fearsome mega-predator. An atlatl or throwing stick was a shaft or carved stick which enabled man to throw a sharp stick or arrow with greater force at a longer distance. With it he could kill the buffalo and other beasts that were much bigger and stronger than he was. For thousands of years the Giant Short-faced Bear had raided man's villages and had easy picking. But with the atlatl, man gained the advantage and the last Giant Short-faced Bear died about 8,000 years ago.

There is an Indiana Atlatl Society, with a web page on the Internet. I contacted them and invited them to come to demonstrate the atlatl at the Trail of Courage. Since that is the same weekend as their major atlatl-throwing contest in Evansville, they probably won't get here in September. Don Fisher, a former volunteer at Conner Prairie, said he would come to the Redbud Trail Rendezvous to teach how to make and throw atlatls.