It was only the skull of a small, young adult grizzly bear, unearthed in 1975 by Harvard archaeologist Steven Cox near an 18th-century Eskimo house in the northern part of the Canadian province of Labrador. Still, the skull had great significance in that it marked the first evidence that grizzly bears had once roamed the Canadian subarctic east of Hudson’s Bay. The discovery confirmed long-standing Inuit (Labrador Eskimo) and Innu (Naskapi-Montagnais Indian) legends that told of a great savage red bear in the Labrador barrenlands.

Now, Stephen Loring, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, has discovered a second important piece of evidence placing grizzly bears in Labrador well into the early 20th century. While working in the Smithsonian Institution Archives organizing the journals and photographs of William Brooks Cabot (1858-1949), an explorer in Labrador from 1899 to 1925, Loring discovered a previously overlooked photograph of a bear skull strapped to a spruce pole. Cabot had taken the photograph at an Innu hunting camp in Labrador near Mistinipi Lake in 1910.

The Innu traditionally placed the skulls of bears they killed high on poles as a mark of respect, Loring says. “Such rites, they believe, appease the spirit of the bear.

“The photo shows a left oblique view of the bear skull, with a good view of the anterior dentition [front teeth] and the left upper premolar-molar row,” Loring explains in a recent article, co-authored with Arthur Spiess of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, in the journal Arctic. The bear’s jawbone is shown attached to the skull in its proper anatomical position with sinew or twine.
After finding the photograph, Loring and Spiess confirmed it most likely showed a grizzly skull—and not that of a black bear or polar bear, two bear species still found in Labrador. They did this by carefully comparing the skull in the photo to actual bear skulls in the collection of the Natural History Museum’s Division of Mammals. The researchers compared the photo to black bear specimens from Ontario, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and grizzly specimens from the Northwest Territories.

The skull’s ruggedness and “a clear upward concavity in the frontal nasal region,” Loring and Spiess write, distinguished the skull in Cabot’s photo as most likely that of a grizzly.

For more than a decade, Loring has been working closely with Innu communities in Labrador and with the Tshikapisk Foundation, an Innu experiential education initiative, on archaeological and heritage conservation projects.

In 2005, he and four Innu students located the camp where the bear skull had been photographed, and they looked for additional artifacts and evidence. The team also conducted an archaeological survey of Innu ancestral hunting grounds in the Lake Mistinipi region.

During the survey, they uncovered a number of large stone caches and walled cliff crevasses once used by the Innu to store game. During the caribou migration, excess “meat, fat and furs” were commonly cached by the Innu who would return later in the season to collect the stored food and supplies.

Cached food had to be protected against wolves, black bears and wolverines, Loring says, but the substantial size of some of the boulder caches “suggests they may have served to protect against more robust creatures”—such as grizzly bears.

“The region around Lake Mistinipi, including the area where Cabot photographed the bear skull in 1910, seems to have been a core area for a small grizzly bear population that apparently survived into the 20th century,” Loring and Spiess write.

While researching past writing on bears in Labrador—writings that Loring describes as “a motley corpus...derived from fur traders, visiting naturalists and explorers”—the researchers discovered a previously unpublished study by Lucien Turner (1848-1909), an intrepid Smithsonian naturalist, who lived and worked for more than a decade in Alaska, the Aleutian Islands and northern Quebec and Labrador. Turner lived in northern Quebec from 1882 to 1884, was an expert in northern wildlife, befriended Innu and Inuit families, and “made expansive collections of plants, birds, fish and insects for the Smithsonian,” Loring says.

In his unpublished paper about wildlife in the northern Ungave district of Quebec-Labrador, Turner cites three distinct species of bears—polar bears, black bears and grizzly bears.

What Turner knew of the Labrador grizzly was based on accounts of Inuit and Innu hunters. “This animal is not plentiful, although common enough and too common to suit some of the natives who have a wholesome dread of it,” Turner wrote. “I was informed that this animal is extremely savage, rushing up on its foe with a ferocity characterized by no other species of bear.” Although he was unable to procure a grizzly specimen for the museum, Turner did report seeing skins of grizzlies killed by the Indians.

The Inuit and Innu both described grizzlies to Turner as “fat and healthy” upon first emerging from their winter hibernation. After a few days, their condition was described as a “huge mass of skin and bones.” These observations, Loring points out, closely conform to modern studies of grizzly bears.

Taken together, the researchers say, “Cabot’s photo and Turner’s paper serve to further substantiate the fact that a small population of grizzly bears once lived in the Quebec and Labrador peninsula.”