James %22Grizzly%22 Adams

John Grizzly Adams was a famous California mountain man and trainer of grizzly bears and other wild animals he captured for menageries, zoological gardens and circuses. When Theodore H. Hittell met Adams in 1856 at Adams Mountaineer Museum in San Francisco, California, Adams first represented himself as William Adams, then a short time later told Hittell his name was James Capen Adams, an alias he maintained until 1860. He also told Hittell he was born on October 20, 1807, in Maine.

In 1854, Adams retrieved a pair of twoweekold male grizzly cubs from the den of their mother near Yosemite Valley. He named one of them Benjamin Franklin. Ben saved Johns life a year later in 1855, when a mother grizzly attacked Adams. John and Ben both bore the scars of that attack the rest of their lives. The head injury John received in the attack led to his demise five years later. In the summer of 1854, John traveled to the Rocky Mountains to hunt and collect more live animals. He and his hunting companions sold meat, hides and some live animals to the emigrants along the Emigrant Trails near where the Oregon Trail and the Mormon Trail split away from each other . They also sold and traded at Fort Bridger, Wyoming and Fort Supply. During this expedition, Lady Washington had an amorous encounter with a Rocky Mountain grizzly. The mating resulted in a male cub that was born the next year when she was with Adams in Corral Hollow on the eastern side of the California coastal mountains

Source: Wikipedia