Close Quarters with Old Ephraim, an illustration from Theodore Roosevelt’s Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (1885). Old Ephraim was a general term used for grizzly bears in the late nineteenth century. 

(USU Special Collections & Archives, Book Collection 16, R-67)

Like any great legend, the Old Ephraim story is a mix of danger, excitement, and a little honest exaggeration. The earliest published account, a 1928 Nature Magazine interview with Frank Clark entitled “A Wasatch Grizzly,” is the closest we have to a contemporary retelling of the event, but we now know even some of these claims were likely clouded by the intensity of the moment and the fogginess of time. Subsequent retellings have further blurred the line between fact and fiction.  

For example, there is some confusion surrounding the bear’s name. “Old Ephraim” was not in fact a name unique to the Utah bear; it was a general term for grizzlies used in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American West. In his 1885 book, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, Teddy Roosevelt used the name to identify a different bear that roamed Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains, though Clark claimed the Utah grizzly was named after a bear in a P. T. Barnum story. Either way, the name was probably derived from Ephraim, a figure in the Bible’s book of Genesis.[1]

It is also unlikely that Old Ephraim stood 9 feet, 11 inches tall and weighed over half a ton. Judging by the size of his skull, experts at the University of Montana’s Grizzly Bear Recovery Program estimate that Old Ephraim was 7 feet, 6.5 inches tall and around 550 pounds. He was still a larger than average grizzly, just not as big as the stories suggest.[2]