Earth

Anyone who lived in Jasper Park in the period preceding the 1960's sure knew about bears as they lived with them and their troublesome habits all throughout the summer. Bears wandered through the town like dogs. Although they were most active in town at night there was always one or two active on the edge of town and often down-town in mid-day...

You could not walk down a back alley after dark without running into a bear every couple of blocks...scavenging in the garbage cans. They frightened the tourists by strolling across the lawns and sometimes coming up behind them...

...When a bear saw a nice white [golf] ball rolling over the grass near him, he sometimes got up and strolled over for a look and more often than not picked it up in his teeth and wandered away. The dilemma was then to try and recover the ball from the bear — not wise — and if not, how to score that stroke...

I delivered groceries after school for Jasper Hardware and Grocery...and you had to watch the back door very closely or a bear would wander into the store attracted by the smells. One day I was loading the truck for deliveries and...I noticed that a loaf of bread was missing...I looked around ans saw a big black bear strolling away toward the C[anadian].N[ational].R[ailway]. station with the bread in his mouth. He crossed the station platform, which was crowded with people off the train, and never looked right nor left...

There was no hollering or shouting, no fuss, no muss, and nobody trying to shoot him or immobilize him with a drugged dart as they do now. It was just a bear.

Our house was just off the edge of the townsite at the foot of Pyramid Hill and I have seen as many as eight bears go through our yard in the interval between supper-time and dark...

If you strolled along the banks of the Miette River in the daytime you could see bears of all colours and sizes, big bears, little bears, black bears, brown bears, cinnamon bears and shades in between, sleeping in the trees or at the foot of the big trees, or swimming in the Pond or Dead Man's Hole to cool off...

The kids used the Pond to swim in and sometimes there would be a bear enjoying the deep end and a few kids splashing around at the shallow other end...

Even with all those bears around nobody got hurt from bears. One or two tourists got bit or scratched on the arm while trying to feed the bears by hand in spite of being warned not to — but nothing serious...

In the 1960's the Park Authorities destroyed [just say killed ffs] a lot of bears when they persisted in coming into town or to the campgrounds and also "bear-proofed" the garbage cans and buried and burned the garbage so that the food source was generally eliminated. The result of those actions was to slowly erode the bear population down to a very small portion of their former numbers, and a tourist is very lucky if he sees a bear in the park today, although there are still a few coming to the campgrounds at night. I think they learned that if they came around in daylight they would probably get a bullet in the head or an immobilising dart in the arse.

–Bruce Neighbour, Memories of a Mountain Man

My grandmother lived in jasper around the same time and has said the same thing: the locals were fine with the bears, the tourists did foolish shit like trying to take closeup pictures