One of our local historical “legends” was a man named “Bear George” McClellan. He lived not far from my house which means in his written stories, I can recognize many of the places he talks about. I was recently given copies of his obituary and remembrances of him. I also have copies of some of the articles he wrote for popular magazines of his day. Some stories seem to have been bound together in some sort of book owned by Mrs. J. H. Tully, of another local pioneering family. Since Bear George died 88 years ago, I believe these stories are all out in the public domain since the 75 year limit has been reached. If you are sensitive to the wording of the days in which he lived, or if you do not care for hunting stories, or if you don’t appreciate a wry story teller, you may want to avoid these tales of Wyoming in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. It was still a wild and wooly place and Bear George led an adventurous life. Please, let me introduce Bear George McClellan.
*Unknown Source*
”Senator George “Bear George” McClellan’s “Bear Story”
“In the fall of 1885, when I first began to hunt bear in the Big Horn mountains, we had not been up there long before we killed an old sow that had two cubs. We took the cubs to camp, and in the natural course of events they grew up. When they got to be about a year old I had a set to with one of them, and he came out dead. When it was reduced to just one bear, he was a good deal more tractable, and better to get along with.
As a consequence we had but little trouble with him, and when he got to be a 2-year-old, he was a great big fine developed silvertip, and I could ride him, and he was of inestimable value in hunting bear. He could find bear where there wasn’t any.
One evening as I was coming in towards camp there had been just a little skiff of snow in the fall of the year. I saw by the actions of my bear that he was uneasy and I knew that there was bear in the vicinity. So I slipped down off of him and he took right up the hill. There was a little fringe of timber up at the top of the hill. He went out of sight and I followed up as fast as I could, and when I got to the top of the hill, here was my bear, foregathered with a couple other big old silvertips out on a big sagebrush flat. It was getting late and I wanted to hurry as much as possible and I shot the two bear as soon as I possibly could.
It’s no small job to skin a bear, and by the time I had these two bear skinned it was quite late and I went to get my bear to put the hides on to take them to camp, and he was just absolutely unmanageable. We just went round and round; I finally got hold of him and showed him the proper manner to go, and by dint of much persuasion I coaxed him into letting me put the hides on him and started for camp, lo and behold, he didn’t want to go into camp, and wouldn’t go in. There was no such thing as doing anything with him, and we just had another set-to and by the time I got him into the mind of going in to camp I was nearly worn out.
And I got thinking about that bear. Well, I’m a little ahead of my story – one time we had a set-to and I had hit him with a Dutch oven lid and knocked off a part of one of his tushes, and you know, I got to thinking about the way the bear had got so blame mean and I just went up to him and raised his lip and looked- and, he had just a fine set of tushes as any bear you ever saw in your life! And the amount of it was that I had killed my pet bear and rode in on one of the wild ones.”

Good heavens! What a story! The “tushes” were teeth? I can’t imagine that any self respecting bear would let a man ride him. I suspect that Senator George “Bear George” McClellan was something of a tall tale teller. (It wouldn’t be polite to call him a liar, now would it?)