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March 18 - March 20, 2021
I came to know Babiarz while exploring a series of mysteries in Grafton, a flyspeck town buried in the woods of New Hampshire’s western fringe. A rural, isolated community of about 560 homogenous households (97 percent of Graftonites are white; 0 percent are black), Grafton is a place people come to in search of freedom.
so there we stood, smiling and nodding at each other while he explained how the libertarian philosophy of unfettered personal and property rights intersects with the issue of bear management.
Babiarz was shot once, not during his tenure with the US Air Force, but in his own front yard. A confused pheasant hunter shot him in the ass.
What I eventually learned was that Grafton’s first modern bear attack should have been predictable. And in fact, future attacks are more predictable still.
Soule says that the summer of 1999 was the first time she started thinking of Grafton’s bears as unusual. For many in town, it was already shaping up to be one more bad year in the seemingly never-ending string of bad years that nibbled away at the community’s fragile bonds.
The first half of the year unfolded in the midst of a severe drought; in the forest, every plant, from the mightiest oak to the tiniest wisp of lichen, felt the lack of moisture and responded by withholding the usual bounty of fruit and foliage. That’s when the burden of want fell onto the shoulders of the woodland beasts. Most could slake their thirst from the brackish ponds and small rills left from the once-bubbling brooks, but each day the scarcity of food drove them closer to the brink of desperation.
In July, the drought was capped by a heat wave that scorched the parched grass to a sickening brown scrub; in vegetable gardens, tomatoes unlucky enough to be in direct sunlight literally roasted on the vine.
(The sturdy forty-five-year-old had once used a shovel to beat off an attack by a large, vicious weasel.) In 1999, the bears of Grafton were not bold enough to attack a woman of Soule’s stature. Instead, the bear blew right past her and continued on into the forest, the rustling of the dead leaves beneath its feet a counterpoint to the sudden frantic mewlings of two kittens—Jessica’s kittens—now in its mouth.
The sow that ate Soule’s kittens apparently developed a taste for cats. It taught its two cubs to eat cats, and soon an extended family of bears was predating upon the cats in Soule’s neighborhood.
Though the world thinks of Grafton as a single tiny town in the woods, it is actually broken up into even smaller, discrete historical villages that reflect an earlier era. Graftonites think of themselves as living in East Grafton, Grafton Center, Grafton Village, Slab City (audaciously termed a “city” by its residents, who number, literally, in the dozens), or West Grafton.
Soule’s village, centered on Wild Meadow Road, is called Bungtown, named for one or more barrel bungs that once popped out during a carriage transport and spilled a remarkable amount of alcohol onto the roadway.
At any rate, the cat-eating bears of 1999 were just a blip in Grafton’s ongoing bad year. June’s drought and July’s heat wave were quickly forgotten in September, when deadly Hurricane Floyd ripped through the region, disrupting power lines, peeling shingles from roofs, and uprooting trees. Over the course of a few days, the town went from parched to inundated. Soon, five-hundred-year-high floodwaters had gouged washouts up to eight feet deep into Grafton’s dirt roads and completely isolated some of its residents from the larger world.
In a typical example of Grafton’s municipal dialogue, someone responded by angrily smashing the windows of the town dump truck.
Despite his newcomer status, Eleazar knew enough to drop a few musket balls into his pants pocket when leaving the safety of his log cabin. One day in early summer, he headed out to his pasture and first saw the immense bear about seven car lengths away (a measure that would have perplexed Eleazer, as cars had not yet been invented). Scrabbling a bullet out of his pocket, Eleazer fired with pinpoint accuracy—a direct hit to the head.
The homestead’s cleared pastures, long sight lines, and sturdy house functioned as a bright little oasis of safety—just beyond, in bear country, towering black spruce, hemlocks, barren oak, and bitter hickory created a state of permanent gloom.
Eleazar sought help from a woods-savvy friend, Joshua Osgood, and the pair entered the damp spring forest, following a trail marked by drying blotches of tacky blood. Miles on, the drops turned more viscous—fresh blood. At this point, to maximize their chances of getting a clear shot, the two men split up, which is why Eleazer was alone when the bear charged. With spectacularly poor timing, his musket misfired harmlessly.
One account says that the bear struck Eleazer in the head and that he fell, then rose to his knees as the bear pressed down on him from above. Another says that the bear swiped the gun (which future generations cherished as a claw-scarred family artifact) from Eleazer’s hands and grabbed him, and that Eleazer responded by seizing the bear’s tongue and crying for help.
Though Eleazer lived, his health never fully returned. It was years before he had any children, and the rest of his life was plagued by what he called his “bear fits.”
Lake Winnipesaukee’s Bear Island earned its name after a group of land surveyors in 1772 used both guns and knives in a successful, though bloody, effort to dispatch four bears.
To the bears, the homesteads brought a welcome addition to the landscape. “He places himself between two rows of corn,” complained one contemporary account, “and with his paws breaks down the stalks of four contiguous hills, bending them toward the center of the space, that the ears may lie near to each other, and then devours them. Passing through a field in this manner, he destroys the corn in great quantities.”
unless they were being actively fired upon, the bears showed little fear of the pale-faced primates in their midst. One Grafton County bear hunter, Jonathan Marston, was treed by a bear and spent the entire night trying to get back down. (A search party eventually ended the standoff.)
Late one August day in 1784, a Mr. Leach saw a bear seize his eight-year-old son from the pasture and drag him toward the undergrowth. Leach, horrified, attacked with a wooden stake, but it “broke in his hand; and the bear, leaving his prey, turned upon the parent who, in the anguish of his soul, was obliged to retreat and call for help.”
One solution was to “place a loaded gun, and stretch a line, connected with the trigger, across the field, so that the bear in his walk, by pressing against the line, may draw the trigger, and kill himself.” Though clever, the brutal downside of such booby traps became quickly obvious. “People not apprised of the design may,” a contemporary wrote, “in passing through a field, kill or wound themselves, and in fact this mode of setting guns has, in some instances, proved fatal.”
The British Crown’s failure to engage in bear management was a natural feature of a nation built on belief in a greater power—for millennia, any state-sanctioned killing of bears would have been acceptable only if it were done in the name of gods or monarchies.
Ordering people to kill bears would smack of monarchism. And funding a costly, state-run bear hit squad would require imposing unpopular taxes. Instead of these options, lawmakers devised a low-cost solution that would preserve the right of the individual to act freely: it put a price on bear heads.
when New Hampshire’s freedom-loving individuals were asked to bear arms against bears, Grafton County went to war.
Others baited bears by sheathing clumps of cruelly pointed fishhooks in balls of tallow to literally tear their innards apart. Hunters shot bears out of trees, and pairs of trappers slung dead bears onto poles to carry home. Two teens found a bear treed in a tall pine near their home; the family musket lacked a firing mechanism, so they ignited its powder with a metal poker from the fire.
After a devout Grafton County Methodist named Benjamin Locke was driven from his homestead by bears, his uncle, Tom Locke, killed sixteen in a single season.
In neighboring Vermont in 1815, Governor Jonas Galusha, seeking reelection, proudly announced that he would hunt a particularly notorious bear known as “Old Slipperyskin” with a hitherto-unknown hunting method. Galusha slathered himself with female bear scent and strode off into the woods, only to return to his entourage at a full sprint, the bear behind him. (He lost the gubernatorial campaign.)
In 1783, American colonists exported 10,500 bearskins to England, and by 1803 that number had risen to more than 25,000, with each skin fetching about 40 shillings. As bear populations dwindled, the landscape lost its mystical power over the spirit of the townspeople.
INTO THIS INTENSE cauldron of deprivation and bear-battling came Grafton’s first settlers. Military captains Joseph Hoyt and Aaron Barney brought one hundred apple trees, their families, and a few dozen other optimists, hoping to carve new lives from the bear-infested Connecticut River Valley.
The settlers hated bears with the sizzling, white-hot hatred that comes from living in constant fear. But there was something they hated even more—taxes.
Their first order of business was to completely ignore centuries of traditional Abenaki law by purchasing land from founding father John Hancock and other speculators. Hancock had bought the land from King George III. King George had gotten it from God.
For example, Britain ordered New Hampshire’s foresters to reserve the colony’s towering white pines for use as naval ship masts. This decree sparked the Pine Tree Riots, in which Grafton-area townspeople disarmed a royalist sheriff and his deputies, beat them with tree switches, and sent them home on horses that, in an unfortunate example of misplaced anger, had been shaved and de-eared.
Grafton’s settlers, very much on board with the anti-tax, anti-law sentiment, named their community after the Duke of Grafton, a notoriously lusty British nobleman who’d earned the honor by suggesting that the Crown impose fewer taxes on the American colonists.
Grafton’s third order of business quickly became the avoidance of US taxes. It’s a pursuit that continues today.
Just a year after the Declaration of Independence, Grafton produced the earliest surviving record of its disquiet with taxes—a May 1777 petition in which town leaders tried to convince the ruling New Hampshire Council that they should be exempt.
Two years later, the town sent another, even more strenuously worded (and semi-literate) petition seeking tax relief. This one was written by Jabez Barney, whose marriage to his cousin had apparently not disqualified him from taking a leadership role as Grafton’s town clerk.
The Hoyts and Barneys may have lacked a Harvard degree, but they understood that simply withholding payment wouldn’t stave off Weare’s tax collectors forever. And so they did what any community of reasonable people would do. They voted to secede from the country.
That was when the door opened to admit a late arrival—Colonel Ethan Allen.
Of course that fucking drunk would show up.
Vermont’s citizenry, Allen smugly replied, paid no taxes of any sort. The republic’s coffers were financed by selling land and chattel houses seized from the Tories.
Vermont brigadier general Peter Olcott was raising a brigade of ten thousand fighting men in the Grafton area to help defend Vermont’s right to sit out the remainder of the Revolutionary War—or even ally with Britain. Faced with the specter of being beaten by bumpkins, Weare called upon George Washington, then at the height of his power and influence, for help. An unamused Washington, who was still battling the British, vowed that, if Vermont persisted, “he would turn his back on the common enemy and lead his whole force against that State and destroy it entirely.”
Though Allen had dangled a tax-free republic before them, his actual goal was Vermont statehood. A Vermont claim on established New Hampshire territory gave him a bargaining chip against efforts by New Hampshire to annex Vermont out of existence.
I mean it beats burning down their settlements. Which he totally did.
Confusingly, the two states each appointed their own slate of county sheriffs to the disputed territory. Throughout the summer and into the fall, the two criminal justice systems simply coexisted in an uneasy truce, with each sheriff enforcing his state’s court orders.
Told that there were six hundred fighting men ready to defend the area against him, President Weare ordered the New Hampshire militia to muster one thousand soldiers for a civil war. Bloodshed was ultimately avoided at the negotiating table when Vermont, having extracted promises for statehood, backed down.
A 2012 research analysis of the personality differences between Republicans, Democrats, and libertarians found that libertarians place the highest value on using logic and cognitive skills to solve questions of policy.
Well. So they say.
Despite priding themselves on their logic, libertarians harbor a passion for individual rights that borders on fanaticism. Babiarz took New Hampshire’s motto both seriously and literally.
“Death is not the worst of evils; subjugation may be. A quick death is kind compared to years of cruelty, deprivation, and slavery entangled within a system that robs the human spirit.”
Says the affluent white man.
He called his new small computer company Intergalactic Software and followed that up with Endor Communications (named for the Ewoks’ home planet in the Star Wars franchise), which he ran out of an old outbuilding on the schoolhouse property and used to provide Grafton with its first internet services.
It was clear that Grafton’s distance from central authority could be as challenging as it was charming. His bear woes were heightened because Grafton was caught between settler-era wilderness surroundings and an obligation to follow modern-day rules about wild animals.
