Recalling August 1967
A young man named Don Gullet put the bleeding Roy Ducat in Don's new sleeping bag at Granite Park campground after the fatal grizzly bear mauling of Julie Helgeson … that awful night.
It was at Kalispell General Hospital next day where I found a dazed, tired, hungry Gullet, sitting in a hallway waiting to get his bag back from the operating room where Ducat was being treated. I introduced myself to Don and offered to help him. With the sleeping bag we went to my home three blocks away and began washing it in my kid's plastic wading pool. The water turned bright red. We must have changed the water four or five times before it seemed free of blood stains, then Iris helped us wash it with soap and warm water.
Don was a likable young wanderer and my kids adored him. We fed him, gave him a place to sleep, with the understanding that next morning he would hike with me into Granite Park and show me where and how the grizzly attack had happened.
Aug. 13, 1967 began the notorious "Night of the Grizzlies" that still haunts a lot of people. There are many revivals of accounts now going around because this month marks the 40th anniversary of those shocking times in Glacier. Last week, the Hungry Horse News published several interviews on the subject, mainly with rangers.
The Public Television network is doing a documentary on the subject and have been to my house twice so far to review photos, ask questions and interview me. Can only hope memory is serving well. The people making the documentary seem very well qualified.
Jack Olsen's best selling book, "Night of the Grizzlies," does a good job of capturing the moods and settings of those incidents. I personally feel his ability to build suspense and dramatize sometimes went a little far. Much of the book was founded on reams of notes I had gathered before and after the maulings and he read them as he talked into a tape recorder. Paid me a hundred dollars an hour but he was a fast reader so I didn't make much. With those notes he then went to the sources found in the files. First publication was as a serial in Sports Illustrated. Then came the book.
Time-Life paid me a thousand dollars for the photos, but Olsen then took them over to the book people and they never paid me. Not wanting to speak ill of the dead, I won't expand on that.
Dear friend Mel Ruder used my black and white photos and paid me well. That's the kind of guy he was.
In his book, Olsen called me a man who could use "earthy language." That's probably correct; however, in describing my confrontation with a certain ranger biologist at Granite Park, he said, "Ostrom stood up, unsheathed his knife and flung it into the ground in a fit of blind rage." That is not correct. Admittedly, I was angry with the way some things were being handled up there, such as telling me what I could photograph and what I couldn't. There were angry words but no "fit." My eyes were never non-functional, AND… I would never ever deliberately dull my beloved, finely-honed hunting knife, by throwing it into the dirt.
G. George Ostrom is the news director of KOFI radio and a Hungry Horse News columnist.