The California grizzly was an enormous bear. Father Pedro Font, an early missionary, described the local grizzly bears, writing, "He was horrible, fierce, large, and fat." In the 1800s, multiple newspaper accounts mentioned bears weighing well over . The hind foot of one particular adult male grizzly was measured at long by wide, and claws were often wide by long. In 1866, a grizzly bear described as weighing as much as was killed in what is present-day Valley Center, California. The incident was recalled in 1932 by Catherine E. Lovett Smith, who witnessed the bear's killing on her family's ranch when she was six years old. If its measurements are accurate, this particular bear was the biggest bear ever found in California and, indeed, one of the largest specimens of any bear species ever recorded. (Other sources confirm Lovett Smith's account of the bear, but differ as to its exact size.) Her telling of that bear is part of the oral history of "Bear Valley", the original name for Valley Center. The bear ranged as far south as the Big Sur region of central California. Frank Post, born in 1859 on the Soberanes Ranch in Big Sur, remembered when his family lived at Soberanes Creek, during the American Civil War – and the "Great Sur Bears".
