You might remember The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams , that gloriously ’70s movie and TV drama about a bearded frontiersman who buddies up with bears and roams the untamed American West. This larger-than-life character is based on a real person – James Capen Adams – and while the on-screen version made him look like a man born to the wild, the truth is far messier and far more interesting.

Writing in the journal Environmental History in 2015, historian Professor Jon T Coleman explains how Adams only lived the life of a rugged woodsman in California for a few years after a “midlife crisis.”

“The spectacle of a bearded patriarch commanding nature's obedience hid the reality of an insolvent shoemaker who traded his own flesh and blood for a California dream,” Coleman writes.

Adams wa

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