"Bull or Bear"
Mexican Spanish Bulls .VS. Coastal Grizzly Bear
Bronze Sculpture by James Marsico

The edition size is 50. The size is 14" high. If you read up on the origin of the Bull and Bear fights in the early days of California you will discover some awesome stories! Those California Grizzlies of old were really huge coastal Brown Bears that never hibernated due to the mild west coast weather.

They were not like today's interior grizzly bear in size which is about half of what these critters were. They were like today's famous Alaskan Kodiak Brown Bears in size and even larger. The wild Mexican Spanish Bulls and these bears would naturally fight to the death whenever the two met. The Cowboys would put them together in the bull rings with one of the bears rear legs chained and staked out and let bull after bull fight to the death with them.

Some bears were known to kill over 80 bulls in a row before they would finally lose. The bulls would charge in low and swing those horns up and the bears would always stand tall and swing down to break the necks of the bulls in usually just one swipe. This is how the stock market symbols and sayings came into being. The California state flag has a brown bear on it and the Brown Bear is the states official animal , but sadly these big bruins in California were long ago wiped out.