Seven-year-old Jean Lenover Brady visited Yellowstone National Park in 1937 with her family and friends. It was part of a 40-day tour of the west made in her Grandfather Sam Lenover’s two-ton Dodge truck. The vehicle had been converted into what was titled a Traveling Hotel. The excursion toured Yellowstone when the roads and campgrounds there were populated with begging bears. Those Jesse James of the highway were not above stopping traffic to obtain a hand out.

The Lenover tour reached Yellowstone in late July and Jean recalled, “The bears were everywhere.” That they were. The feeding station the National Park Service had set up at Canyon to feed garbage to bears reportedly drew 70 mature grizzlies at one feeding. Numerous black bears watched from a safe distance waiting their turn at the table. That station drew 50,000 people to view the bears during the month the Lenover group arrived in Yellowstone.

Jean recalled she had an encounter with a bear when the travelers were camped at Fishing Bridge. She was returning from disposing of trash when she heard a tapping on a window at one of the cabins located there. She looked and a finger was pointed at a bear that was following her. She remembered the bear was not running but slowly walking. After the incident she said, “I no longer wandered around by myself.”

In that period of time the bears associated people with food. There was a good reason they did this because the park was feeding them food left behind by humans, and people were also feeding the bears from their autos. When one of the black bears saw a car approaching it was viewed as a garbage can on wheels that would usually disperse a tidbit.

On a visit to Yellowstone, I asked a young park ranger about the feeding stations that once existed. He noted he knew the park’s history and observed the feeding stations were probably not one of the better practices that took place. He pointed out people and wild life management at the park was always evolving. He said there was one constant in the relationship between the two, when they were at close quarters it was never an acceptable situation. When asked about the reported 70 grizzly bears feeding at the same time at a station, he smiled and said, “It would have been quite a sight to have seen all those grizzlies.”

There were more than a dozen people touring in Lenover’s Traveling Hotel and they saw all the sights in the park. They also saw the many animals that lived in the park, including numerous bears. They mailed post cards home from the new post office that opened at Mammoth that year and attended a lecture that informed them about “Larger Game Animals in the Park.”

Jean recalled her grandfather’s vehicle ran out of gas once in Yellowstone. Gas in the park cost 27 cents a gallon, a one cent increase from the prior year. Then, as today, gas was less expensive outside the park, where it cost 20 cents a gallon.

Sam Lenover and his friends and family had the tools and ability to make any repairs the Traveling Hotel required. Among the many items the vehicle carried were water, food, and fuel burning stoves to prepare it. There were also insulated boxes to fill with ice to preserve food. There were no interstate highways, or numerous chain motels and restaurants, but those on the epic journey did not need them.

After several days of touring Yellowstone, the Traveling Hotel left by the west entrance and headed for the Pacific Ocean. They completed a 40-day excursion that left seven year old Jean and her traveling companions with a lifetime of memories. High on the list was the Yellowstone bears.