Original numbers and distribution of grizzly bears are uncertain. Perhaps as many as 250,000 once roamed the western half of North America, with 50,000 to 100,000 of these south of Canada. Today, the lower 48 states hold roughly 1,600 grizzlies. In other words, there is only 1% of the original population of grizzly bears remaining in the lower 48 states today on less than 2% of its original habitat. In the 1850s, when European settlers were first moving west, grizzies occupied nearly all of the western Great Plains, the Rocky Mountain region and the entire west coast. By the 1920s, their range was just a fragment of what it had been just 70 years earlier. At the end of the Twentieth Century, their range was just 1-2 percent of what it once was. And even in some of the current habitat, their population is unknown.
Map courtesy Sightline Institute.
