Charles "Page" Paige Rowell

  General Notes:

He was named after his uncle Paige, whom in later years he strongly resembled, but he always spelled his name "Page". He was like his brother Bert - an outdoor man.
"In the summer of 1890 a big grizzly, called Ol' Three Toes because he had lost part of one foot in a trap, was killing so many cattle on the eastern part of Grand Mesa that the cattlemen offered a reward for him Bert and Charlie went up on the mountain to get him.
Leaving camp in the morning, they split up and went in the two most likely directions. Charlie soon picked up the trail left by the bear as he wallowed through the dew -covered skunk cabbage. When he had followed it only a short distance, it led into an old burn, filled with rotting logs and spruce saplings. A grizzly operates on the principle that the best defense is an offense, and when he is being followed, he will try to set up an ambush. Knowing this, Charlie looked down the trail ahead and saw the hair on the bear's back come up as he put his dead down behind a log. This posed a hair splitting question: too low a shot would lodge in the log; too high would only crease the bear.
Having made a decision, the first shot brought the grizzly up over the log, and Bert, who was about a mile away, said the shooting that followed sounded like a machine gun. In his final struggle, the bear went over on his back with his head wedged between two young spruce. As a coup de grace, Charlie slipped around into position, and put a final bullet between the grizzly's eyes. Bert said that final shot was the most welcome sound he ever heard.
This was accomplished with a rifle that would now (1961) be considered to have only enough foot -pounds of striking energy to make it suitable for very small game. When they skinned the bear, they found that Charlie had put more bullets into him than the magazine of the rifle would hold, but when the shooting stopped. the magazine was full and Charlie had three cartridges in his hand. Bert said nearly an one the shots would have killed the bear - he just needed a few seconds to die.
An itinerant salesman saw the hide stretched on a wall at the ranch, and asked Mother where it came from. Mother said, 'One of my boys killed it.' He said 'How old a boy' When she said 'seventeen' he was shocked. 'Good heavens, lady,' he said, 'do you mean to tell me that a mere child could conquer a beast of that size?" ----Albert Lee Rowell

¹