Sarah Dettmer

The grizzly that killed Kenneth Scott in October 1956 was 8 feet tall and 750 pounds. Scott emptied his .30-06 rifle into the bear’s chest, but it kept charging. The grizzly caught Scott, repeatedly bit into his skull and rolled and thrashed on top of him, bruising and breaking the bones in his limp body.

He was conscious for the whole ordeal and lived for 12 more hours while his friends desperately searched for help.

“God, I wish I’d die and get this over with,” Scott said, according to the Nov. 5, 1956, issue of Time Magazine.

But before Scott became known for his tragedy in the Bob Marshall Wilderness, Scott was an all-American hometown hero in Fort Benton.

He was 5-foot, 10-inches, blond and class president his junior and senior years.

“He grew up poor,” said Don Scott, Kenneth Scott’s nephew. “Grandpa was a dirt farmer.”

He was captain of the Fort Benton football team, where he played as fullback and a winning track and field athlete.

Then a town of 1,800, Fort Benton was slightly larger than it is today. According to the 1945 Fort Benton Pioneer yearbook, the school’s 1944 football season began by beating the Great Falls Reserves 12-0. In the same season, Fort Benton played Malta for the championship of the Judith Basin District and won 45-7.

Scott received several offers to play professional football out of high school, including offers from the Chicago Bears and Detroit Lions, Don said.

“He ran the 100-yard dash in tennis shoes, because they didn’t have cleats back then, on a cinder track in 10 seconds flat,” Don said.

However, he turned down the pro offers and moved to Loma, where he leased 1,200 acres for a Hereford cattle ranch.

Scott graduated with the class of 1945. He married his high school sweetheart Bernita Flatt and they had three daughters together: Connie, Shirley and Glenda.

Years later when he was 29 years old, Scott would go on an elk hunting trip with four of his friends and neighbors, including his longtime friend V.F. “Viv” Squires. Only four men would come home alive.

On the cold morning of Oct. 22, 1956, Scott, Squires, Moe Embleton, Lloyd Cline and Ray Hamm took off toward the Continental Divide near the headwaters of the Flathead River. Scott and Squires spotted fresh elk tracks and headed out by themselves to hunt the animal. Unbeknownst to them, a male grizzly was in the area and picked up their scent.

Scott and Squires had intentionally separated. Scott stayed at the top of a ravine while Squires followed the elk trail down the slope, hoping to flush the animal out toward Scott for a clear shot.

Squires recounted in the June 1957 issue of Real Magazine that he heard a crash in the timber. The angry bear cleared the 50 feet between himself and the animal in three bounding leaps. Squires said he tried to back away, but tripped and fell onto his back.

The grizzly’s teeth closed in on Squires’ ankle, gouging through his skin clear to the bone. The bear shook Squires “like a dog worrying a bone,” he told Real Magazine.

Squires struggled and kicked at the animal with his other leg. Eventually, the bear let him go and took after Scott.

Squires told Real he heard Scott fire two shots. After the ordeal, Scott told Squires he had fired the first shot to try to scare the animal away. Instead, the grizzly charged him. The second shot hit the bear in the chest. The bullet clipped the bear’s shoulder, broke through three ribs, punctured both lungs and then stopped about six inches below the bear’s spine.

The bear turned and ran off, leaving a massive blood trail in its wake.

Scott and Squires decided to track the bear and kill it so the injured animal couldn’t attack any other hunters.

The two took an hour to rest, eat and reload, hoping that in the passing time, the bear would have severely weakened or died on its own.

The two men found the bear on the edge of a hollow and began firing at the animal. Scott’s gun jammed and he knelt down to reload it. Squires fired until he was out of bullets. As Squires reloaded, Scott yelled to him, telling him to run because the bear was charging him.

Squires ran to the edge of the ravine, but the strap of his gun caught a tree branch and he tumbled to the bottom. He lay there, armed only with a skinning knife, when he heard Scott yell and a struggle commence above him.

The forest went silent, and Squires had to decide his next move. He knew Scott was a great athlete and thought maybe he had run from the grizzly. With no weapon, Squires decided the best thing he could to do to help Scott would be to get the other men from the hunting party.

Squires sprinted through the ravine to his horse, and then raced back to camp to gather the rest of the men. The group charged back to the spot Squires and Scott were attacked by the bear the second time.

The men found Scott, still conscious, badly injured and bleeding. The bear was nowhere in sight.

Scott recalled his encounter with the grizzly for the group. The bear had taken Scott’s whole head into its mouth four times.

Scott fought back as hard as he could. A taxidermist later noted a bone-deep slash from the bear’s eye to its ear from Scott’s knife.

The May 1957 issue of Real Adventure Magazine reported that Scott’s scalp had been torn almost completely off, one eye was gouged out and hanging by his ear and his face was covered in puncture wounds from the bear’s teeth.

Scott said after the bear released his head, it laid down and furiously rolled on top of him, breaking six of his ribs and internally injuring him.

Real Adventure reported that when the group tried to give Scott a drink of water, the liquid spilled out of the holes in his cheeks.

The men took off their shirts and used branches to create a stretcher for Scott. They moved him to a creek bottom.

Just before three of the men were about to leave for help, the bear returned a third time feet from where the men sat with Scott.

Embleton raised his gun and shot the bear in the neck. The bullet shattered the grizzly’s spine and it dropped dead.

The men rode out for help, but the telephone line from the local forest-service airfield was down. They did find Frenchy Mayer and Roy Homme, two hunters in the area. Mayer rode his horse 16 miles across the Continental Divide to Benchmark, Real Magazine reported, and called the Palmer Air Service in Great Falls.

“What will happen to my family?” Scott asked the group.

A plane was sent to the area, but it was unable to land in the dark. The 29-year-old Scott died an hour before a doctor finally arrived early Sunday morning.

Real Magazine reported that Squires lived a tough life following the death of his friend. His son, Mark Squires, was bullied in school by kids who called his father a coward for leaving Scott to find help.

Members from Scott’s hunting party came to Mark’s class and explained what happened to the children. All were experienced hunters and assured the students that there was nothing Squires could have done but go for help.

Following Scott’s death, the city of Fort Benton named the community football field Scott Field, in his honor near Old Fort Benton. Real Magazine reported that the memorial was marked by an arched gateway onto the field.

Scott Field no longer exists.

“When the new football field was built in the 1970s, they abandoned that field,” Fort Benton Mayor Rick Morris said. “It became part of the Old Fort Park. It used to be the only place for the community to play football, but then they built that new field over by the high school.”

Robert Schoonover, Fort Benton High School athletic director, said the sign marking Scott Field used to be on the corner of Main and 21st Street.

The memory of Kenneth Scott lives on in the yellowed pages of Don’s magazines from the ’50s and in the stories his surviving family members tell of his glory days on the football field.

Follow Sarah Dettmer on Twitter @GFTrib_SDettmer