The skull, reduced to an upper jaw and half an eye socket, is kept under glass at Utah State University.

The giant bear terrorized sheep and cattle for 10 years in Utah and Idaho, always getting away until the very end.

The story has inspired poems, songs, a short story and even a novel. The men’s downhill ski run at the 2002 Winter Games, “Grizzly,” was named in honor of Old Ephraim.

His grave in a remote area of Logan Canyon is the site of a granite monument standing his original estimated height of 9 feet, 11 inches.

“Old Ephraim was the last great bear,” said Coralie Beyers, co-author of a book on man-bear encounters from Lewis and Clark to modern times. She called the story of Utah’s grizzly “absolutely the best bear story ever. That is the last time that we have a record of a man and a bear on equal footing. There was a chance for the man and a chance for the bear.”

With a fondness for sheep, Old Ephraim spent the better part of his life decimating flocks before disappearing, leaving only the distinctive mark of a deformed paw that gave him an early name, “Old Three Toes.”

Enter Frank Clark, a sheepherder from Malad, Idaho, and accomplished bear hunter who killed 43 bears to protect his flocks. With Old Ephraim it became personal.

While camping in 1923, Clark awoke to hear Ephraim’s roars of pain and rage from a closed trap. Clark, dressed only in underwear and shoes, spent the night tracking the bear, which chewed through a heavy log attached to the trap and was stalking the area in a rage.

By dawn, Clark saw the bear from a distance and fired, grazing its shoulder. Old Ephraim raised up on his hind feet to his full, massive height. A 23-pound bear trap dangled from a raised paw with 14 feet of chain wrapped around an arm.

Roaring, he lumbered toward Clark, who froze in terror. Not until the grizzly was within six feet did Clark finally pump five bullets into Old Ephraim, but the bear kept coming. With a single bullet left and Old Ephraim almost on top of him, Clark ran for his life.

Just then, Clark’s dog began snapping at the bear’s heels. With the bear distracted, Clark warily approached and shot his final ball into the bear’s ear.

It would be the last bear Clark would ever kill.

“I’m sorry he’s gone,” Clark told an interviewer in 1928. “That bear belonged to the range. … We are all of us much the same I guess, men and bears. And it is a pity we can’t get on better together.”

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page A8.