100 years ago in Spokane: 9-year-old girl attacked by polar bears at Manito Park

Elizabeth Harris, 9, lived through a terrifying experience at Manito Park when two of the caged polar bears grabbed her arm and tore it from her shoulder.

The little girl was feeding the bears part of her sandwich and “probably thrust her hand through the grating to hand them something,” according to the newspaper.

Two park attendants saw one of the bears seize the girl’s hand in its mouth. Then the second bear “leaped on top of the first and tore at her arm.” She was “heroically tugging to free herself from the bear’s jaws, and fell back to the ground, armless.”

The attendants came to the girl’s rescue and rushed her to the hospital, where surgeons performed an operation. They “marveled at her bravery and because of her pluck, they all feel sure she will survive.”

Her mother said “the arm was torn or bitten by the bear right out of the shoulder socket and all that was necessary was to close the wound.”

John W. Duncan, the park superintendent, said the bear’s cage was wired in a way that made it impossible for the bears to get their big claws through bars. Yet it was apparently possible for a little girl’s hand and arm to go through the grating.

From the movie beat: Mildred Davis, recently of Spokane, was lured to Hollywood by the famed movie comedian Harold Lloyd, after he saw her in a short film.

“Faced with the problem of finding a girl who was beautiful and could play comedy besides, I started the search for this blonde girl, not knowing her name or the name of the picture in which I had seen her,” said Lloyd.

He eventually found out her name and discovered she had moved to Spokane to attend a private school.

He wrote her and offered to make her a leading lady in his movies. She appeared with him in a number of films – and eventually captured his heart. They married in February 1923 and remained married until her death in 1969.