09/04/2026
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Modern bow season owes Fred Bear a considerable debt.
Bear took up archery in the 1920s, when killing a deer with a bow was still enough of a novelty to require some explaining. He began making archery equipment commercially in 1933, won the Michigan target archery championship three times during the 1930s, and became one of the early advocates for giving bowhunters seasons of their own.
Then he went about building better bows.
Bear Archery grew from a small Michigan operation into one of the defining names in American archery. Bear helped advance fiberglass-laminated bow construction, and the company’s Kodiak family of recurves became some of the best-known hunting bows of the postwar era. Later came the Bear Takedown, with removable limbs and the sort of practical engineering that mattered to hunters who actually traveled with their bows.
More important, Bear proved the things worked.
He carried recurves after whitetails, elk, moose, sheep, bears, and other big game around the world. And he brought cameras. His hunting films put close-range archery hunting in front of Americans decades before outdoor television made such things commonplace.
His influence was personal, too. A young Ted Nugent encountered Bear through family bowhunting trips to Grayling, Michigan, and eventually became his friend and hunting companion. Nugent later recalled spending time with Bear shooting recurves and sharing deer camp at Bear’s Grouse Haven property in Michigan. Even after compounds became ascendant, Nugent remembered Bear sticking with his Kodiak recurve and shooting instinctively. Nugent eventually memorialized his mentor in the song “Fred Bear.”
Bear also became one of the founding figures of the Pope & Young Club in 1961, helping give North American bowhunting its own record-keeping institution.
Nearly a century after Bear first picked up a bow, we have carbon arrows, laser rangefinders, trail cameras, mechanical broadheads, and compounds capable of speeds he could scarcely have imagined.
The deer remain unimpressed.
The job is still to get close, draw without being seen, and put the arrow where it belongs.
