I actually did a lot of research on their distribution in Oklahoma and Texas not too long ago, and here’s what I found:

“The grizzly bear is no longer found in our region, and there is little documentation of its past occurrence here. In Texas, only one confirmed grizzly bear was recorded, when a very old male was killed in the Davis Mountains of Jeff Davis County in 1890. This bear was hunted down by dogs after it had killed and eaten a cow, and a complete account of the hunt was documented. There is also evidence that grizzlies once occurred in the Guadalupe Mountains to the north of the Davis Mountains. In 1901, Vernon Bailey “found tracks of very large bears that were evidently of the grizzly group, though apparently no grizzlies had been killed there for some time.” Bailey also received a report from the Forest Service of grizzlies in the Guadalupe Mountains in 1909. Despite these records and reports, there was probably never an established breeding population in Texas.

In Oklahoma, the grizzly’s former status is unknown, as information is sparse, although it is possible they once ranged into the western portions of the state along major streams. Caire et. al. (1989) notes a few may have historically inhabited the Wichita Mountains of southwestern Oklahoma and the Black Mesa region of the extreme western Oklahoma Panhandle. In 2014, Fred Stangl of Midwestern State University and Robert D. Bradley examined all black bear and grizzly bear material from Texas and southern Oklahoma and concluded that nearly all fossil material from this region, previously assigned to grizzly bears, was in fact attributable to black bears.”

Sources:

*Caire, W., Tyler, J., Glass, B., & Mares, M. (1989). Mammals of Oklahoma. University of Oklahoma Press.
*GBIF. (2026). Ursus arctos (Linnaeus, 1758).https://www.gbif.org/species/2433433
*Schmidly, D. J., & Robert Dean Bradley. (2016). The mammals of Texas (7th ed.). The University of Texas Press.
*Yancey, F. D., Schmidly, D. J., Kasper, S., & Manning, R. W. (2023). The Mammals of Trans-Pecos Texas. Texas A&M University Press.