Wednesday’s fatal bear mauling near West Glacier was perhaps the first in the history of the Flathead National Forest, which lies adjacent to Glacier National Park and contains some of the most productive grizzly bear habitat in the lower 48 states.

“It’s the first at least in recent memory — I don’t know about the ’30s or ’40s or way back — that I’ve heard of,” Rick Connell, a longtime forest employee and a fire management officer, said Thursday. “We have employees who have been here their entire careers and talking with people today, no one said that they can remember one.”

Connell said he isn’t aware of any documented cases of people killed by black or grizzly bears in the 2.5-million acre forest. State officials have yet to confirm the species of the bear involved in Wednesday’s deadly attack.

THE MOST recent such mauling in Northwest Montana happened last fall, when an elderly woman was killed by a black bear inside her Ashley Lake home.

On Sept. 27, 2015, a juvenile black bear entered Barbara Paschke’s house, attacking her and ransacking the house. Paschke, 85, died Oct. 1 at Kalispell Regional Medical Center.

Paschke was believed to have been feeding bears prior to being attacked and had been issued a citation for feeding bears in October 2012.

Paschke’s obituary stated that she had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2009, “which altered her perspective on how to preserve wildlife wisely and safely.”

Officials initially believed Brad Treat’s death Wednesday was the result of an encounter with a grizzly bear, which would make it the first fatal grizzly attack since 2001 in Northwest Montana. In that incident near Ovando, a grizzly killed an elk hunter on the Blackfoot Clearwater Game Range.

Six people have been fatally mauled by bears in the Northern Rockies since 2010, but those deaths were mainly in the Yellowstone area.

Treat was killed on a trail on Flathead National Forest land outside Glacier National Park.

In Glacier Park’s 116-year history, there have been 10 bear-related human deaths. All those occurred between 1967 and 1998.

In the most well-known Glacier attacks, bears killed two people in different parts of the park in a single night in 1967.

Those attacks became the subject of a 1969 book by Jack Olsen, “Night of the Grizzlies,” and a documentary by the same name.

The 1998 incident involved a grizzly sow and two cubs that killed a hiker on the east side of Glacier.

The bears “stalked, killed and devoured 26-year-old Craig Dahl while he hiked a winding trail above Two Medicine Valley on May 17, 1998,” according to author Randi Minetor in her recent book, “Death in Glacier National Park.”

GRIZZLIES in the Lower 48 states have been designated a threatened species since the 1970s, but their numbers are increasing and so are conflicts between people and bears.

There are about 1,000 bears in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem, which covers Glacier Park, the Flathead National Forest and the Bob Marshall Wilderness. At least 700 more grizzlies live in and around Yellowstone National Park, which is roughly 360 miles south of Glacier.

Glacier officials say there are usually one or two non-lethal encounters between bears and people each year inside the park.