After the Grizzly. Peter S. Alagona
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empire discovered a small band of elk hiding in the marshes near Buena Vista Lake in the San Joaquin Valley. The firm’s proprietor, Henry Miller, gave orders to protect the animals, and in 1904 he donated a portion of his herd to the U.S. Biological Survey for keeping at Sequoia National Park. Ten years later, Miller gave more of the elk to the California Academy of Sciences, which began to distribute them to parks around the state. All tule elk now derive from that single bottlenecked population.38
As the numbers of hide- and fur-bearing mammals declined, hunters shifted their focus to birds. Between 1850 and 1856, collectors from the Farallon Egg Company harvested three to four million murre and guillemot eggs from the Farallon Islands, west of the Golden Gate. By 1900, merchants were selling at least two hundred fifty thousand ducks, many shot in Central Valley wetlands, in San Francisco markets each year, and more than five hundred thousand waterfowl, upland game animals, and shorebirds were passing through the combined markets of San Francisco and Los Angeles annually. Wealthy urban sportsmen and rural subsistence hunters also took considerable harvests.39
By 1900 the populations of most valuable fish and game species had reached historic lows. The wood duck, the Columbian sharp-tailed grouse, and the band-tailed pigeon had all declined. Rails and other shorebirds no longer frequented their ancestral haunts. Antelopes had vacated most of their range. Beavers and river otters lingered in only a few remote backwaters. The last herd of northern elephant seals retreated to Guadalupe Island off the coast of Mexico. Wolves withdrew into the Rocky Mountains, and jaguars vanished into the Sonoran Desert. Even the common mule deer became scarce.40
California was not alone in the loss of its native fauna. More than two hundred animal species have gone extinct in and around North America since the beginning of the colonial period.41 The victims have included a disproportionate number of coastal and island-dwelling birds, such as the great auk, the Labrador duck, and the magnificent chickcharnie—a three-foot-tall flightless barn owl, elfin in appearance and endemic to the Bahamian island of Andros. Species such as the heath hen provided easy targets for mariners, lost their habitats to land-use change, succumbed to exotic predators, and became the targets of sportsmen, commercial hunters, and scientific collectors who canvased the countryside gathering specimens of dwindling species. The passenger pigeon became the subject of great seasonal hunts in the Northeast and the Midwest, until the birds abruptly disappeared. Thousands of Carolina parakeets died to become hats, as did millions of egrets, herons, terns, gulls, and hummingbirds. Island mammals, large carnivores, freshwater fish, and mollusks also fared poorly. Little information exists for most taxa, but it seems likely that no class of North American vertebrate escaped the nineteenth century with all its constituent species.
Historians have described California’s nineteenth-century economic history as a chronicle of natural resource exploitation that progressed, with plenty of overlap, from animal to mineral to vegetable. The animal part—California’s wild-game hunting frenzy—happened fast, happened late compared to other areas of the continent, and took place on a massive scale. But in the end, it differed little from the overall pattern. Newcomers of all races and classes consumed and wasted wild animals until few remained. Most seem to have believed either that California’s fish and game were unlimited or that it was appropriate to exhaust a region’s wildlife resources during the early stages of its capitalist economic development. As early as 1885, the historian Theodore H. Hittell wrote that the “days of fur hunting, which was once a great business in California, are gone; and it can not be long until wild fur-bearing animals will be curiosities in the country.” San Francisco remained the market center of the Pacific game trade until around 1915, but by then the hunters and trappers had long since moved on to fresher fields in more-remote regions.42
The California fur trade followed a pattern of exploitation and decline that has become familiar to all students of natural resource economics. But this was no simple tragedy of the commons, in which rational individuals, acting independently and in their own self-interest, inevitably exhaust a common property resource. The wild animals that people captured and consumed in nineteenth-century California, from the grizzly to the sea otter to the tule elk, represented much more than just commodities. They served as instruments of cultural domination, of religious persecution, of economic imperialism, of power, and of violence. Those who controlled animals controlled the region’s most valuable natural resources, and, in an economy based on resource extraction, they controlled other people too.
The history of the conservation movement that emerged in the late nineteenth century is in part a chronicle of efforts to restore decimated populations of fish and game. It is also, however, a tale of social conflict. Squabbles among various groups about access to and control over fish and game, as well as who should accept culpability for wildlife declines, sparked a series of debates throughout the country, including California’s first major wildlife conservation battle, which began in 1912. By that time, it was probably already too late for California’s grizzlies, but the stories of the chaparral bear and other lost wildlife species would serve as rallying cries and cautionary tales for generations of conservationists.
RESPONSES TO THE DECLINE
Californians responded to wildlife declines in several ways. They launched research expeditions, founded scientific societies, built academic institutions, started government conservation programs, and enacted dozens of laws that regulated the harvest of fish and game. These were typical responses for the late nineteenth century. Similar efforts were occurring throughout the country, and California’s conservationists worked alongside their progressive colleagues in the Northeast, the Northwest, and the Midwest.
California may not have been unique in its loss of wildlife or in the efforts of some people to protect its fish and game, but it did offer a compelling perspective from which to view the momentous social and ecological changes that occurred throughout the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century. The state represented the culmination of Manifest Destiny in North America, and it would serve as the seat of American imperial power in the Pacific Basin. Between 1848 and 1880, San Francisco grew from a seaside village into the eighth-largest city in the United States, with a population of 234,000. The San Francisco Bay Area, meanwhile, contained more people than all other major western cities combined.43
The new Californians struggled to understand the deluges, fires, mudslides, and droughts that shaped the landscapes of the Pacific Coast. Economic development required natural resources, which California possessed in abundance. But it also required a modicum of stability, which nature failed to provide. There was a point in the mid-nineteenth century when Californians had a choice. They could work with the elements or stand and fight. They could, for example, relocate their state capital from a floodplain to higher ground or decide to stay put and build levees. They opted for the latter. Stephen Powers captured this mentality in 1869 when we wrote that “nature is eccentric and obstinate here and must be broken with steam and with steel.”44 So Californians raised capital in distant financial centers, imported cheap labor from Europe and Asia, and devised new technologies to reorganize their landscapes. They unearthed minerals, raised cattle, planted orchards, sowed wheat, cultivated grapevines, and built cities. They also denuded their rangelands, drained their marshes, channelized their rivers, felled their forests, and washed their mountains out to the sea.
As early as the 1870s, the scientists and conservationists who witnessed these changes in California began to develop a distinctive viewpoint, approach, and set of institutions that would shape the future of fish and game conservation there and elevate them to national and international leadership positions. The state’s abundance and diversity of wild species, combined with its increasing wealth, growing civic institutions, and geography that placed large urban centers in close proximity to wild areas, contributed to the rise of California as a center for natural history research and conservation activism.45
Despite the havoc wreaked on its environment, California gained a reputation as a naturalists’ haven. By the middle of the nineteenth century, San Francisco had become a required stop for all serious students of natural history. Those who came there found that the state still possessed wild tracts of land close to the city where naturalists could explore unsurveyed areas and discover new species unknown to science. The proximity