After the Grizzly. Peter S. Alagona
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and democratic solutions. But to gain such support, they portrayed social and economic differences as antagonistic dichotomies: rich versus poor, citizen versus alien, white versus nonwhite, rural versus urban, masculine versus feminine, ethical versus unethical, honorable versus dishonorable, public versus private, occupied with leisure versus consumed by work. The struggle over hunting regulation and its enforcement in California, as in other parts of the country, thus grew to encompass issues far beyond the conservation of wildlife and became a surrogate for much larger conversations about the social and moral order.
The three main groups of conservationists that debated these issues in California were the same as those that participated in fish and game controversies in other parts of the country. Among the advocates for additional regulations were the professional and amateur naturalists, such as the members of the Berkeley circle, who advocated for measures to conserve wildlife as a public good. Then there were the humanitarians—Protestant clergy, women’s club members, and temperance unions—who worried that cruelty toward animals, including unnecessary hunting, damaged the moral fiber of society. And finally there were the sportsmen, a group mostly made up of wealthy, white, urban men who wanted to secure a privileged place for recreational hunting and fishing as a way to maintain what they considered the rough, masculine virtues of the fading frontier and to combat the feminizing aspects of Victorian culture. They also tended to view working-class men, immigrants, and anyone who relied on fish and game to make ends meet as illegitimate users of these resources.34
In practice these three groups overlapped, but rhetorically they often worked to maintain their boundaries. Sportsmen indulged in bird watching with female companions and sought to mobilize women’s groups for conservation campaigns, but they disregarded, and even belittled, sentimental arguments for animal welfare. Women’s groups played outsize roles in many conservation efforts, including the establishment of some of the country’s first environmental organizations, but they railed against the corrosive moral influence of bloodsports and were often excluded from the grounds of private sporting clubs. Individual women who crossed gendered boundaries or controlled significant financial resources, such as Annie Alexander, who did both, wielded considerable political influence, but they were few in number.
As for the naturalists, many amateurs were women, but most professionals were men who were also accomplished hunters. Naturalists often required sportsmen’s support to fund their projects and organizations. But a large fraction were middle-class academics and professionals who avoided identifying with sportsmen’s groups, which seemed to constitute a kind of New World aristocracy. In public, for example, Joseph Grinnell distanced himself from the sportsmen’s clubs, but in private he worked with them and courted their support. He or his assistants submitted anonymous dispatches, under the pseudonym Golden Gate, to the country’s preeminent sporting magazine, Forest and Stream, updating its subscribers on the California conservation campaign. Grinnell worked to retain the sportsmen’s financial support, including a $4,500 donation in 1914 on behalf of the Berkeley circle’s conservation efforts. And throughout his career he remained a member of the Boone and Crocket Club, a famous cabal of prominent sportsmen that included the former U.S. Forest Service chief Gifford Pinchot, Aldo Leopold, and the club’s founder, Theodore Roosevelt.35
It is impossible to say exactly how different groups of hunters and different forms of hunting contributed to the game declines of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Market hunting must have made a significant impact. In 1895 and 1896, markets in Los Angeles and San Francisco alone sold 501,171 game birds, and this was only a fraction of the statewide total.36 In a biological sense, however, market hunting was no different than subsistence or recreational hunting conducted lawfully under the same seasons and bag limits. The class, gender, nationality, ethnicity, citizenship, rationale, fashion, style, and intention of the shooter mattered less than the number of animals taken, where, and when. What is clear is that hunting of all types—for sport, sale, science, and subsistence—rearranged wildlife populations, decimating some and creating new opportunities for others.
Hunting was, of course, not the only problem facing fish and game in the early twentieth century. Astute conservationists realized that complex factors—such as pollution, disease, exotic species, and habitat loss—all contributed to the decline of native fauna. No one knew this better than Grinnell, who had spent his early career watching the transformation of California’s wildlife habitats. At the time, however, conservationists had few policy or management tools available to address larger issues related to land use and environmental change. So most wildlife conservation efforts focused on hunting: who should be allowed to do it and for what purpose, how it should be conducted, and where and when it should be done. By the 1910s, many conservationists had come to believe that the only way to restore depleted wildlife populations was to turn hunting into a purely recreational endeavor by banning the sale of wild-caught game.37
STATE REGULATION
During the Progressive Era, the states retained almost all of the legal authority over the fish and game within their boundaries, with the exception of a few areas such as Indian reservations. This authority derived from a series of court rulings in the nineteenth century that named the states as the lawful successors of the British crown and the colonies under common law. In the case of Martin v. Waddell (1842), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that after the American Revolution, the states became sovereigns with a general police power and the jurisdiction to maintain navigable waters, soils, and other natural resources in public trust for the common use of their citizens. The public trust doctrine remains a cornerstone of state wildlife and natural resources law.
Half a century later, in 1896’s Geer v. Connecticut, the court went even further when it ruled that the states owned the fish and game within their boundaries. This decision drew criticism for its flawed conception of property, and in 1979 the court overturned Geer when it ruled that Congress had the authority to govern wildlife on federal lands within state boundaries under the supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution. Yet Geer was only one of many court decisions that empowered the states to take the lead in most areas of fish and game conservation—a role they continue to play today.38
By 1910, most states, including California, had extensive catalogues of fish and game codes. Yet these regulations remained limited to the harvest and sale of wild animals acquired through hunting, gathering, trapping, or fishing and did not include other measures such as habitat protection. There was little legal precedent for habitat protection, and few politicians believed state governments should own or manage nonessential properties. Instead of acquiring land or restricting its use, states sought to strengthen the rights of private landowners through measures such as increasing the scope and power of trespass and nuisance laws.39
Conservationists advocated for new regulations on take and sale, but they encountered two main problems: cooperation and enforcement. The first was the lack of cooperation among the various agencies involved—within a state, among the states, and between the states and the federal government. Many conservationists regarded this as the single most important problem for fish and game. As early as the 1870s, government officials began to call for uniformity of closed seasons and bag limits so that hunters in one state could not monopolize the fish and game that the citizens of a neighboring state were attempting to protect. One vocal advocate for state cooperation was the activist, photographer, and Oregon state game warden William Finley. In 1913 he complained that sportsmen in Oregon had grown “tired of keeping seasons closed on certain birds for the sole purpose of allowing the California hunters to kill without regard to the breeding season.” The band-tailed pigeon, he wrote, was disappearing for exactly this reason “and may become extinct before many years.”40
The federal government’s first two national wildlife laws both aimed to increase cooperation. The Lacey Act of 1900 made it a federal crime to engage in interstate commerce with wild animals that had been taken in violation of state laws. It also allowed the federal government to regulate the import of exotic species into the United States and authorized federal programs to restore native species in areas where they had declined. The purpose of the act, which came just four years after the Supreme Court’s Geer decision, was to strengthen the states by buttressing