After the Grizzly. Peter S. Alagona
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was tough on Monarch. According to the Examiner, the grueling voyage had left the great bear “travel-worn and thin. . . . His broken teeth trouble him some and it will be some time before he will feel as well as he did before he was caught.” The paper assured its readers, however, that Monarch was “brightening up, and when the abrasions of his skin, made by ropes and chains, are healed up and his hair grows again on the bare spots he will be more presentable.”7
On November 10, around twenty thousand people gathered at Woodward’s Garden—a long-shuttered zoo, museum, and theme park that was then in San Francisco’s Mission District—to attend a reception celebrating Monarch’s debut as the only California grizzly in captivity. It was a merry outing for most of the attendees. But for Kelly the day’s festivities offered little cause for cheer. Looking back, he recalled that after Monarch’s capture, the bear had “exhausted every means at his command to break out, and when convinced that he was beaten, he spent one whole day in grievous lamentation and then ceased his futile efforts. Monarch is a brave old fellow and he ought to be free in his native mountains. If he still regrets that he was captured I sympathize with him for I’m more than half sorry myself.”8
Kelly never said exactly why he was sorry. But he knew that California’s wildlife was declining rapidly and that zoos were miserable places for most animals. His experience with Monarch had challenged him and changed him, and it seems safe to say that he had decided that wild creatures, particularly large and intelligent animals such as grizzlies, belonged in wild places. This was not a common belief at the time, but Kelly would be far from the last Californian to reach that conclusion.
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE CHAPARRAL BEAR
Before the arrival of European explorers, settlers, and missionaries in the late eighteenth century, grizzlies roamed throughout most of what is now California. They lived on the seashores, in the valleys, in the foothills, and in the mountains all the way up to the alpine zone. They favored grasslands, wetlands, woodlands, and brushlands—especially chaparral—but they ranged widely throughout the region’s diverse landscapes, from the Sierra Nevada and the Cascades to the Coast, Transverse, and Peninsular Ranges, into the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys, and along coastal bluffs and prairies including the San Francisco Peninsula and the Los Angeles Basin (see map 2). The only part of California that grizzlies probably did not frequent was the eastern deserts. They did, however, wander all the way out to the desert fringe, especially during the sporadic years when the piñon trees produced their sumptuous crops of buttery pine nuts.9
Unlike their relatives farther north, California grizzlies lived in a region with year-round resource availability. They remained active day and night, consumed a wide variety of foods, and had no need to hibernate. Grizzlies scavenged the carcasses of beached marine mammals, grazed on perennial grasses and seeds, gathered berries, and foraged for fruits and nuts. They rooted around like pigs in search of roots and bulbs, and after the introduction of European hogs, the bears ate them too. At times and places of abundant food—such as along rivers during steelhead spawning seasons or in oak woodlands during acorn mast years—grizzlies congregated in large numbers. Such a varied and plentiful diet produced some enormous animals. Male California grizzlies could grow to more than fifteen hundred pounds. This equals the maximum size of the largest grizzlies alive today, Alaska’s Kodiak bears, which achieve their exceptional girth by the rather different strategy of specializing on salmon and hibernating for much of the year.10
No one knows how many grizzlies lived in California before European contact. The great naturalist Joseph Grinnell, who served as the first director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at UC Berkeley and spearheaded California’s first grassroots wildlife conservation campaign in the 1910s, calculated a pre-1830 population of 2,595 adult grizzlies. He based this number on historical records, assumptions about resource availability, and the size of grizzly ranges in other regions. He also noted that under favorable conditions, grizzlies were capable of rapid population growth.11 Yet Grinnell’s numbers are only estimates. All we can say for sure is that grizzlies were probably always common in California, and much more so than their smaller cousins, the black bears, whose populations grizzlies appear to have limited through territorial aggression and competitive exclusion. Black bears are common throughout much of California today, but they probably only became so after the grizzlies’ eradication.
Despite their robust size and large population, grizzlies were never the dominant land animal in California. For the first million years of the species’s existence, the grizzly was just one member of a spectacular group of Pleistocene megafauna that included such formidable beasts as the saber-toothed tiger, the dire wolf, the giant ground sloth, and the woolly mammoth. Around thirteen thousand years ago, near the end of the last ice age and shortly after the arrival of the first human hunter-gatherers, many of these species began to decline. Some persisted for millennia in isolated areas, but within a few thousand years most had disappeared. Species with the largest body masses were the first to go, and they went extinct at a much greater rate than did the smaller ones. Grizzlies ranked well down the size hierarchy of the Pleistocene megafauna, but they were one of the largest terrestrial animal species to survive the subsequent extinctions. By ten thousand years ago, they were the second-most-dominant land animals in California, after humans.12
MAP 2. Key sites in the history of the California grizzly.
As late as the 1980s, many scholars of this period thought that California Indians did not have the capacity to challenge or control the grizzlies in their midst. This belief derived from scattered accounts by Spanish chroniclers who claimed that killing problem grizzlies proved their countrymen’s benevolence toward the helpless natives. The Indians’ supposed inability to control grizzlies was an example of their failure to civilize their country and thus contributed to a larger narrative of indigenous savagery and vulnerability that helped to justify colonization.13
Recent scholarship on pre-Columbian environmental manipulation by indigenous people has revealed the self-serving absurdity of the Spaniards’ claims.14 California before the Spanish was not a primeval wilderness; it was one of the most densely populated regions on the continent outside present-day Mexico, with human inhabitants who altered its environments through hunting, fishing, gathering, burning, and horticulture. Grizzly bears and people coexisted in uneasy proximity and often killed one another. But this was no balance of power. People almost certainly excluded bears from key resource sites, hunted them for food and ceremonial uses, and may even have culled their populations for community safety or to prevent raids on valuable resources. Grizzlies were formidable neighbors, but then as now, people ruled the land.
The Spanish did, however, bring superior firepower to their first encounters with California’s bears. In September of 1769, a motley band of soldiers from the Gaspar de Portolá expedition landed on the shores of what is now San Luis Obispo County, near Morro Bay, and marched inland in search of freshwater and wild game. Not far from the coast, they found “troops of bears” foraging in a marshy basin. The famished soldiers mounted their horses and began the chase. None of these animals had ever heard or felt gunfire, and they were caught exposed in open country. One grizzly took seven shots and maimed two of the Spaniards’ mules before chasing the men away. A 375-pound female, small by California standards but enormous to Spanish eyes, died only after receiving nine bullet wounds, including a final shot to the head. The bruin provided a hearty meal, both “savory and good,” and gave the soldiers a taste for bear meat that, just a few years later, would prove their salvation. The site became known as La Cañada de los Osos: The Valley of the Bears.15
The Spaniards settled in the north at Monterey, and then at San Carlos and San Antonio, but their missions were miserable, squalid places. They had meager supplies, and the landscape that surrounded them seemed to offer few resources. The missions in the south, at San Gabriel and San Diego, were even worse off, and Junípero Serra, the leader of the Spanish mission system in Alta California, sent provisions to the southern outposts overland by mule. Within three years of their arrival in California, the residents of the northern missions