After the Grizzly. Peter S. Alagona
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patriotic reunification and rebirth of a country still reeling from half a century of internecine violence and frenetic change that included the Civil War, Manifest Destiny, and the Gilded Age.33
Shinn was not the only observer who believed that wild animal extinctions were necessary and inevitable in American progress. During the previous two decades, a wide variety of commentators, capitalists, and politicians had made similar statements about other species in other parts of the American West. They argued that the settlement of the region required a great transformation of nature and society—one that would see unruly wild beasts and uncivilized native peoples give way to domestic animals and an industrious white society. The California grizzly was just one creature among the many that had no place in this new American future.34
Shinn had good reason to believe that the grizzly would become a permanent feature of California’s foundation mythology. His article coincided with the U.S. Census Bureau’s announcement, in 1890, that the country no longer had a western frontier, which it defined as a single contiguous line beyond which the population density decreased to less than two people per square mile. The West was now, at least in official terms, settled. The western frontier had occupied a prominent place on the mental maps of white Americans since the seventeenth century, and its closure created an uncommon opportunity for collective reflection and mythmaking. This process was already well under way in California, where the grizzly bear had emerged as an icon of both the fading frontier and the new society that was replacing it.
In the Bear Flag Revolt, of June 1846, a band of Anglo-American interlopers, acting at the behest of U.S. Army Major John C. Frémont, marched into the town square of Sonoma, fifty miles north of San Francisco, and replaced the Mexican flag there with a makeshift banner featuring a star, a grizzly bear, and the words CALIFORNIA REPUBLIC. The bear symbolized power and defiance for a ragtag group of insurgents whose intention was to seize control of land that the Mexicans had wrestled from the Spanish, and the Spanish had usurped from the Indians. The California Republic was short-lived. It ended less than a month later, when army forces occupied Monterey and the Bear Flag rebels sided with the United States in the Mexican-American War. California joined the Union in 1848 and achieved statehood in 1850. A redesigned version of the insurgents’ original Sonoma banner became its official flag in 1911 (see figure 5).
The Great Seal of the State of California, adopted at California’s constitutional convention on the eve of statehood in 1849, also features a grizzly. This bear shares its space with grapevines, representing agriculture; a miner, embodying resource extraction; sailboats, signifying trade; and the Roman goddess Minerva, symbolizing wisdom, poetry, craft, and commerce. Native Americans, Franciscan missionaries, and Californios are nowhere to be found.
Shinn was right to identify the grizzly as an enduring symbol of early California. But he was wrong to think that most people would look back on the bear’s destruction as a necessary step in American progress, and he underestimated its versatility as a cultural icon. By the time the California grizzly went extinct, people had seen it as a man-eater, a cattle killer, a test of masculine virtue, an exemplar of domesticity, and a source of meat for their starving communities. They had pressed it into service as a totem, a trophy, a varmint, a delicacy, a matador, and a jester (as in Grizzly Adams’s grotesque basement circus). They had mobilized it as a symbol of revolt and statehood, of the fading frontier and the residual wilderness, of reckless consumption and the promise of conservation. People had even used grizzlies to hunt other grizzlies. The grizzly provided Californians with such a powerful symbol not only because it played a unique role during a formative historical period but also because it typified a much larger transformation that reordered the state’s ecosystems and rearranged its animal populations. We now turn to that larger context of wildlife exploitation and ecological change.
FIGURE 5. The California state flag.
THE BELEAGUERED MENAGERIE
Not all wild animal species responded in the same way to the social, economic, and ecological changes that transformed California during the nineteenth century. Some, such as the grizzly, probably experienced brief periods of superabundance, in response to diminished human hunting and increased resource availability, only to become rare during the final decades of the century. Species that thrived in fields and farmlands probably increased their numbers. But many others declined in population due to habitat loss, increased competition, and predation from larger, more aggressive species. The net result of all of this change was that by 1900, many of the state’s most valuable and charismatic fish and game species reached their lowest levels ever recorded, before or since. We must understand the grizzly’s story within this broader context.
Marine species were among the earliest to suffer from exploitation. Beginning around 1780, the sea otter supported the first major wildlife industry in Alta California. By 1800, ships were arriving there from around the world, and sea otter pelts, which had become North America’s most valuable natural resource by weight, were appearing in markets as far away as Shanghai and London. This was California’s first “gold” rush. By 1840 the fur trade had nearly led to the sea otter’s extinction. A sea otter harvest would briefly reemerge around 1890, and this second phase of hunting again almost annihilated the species, as well as several other marine mammals. The North Pacific Fur Seal Convention of 1911, the world’s first wildlife conservation treaty, banned further exploitation, but by this time fewer than two thousand sea otters remained in the near-shore waters throughout western North America. Despite their long-predicted extinction and to the amazement of many naturalists, sea otters reappeared along the California coast in the 1930s. In 2010 there were more than twenty-six hundred sea otters in California waters. The resurgence of this species ranks among the most dramatic reversals in the annals of American wildlife conservation, but the otters’ return remains controversial among fishers forced to compete with these voracious carnivores for valuable crabs, snails, clams, mussels, urchins, and abalone.35
A vigorous trade in freshwater aquatic species began almost as soon as sea otter populations started to decline. In 1827 Jedediah Smith led a hunting expedition to the San Joaquin River that bagged fifteen hundred pounds of skins. By the 1830s, French, British, and Anglo-American trappers were making regular visits to California’s interior valleys in search of aquatic fur-bearing mammals, including beaver, river otter, mink, and muskrat. With its abundant wildlife and proximity to the port town of Yerba Buena, now San Francisco, the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta soon became the hub of Alta California’s inland fur trade. In 1840 the author Thomas Farnham noted that “beaver were very numerous . . . on the hundreds of small rush-covered islands” in the delta. “There is probably no spot of equal extent in the whole continent of America,” he concluded, “which contains so many of the much-sought animals.” By the time of Farnham’s writing, the beaver market had already begun to crash in Europe, but large-scale trapping in California continued for several years.36
It did not take long for the fur trade to expand to terrestrial species. Bobcats, wolves, fishers, martens, wolverines, foxes, raccoons, skunks, badgers, and bears all provided luxurious winter furs, while deer, antelope, and elk supplied fat for tallow and hides for tanning. In 1833 John Work, an officer with the Hudson’s Bay Company, recorded that his party had killed “395 elk, 148 deer, 17 bears & 8 antelopes” during a month in the Central Valley. According to Work, this was “certainly a great many more than was required, but when the [hunters] have ammunition and see animals they must needs fire upon them be wanted or not.”37
One of the species that suffered the most from this onslaught was the tule elk, a diminutive subspecies of wapiti found only in California. Tule elk probably declined due to competition and diseases from domestic livestock and predation from wolves and grizzlies, but they also benefited during the early nineteenth century from a reduction in Indian hunting. By 1845 Charles Wilkes, of the United States Exploring Expedition, estimated that California was exporting three thousand elk and deer skins per year for the hide and tallow industries, at between fifty cents and a dollar each. The State of California banned all tule elk hunting in 1873, but by then many believed that the species had already gone extinct. The following year, a farmhand