After the Grizzly. Peter S. Alagona

      FIGURE 6. Glass case grizzly: Monarch on display at the California Academy of Sciences in 2011, one hundred years after his demise. © Brant Ward/Corbis.

      The extinction of the California grizzly took place long before the term endangered species entered the English lexicon. Even wildlife only became common, in its current compound form, in the 1910s. Yet the grizzly’s story offers a crucial insight for anyone who wants to understand the subsequent history of wildlife and endangered species in the United States. This epic saga is only partly about an animal. It is also about a place, and about how the people who lived there understood, envisioned, portrayed, and promoted its political, economic, and ecological future. We could say the same of the stories of myriad other endangered species.

      It is a paradoxical fate to be simultaneously adopted and eradicated, but such is the predicament of an extinct mascot. Most Californians are probably unaware of the grizzly’s history in their state. Those who do know seem to view it with a sense of irony and regret similar to what Allan Kelly expressed after Monarch’s debut at Woodward’s Garden in 1889. Few Californians would likely want to see grizzlies patrolling the crowded trails of Muir Woods, Yosemite Valley, or Griffith Park in Los Angeles. But the extermination of this remarkable animal is not something to take pride in anymore either. Now when Californians speak of their departed grizzlies, they talk not about courage or progress or inevitability but about folly and destruction and the necessity for restraint. In the words of the author Susan Snyder, the grizzly’s disappearance “evokes the absence of what else is now gone from California,” including its lost landscapes and biological diversity.⁵⁷ The story of the California grizzly has become an allegory of ecological decline.

      It is easy to embrace a story of ecological decline when you do not have to contend with thousand-pound omnivores in your daily life. When you do, things become more complicated. In other regions of the United States, controversies still surround living grizzlies, and outside Alaska their populations have continued to fare poorly.

      It was not until 1973—almost fifty years after the chaparral bear’s extinction—that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began monitoring the country’s remaining grizzlies, all of which lived in Idaho, Montana, or Wyoming. Two years later, the FWS listed the grizzlies in the lower forty-eight states as threatened, under the federal Endangered Species Act. By that time their total number had declined, from around fifty thousand individuals in the early nineteenth century to about one thousand in just six scattered populations. In 1982 the FWS completed its first Grizzly Bear Recovery Plan, and three years later a consortium of government agencies formed the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee. A small group of grizzlies eventually returned to Washington State, and in 2007 the service announced that the Yellowstone population, which had increased from a low of 136 to more than five hundred bears, no longer qualified as endangered. Today, however, the grizzly’s total non-Alaskan U.S. population is still less than fifteen hundred and remains limited to the North Cascades and Northern Rockies.⁵⁸

      More than a century after Monarch’s death, Californians are still surrounded by bears. The state’s living, breathing grizzlies are of course long gone, expelled decades ago from the fringes of an expanding society. Today’s grizzlies are symbolic beasts of our own making. But we also have dozens of metaphorical grizzlies that are not bears at all. They may be condors, tortoises, foxes, smelts, or any other imperiled species that has become a symbol of the contested relationships between people and nonhuman nature in the places where they live. The rest of this book explores the wildlife and endangered species conservation debates that began in California around the time of the grizzly’s extinction and grew to encompass all of these creatures and many, many more. As we will continue to see, these debates remain as much about the politics of place as about wild animals.

      Monarch’s arrival in San Francisco in 1889 captivated the city, but his death in 1911 went almost unnoticed. If his story had ended there, this would have been an anticlimactic conclusion to the life of a California icon, but the great bear’s journey was far from complete. During the preceding decades, popular enthusiasm for recreational hunting and natural history museums had fostered advances in the art and science of taxidermy, and by the time of Monarch’s death, expert technicians were capable of preserving animal remains almost in perpetuity. A local purveyor named Vernon Shephard accepted the job. He used part of the bear’s skull to mount its hide but discarded the rest of its massive skeleton. The specimen first went on display at the de Young Museum in San Francisco and later moved down the street to the California Academy of Sciences, where curators placed it on a pedestal adorned with an image of the California flag. It appeared that Monarch would have two final resting places: his skin would occupy a station of honor at one of the state’s oldest cultural institutions while his bones rotted at the bottom of a ditch in some weedy corner of Golden Gate Park.¹

      News of Monarch’s unceremonious burial soon reached Joseph Grinnell, a young zoologist who in 1908 became the founding director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ) at the University of California, in Berkeley. Grinnell set out to establish the West Coast’s premier institution for research in zoology and evolutionary biology. His work used comparative morphology to illuminate patterns of evolution in the state’s diverse fauna and thus required a large collection of biological specimens. By the time he accepted his position, however, the populations of many of California’s most charismatic and sought-after wild animal species—from marine mammals to terrestrial fur bearers, large carnivores, ungulates, raptors, shorebirds, and waterfowl—had reached historic lows, and opportunities to acquire additional specimens were diminishing with each passing year.² Specimens of any vertebrate species could contribute to Grinnell’s research, but none was more important for the museum than the state’s mascot, the California grizzly. So six months after Monarch’s death, Grinnell sent his assistant, Joseph Dixon, to San Francisco with a map and a shovel. Dixon located Monarch’s grave, exhumed the skeleton, and brought it back to Berkeley, where he disinfected it and prepared it for storage.

      Soon after Monarch’s death, Grinnell and his “Berkeley circle” of students and colleagues decided that museum conservation, of the kind they had undertaken for Monarch’s remains, was not enough—they needed to do more to save California’s dwindling fauna. Grinnell was by no means the state’s first wildlife conservationist, but he proposed an ambitious plan to launch a new political movement that would inform “the public of the great depletion of the supply of game in the state” and generate support for a comprehensive program of research, education, regulation, and enforcement. By 1914 the campaign had expanded from its initial focus on game animals to include all of California’s native fauna.³

      The Berkeley circle’s campaign sparked the first major political debate about the conservation of terrestrial wildlife in California. Grinnell carefully guarded his reputation as a nonpartisan scientific expert, and he remained mostly in the background during the controversies that ensued, but from his office at the museum he dispatched a small army of emissaries, including several students who took classes and worked as research assistants at the university. Between 1912 and 1914 they raised money, founded activist groups, developed public relations campaigns, and lobbied politicians in Sacramento. Their campaign had several legislative goals, but the most important was an effort to pass a state law that would ban the commercial sale of wild-caught game.⁴

      Grinnell