After the Grizzly. Peter S. Alagona
Don Pedro Fages Beleta, the Spanish navy captain who served as the maritime chief of the Portolá expedition. After Portolá’s departure, in 1770, Fages became Alta California’s second Spanish military governor, and he concocted a daring plan to resolve the increasingly desperate situation. He and his small band of soldiers marched 140 miles, from Monterey back to Morro Bay, to find food. They reached La Cañada de los Osos in 1772 and remained in the area for three months, during which time they killed some thirty grizzlies and sent about nine thousand pounds of jerked bear meat back to the northern missions. Fages became an instant hero, and for his accomplishments he earned the nickname El Oso.16
Why did Fages need to travel 140 miles to find food? There are several possible answers. First, the Spaniards were picky and prejudiced eaters. They were accustomed to consuming large quantities of red meat, but they preferred the beef of proper Spanish cattle. They knew little about hunting, fishing, or trapping, other than shooting bears, and because they believed they were the ones doing the teaching, they rejected the advice of the area’s indigenous inhabitants. But there is something else to this story. Fages needed to travel 140 miles to find food because in 1772, wild game in Alta California appears to have been relatively scarce.17
Before European settlement, a population of some three hundred fifty thousand American Indians used the region’s fish and wildlife resources and altered its ecosystems in myriad ways. Consider two well-known examples: Fisheries biologists have estimated that indigenous people in the Central Valley alone caught up to 8.5 million pounds of salmon annually. The largest Euro-American commercial harvests taken in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ranged from four to ten million pounds. Indians also managed landscapes to maintain terrestrial game, such as deer, using fire to clear brush and promote forage, and they undoubtedly took large numbers of these animals too. Some of these practices had already diminished by the late eighteenth century, but indigenous environmental manipulation and resource harvests continued at significant levels for several decades. The consequences of these activities for fish and wildlife must have been profound and complex, but it seems clear that indigenous hunting and gathering limited the abundance of wild game in Alta California into the second half of the eighteenth century.18
This situation changed swiftly and dramatically during the mission era. Between 1769 and 1834, the number of Indians living along the coast between San Diego and Sonoma dropped by an apocalyptic 75 percent. Disease and migration contributed to further declines through the end of the Mexican rancho era in 1848. By 1855 there were only about fifty thousand Indians left in California. For the few who survived, ecological changes, including the proliferation of exotic plants and animals, made it more difficult to pursue traditional subsistence life-styles based on the harvest of native species.19
Aside from its human consequences, the demographic collapse of California’s Indians had enormous consequences for the region’s ecology. Hunting, gathering, fishing, burning, and horticulture all dwindled. European livestock proliferated on the range, denuded the vegetation, and formed huge feral herds. Some native wildlife species were forced to compete with introduced European species for resources. But for many others, particularly those that did not compete with or suffer from the presence of feral livestock, the mission era represented a period of diminished human pressure, abundant resources, and population growth.20
This process began almost immediately, and it soon reached epic proportions. As early as 1786, the French navigator Jean François de La Pérouse wrote that no country was “more abundant in fish and game of every description.” Tales of California’s bountiful elk, antelope, deer, salmon, ducks, geese, and of course bears became commonplace in travelers’ and settlers’ accounts. In 1826 Frederick William Beechey, of the British Royal Navy, found the San Francisco Bay region “abounding in game of all kinds, so plentiful, indeed, as so to lessen the desire of pursuit.” In 1841 the American settler John Bidwell described the Great Central Valley as containing “thousands of elk, antelope, deer, wild horses, . . . incalculable thousands of wild geese, ducks, brants, cranes, pelicans, etc.,” as well as “a great abundance of salmon in every stream.” A complete list of such accounts could continue for many pages. California’s boosters almost certainly exaggerated these reports in their attempts to attract new residents. Yet descriptions of plentiful wildlife were so common, among so many diverse and independent observers, that it would be folly to reject their essential vera-city. By the 1830s, the same region in which El Oso had needed to travel 140 miles to find wild game had become a paradise for fish and wildlife—including grizzlies.21
No group of species profited more from this transition than the large carnivores, which benefited from a reduction in hunting but even more from an increase in resource availability. Eagles preyed on newly introduced agricultural livestock, including goats and piglets. Wolves stalked vast flocks of feral sheep. Coyotes and bobcats devoured house cats and Norway rats. Condors and vultures gathered around gruesome calaveras, or “places of skulls,” where they and other scavengers picked at the discarded remains of animals slaughtered for the hide and tallow industries. And thousands of grizzlies became fat on the carcasses of Spanish livestock. Grizzlies are opportunistic eaters. They can survive on largely herbivorous diets, but they will consume extravagant quantities of meat when the chance arises. Livestock provided an unprecedented caloric resource, and by 1848 the population of bears in Alta California had probably reached its historic peak. On the eve of statehood, the region contained about seventy-five hundred naturalized Spanish settlers, or Californios, one hundred thousand Indians, sixty-five hundred miscellaneous immigrants, and some ten thousand grizzly bears—a staggering ratio of more than one grizzly for every twelve people.22
The historical record from California during this period abounds with stories about bears. In Southern California, grizzlies were “more plentiful than pigs,” a situation that made ranching in the mountains above Santa Barbara and Los Angeles “utterly impossible.” In central California, grizzlies loitered around the towns of San Luis Obispo and even Monterey, where El Oso had failed to find any just a few decades earlier. In Northern California, George C. Yount, one of the region’s first Anglo-American pioneers, recalled that near his Napa homestead, grizzlies “were everywhere upon the plains, in the valleys, and on the mountains . . . so that I have often killed as many as five or six in one day, and it was not unusual to see fifty or sixty within twenty-four hours.” In 1827 a grizzly bear astonished the crew of a boat sailing near Angel Island, in San Francisco Bay, when it surfaced nearby and began swimming toward them. The sailors dispatched the animal with “four balls . . . at close range” before it had an opportunity to board their vessel. As late as 1850, a grizzly wandered into the settlement at Mission Dolores on the outskirts of San Francisco.23
The Californios hunted and killed grizzlies. Yet unlike the Puritan farmers who had arrived in New England with a pious hatred of all things wild, the Catholic ranchers who settled in Alta California a century and a half later had no particular enmity toward the native animals. By the 1830s the region had an overabundance of livestock, and the ranchers, who never made much of an effort to maximize their profits, felt little urgency to control the predators or build their herds. Grizzlies became subjects of sport and leisure, and they assumed a central place in the grand festivals that defined the time (and still do in the popular imagination). Bear lassoing was one popular, if hazardous, diversion (see figure 3). Grizzlies also participated in the bear-and-bull fights that occurred in towns throughout the region. These fights continued a European tradition thousands of years old, but they reached their most elaborate development in Alta California. The bears almost always won these bloody contests, but the fights often turned into harrowing spectacles whose result was never a foregone conclusion.24
FIGURE 3. Roping the Bear at Santa Margarita Rancho of Juan Foster, by James Walker (1818-89), c. 1870 (oil on canvas). Courtesy of the California Historical Society; gift of Mr. and Mrs. Reginald F. Walker Coll., CHS2009.165.
By 1840, Anglo-American pioneers were beginning to arrive in Alta California in larger numbers. Most had little appreciation for Californio culture and even less regard for wild animals. These newcomers killed grizzlies for a multitude of reasons—or sometimes for no reason at all—and they pursued their