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 working for the Miller and Lux agricultural empire discovered a small band of elk hiding in the marshes near Buena Vista Lake in the San Joaquin Valley. The firm’s proprietor, Henry Miller, gave orders to protect the animals, and in 1904 he donated a portion of his herd to the U.S. Biological Survey for keeping at Sequoia National Park. Ten years later, Miller gave more of the elk to the California Academy of Sciences, which began to distribute them to parks around the state. All tule elk now derive from that single bottlenecked population.38
As the numbers of hide- and fur-bearing mammals declined, hunters shifted their focus to birds. Between 1850 and 1856, collectors from the Farallon Egg Company harvested three to four million murre and guillemot eggs from the Farallon Islands, west of the Golden Gate. By 1900, merchants were selling at least two hundred fifty thousand ducks, many shot in Central Valley wetlands, in San Francisco markets each year, and more than five hundred thousand waterfowl, upland game animals, and shorebirds were passing through the combined markets of San Francisco and Los Angeles annually. Wealthy urban sportsmen and rural subsistence hunters also took considerable harvests.39
By 1900 the populations of most valuable fish and game species had reached historic lows. The wood duck, the Columbian sharp-tailed grouse, and the band-tailed pigeon had all declined. Rails and other shorebirds no longer frequented their ancestral haunts. Antelopes had vacated most of their range. Beavers and river otters lingered in only a few remote backwaters. The last herd of northern elephant seals retreated to Guadalupe Island off the coast of Mexico. Wolves withdrew into the Rocky Mountains, and jaguars vanished into the Sonoran Desert. Even the common mule deer became scarce.40
California was not alone in the loss of its native fauna. More than two hundred animal species have gone extinct in and around North America since the beginning of the colonial period.41 The victims have included a disproportionate number of coastal and island-dwelling birds, such as the great auk, the Labrador duck, and the magnificent chickcharnie—a three-foot-tall flightless barn owl, elfin in appearance and endemic to the Bahamian island of Andros. Species such as the heath hen provided easy targets for mariners, lost their habitats to land-use change, succumbed to exotic predators, and became the targets of sportsmen, commercial hunters, and scientific collectors who canvased the countryside gathering specimens of dwindling species. The passenger pigeon became the subject of great seasonal hunts in the Northeast and the Midwest, until the birds abruptly disappeared. Thousands of Carolina parakeets died to become hats, as did millions of egrets, herons, terns, gulls, and hummingbirds. Island mammals, large carnivores, freshwater fish, and mollusks also fared poorly. Little information exists for most taxa, but it seems likely that no class of North American vertebrate escaped the nineteenth century with all its constituent species.
Historians have described California’s nineteenth-century economic history as a chronicle of natural resource exploitation that progressed, with plenty of overlap, from animal to mineral to vegetable. The animal part—California’s wild-game hunting frenzy—happened fast, happened late compared to other areas of the continent, and took place on a massive scale. But in the end, it differed little from the overall pattern. Newcomers of all races and classes consumed and wasted wild animals until few remained. Most seem to have believed either that California’s fish and game were unlimited or that it was appropriate to exhaust a region’s wildlife resources during the early stages of its capitalist economic development. As early as 1885, the historian Theodore H. Hittell wrote that the “days of fur hunting, which was once a great business in California, are gone; and it can not be long until wild fur-bearing animals will be curiosities in the country.” San Francisco remained the market center of the Pacific game trade until around 1915, but by then the hunters and trappers had long since moved on to fresher fields in more-remote regions.42
The California fur trade followed a pattern of exploitation and decline that has become familiar to all students of natural resource economics. But this was no simple tragedy of the commons, in which rational individuals, acting independently and in their own self-interest, inevitably exhaust a common property resource. The wild animals that people captured and consumed in nineteenth-century California, from the grizzly to the sea otter to the tule elk, represented much more than just commodities. They served as instruments of cultural domination, of religious persecution, of economic imperialism, of power, and of violence. Those who controlled animals controlled the region’s most valuable natural resources, and, in an economy based on resource extraction, they controlled other people too.
The history of the conservation movement that emerged in the late nineteenth century is in part a chronicle of efforts to restore decimated populations of fish and game. It is also, however, a tale of social conflict. Squabbles among various groups about access to and control over fish and game, as well as who should accept culpability for wildlife declines, sparked a series of debates throughout the country, including California’s first major wildlife conservation battle, which began in 1912. By that time, it was probably already too late for California’s grizzlies, but the stories of the chaparral bear and other lost wildlife species would serve as rallying cries and cautionary tales for generations of conservationists.
RESPONSES TO THE DECLINE
Californians responded to wildlife declines in several ways. They launched
