built academic institutions, started government conservation programs, and enacted dozens of laws that regulated the harvest of fish and game. These were typical responses for the late nineteenth century. Similar efforts were occurring throughout the country, and California’s conservationists worked alongside their progressive colleagues in the Northeast, the Northwest, and the Midwest.
California may not have been unique in its loss of wildlife or in the efforts of some people to protect its fish and game, but it did offer a compelling perspective from which to view the momentous social and ecological changes that occurred throughout the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century. The state represented the culmination of Manifest Destiny in North America, and it would serve as the seat of American imperial power in the Pacific Basin. Between 1848 and 1880, San Francisco grew from a seaside village into the eighth-largest city in the United States, with a population of 234,000. The San Francisco Bay Area, meanwhile, contained more people than all other major western cities combined.43
The new Californians struggled to understand the deluges, fires, mudslides, and droughts that shaped the landscapes of the Pacific Coast. Economic development required natural resources, which California possessed in abundance. But it also required a modicum of stability, which nature failed to provide. There was a point in the mid-nineteenth century when Californians had a choice. They could work with the elements or stand and fight. They could, for example, relocate their state capital from a floodplain to higher ground or decide to stay put and build levees. They opted for the latter. Stephen Powers captured this mentality in 1869 when we wrote that “nature is eccentric and obstinate here and must be broken with steam and with steel.”44 So Californians raised capital in distant financial centers, imported cheap labor from Europe and Asia, and devised new technologies to reorganize their landscapes. They unearthed minerals, raised cattle, planted orchards, sowed wheat, cultivated grapevines, and built cities. They also denuded their rangelands, drained their marshes, channelized their rivers, felled their forests, and washed their mountains out to the sea.
As early as the 1870s, the scientists and conservationists who witnessed these changes in California began to develop a distinctive viewpoint, approach, and set of institutions that would shape the future of fish and game conservation there and elevate them to national and international leadership positions. The state’s abundance and diversity of wild species, combined with its increasing wealth, growing civic institutions, and geography that placed large urban centers in close proximity to wild areas, contributed to the rise of California as a center for natural history research and conservation activism.45
Despite the havoc wreaked on its environment, California gained a reputation as a naturalists’ haven. By the middle of the nineteenth century, San Francisco had become a required stop for all serious students of natural history. Those who came there found that the state still possessed wild tracts of land close to the city where naturalists could explore unsurveyed areas and discover new species unknown to science. The proximity of urban areas to wildlands enabled a legion of naturalists, even those with scant resources, to map California’s physical and biological diversity and document the changes that were transforming its landscapes. The knowledge that development might eradicate many unique species only increased the naturalists’ enthusiasm. First came the contract collectors, who gathered botanical specimens for museums in Europe and the Northeast. Then came the self-educated amateur naturalists, such as John Muir, who achieved notoriety in the state’s small scientific community. Next came the government surveyors, who sought to document the state’s resources for economic development. These included the members of the famed Whitney Survey, which traveled “up and down California” during the 1860s, as well as the Death Valley Expedition, which surveyed the state’s eastern deserts in 1891. Finally, there were the professional academics—the museum researchers and the professors.46
Naturalists played central roles in the establishment of all of California’s major scientific institutions. Californians founded the first scientific institution on the West Coast, the California Academy of Sciences, in 1853, with botanists and zoologists as its primary participants. During the early twentieth century, Barton W. Evermann, a fisheries biologist, became one of the academy’s longest-serving and most influential directors. The University of California, a publicly funded land-grant institution, began accepting students in 1868, and that same year Joseph LeConte offered its first course in zoology. Stanford University opened its doors in 1891 under the direction of its first president, the famous ichthyologist David Starr Jordan.47
It was not unusual for naturalists, who were much more prominent at the time than they are today, to play leading roles in scientific institutions. Yet their work revealed important aspects of California’s scientific community that distinguished it from those of New York, Boston, and London. The state’s new universities and museums lacked the libraries, specimen collections, and laboratory facilities of more-established and better-endowed institutions a continent—or continents—away. The California Academy of Sciences launched some foreign expeditions, but most of the state’s researchers still lacked the philanthropic funding necessary to support far-flung adventures. They did, however, have a vast, sparsely populated, and easily accessible countryside all around them and available for research. California attracted scientists who stressed observation over experimentation and looked first to the landscape and only later to the laboratory for their subjects of study. Unlike their eastern counterparts, whose elaborate imperial expeditions have become both legendary and infamous, California naturalists tended to focus their research on the region where they lived.48
This regional focus had implications not only for the content of scientific knowledge but also for the role of science and scientists in California politics. Elected officials expected state-funded universities to conduct research that contributed to California’s two major industries, mining and agriculture. Many scientists chose instead to study California’s wild landscapes and diverse flora and fauna. As they traveled around the state, they witnessed the conversion of its landscapes and the eradication of its native species. Their experiences watching the decline of fish and game led them to argue against both the myth of resource inexhaustibility and the wisdom of unfettered exploitation, which played such central roles in the state’s economic development. They soon found themselves in the uncomfortable position of asking for financial support from the state while denouncing the practices of its most important industries. By 1890 many of California’s leading scientists were among its most active conservationists.49
Conservation meant different things to different people in different contexts. For fish and game, it could refer to the introduction or propagation of species for the purpose of augmenting wild populations, or to the enactment and enforcement of regulations establishing harvest seasons and bag limits. It could also refer to federal, state, or nongovernmental efforts. The federal government started the Bureau of Biological Survey in 1885 to facilitate research and conservation, but most public programs occurred at the state level because the federal government appeared to have little constitutional or statutory jurisdiction over wild animals within state boundaries. California began enacting fish and game conservation measures almost as soon as it joined the Union. In 1852 the state legislature passed its first such measure, a law that prohibited elk, deer, antelope, quail, mallard, and wood duck hunting for six months each year. Several codes attempting to restore depleted populations of valuable species followed. In 1870 California established the country’s first wildlife refuge, at Lake Merritt in the city of Oakland. But this was an isolated event: the state had little authority or resources to purchase or set aside lands or waters for conservation, and the movement to establish wildlife refuges would not gain widespread support until the 1930s.50
The California legislature’s most important move on behalf of fish and game during the first few decades of statehood was its establishment of a conservation commission. In 1870 it created the Commissioners of Fisheries, which it tasked with replenishing and building stocks of commercial and sporting fish, mainly through importation and propagation. Eight years later the state expanded the organization and renamed it the Board of Fish and Game Commissioners. This made California one of the first two states,
