fish and game conservation. Others soon followed, and by 1910 most states had similar agencies.51
During its first two decades, the California commission enjoyed widespread popularity. It pursued uncontroversial programs, such as introducing popular fish species from other regions, constructing hatcheries to rebuild diminished salmon runs, and educating the public about the value of wild species. The commission had an early success in 1879, when it imported striped bass from New Jersey and planted them in the Carquinez Strait. Within five years the species was appearing in San Francisco markets, and today it is one of the delta’s most important sport fish. By 1900 the commission had become a model for similar organizations around the country, and it could boast a “well-earned reputation for scientific achievement” and “great returns” despite only a “small annual expenditure.”52
The commission’s early programs may have been popular, but they helped create the context for a series of conflicts. Opinions differed about what had caused the decline of valuable species. Some observers recognized that the causes were numerous and diverse: hunting, development, pollution, the introduction of exotic species, and other factors had transformed the state’s land and waterscapes and reduced the populations of many important fish and game species. Other commentators grasped for simpler and uglier answers. California had attracted immigrants from around the world who sought work in resource-based industries and provided convenient scapegoats for disgruntled whites who were only a generation or two from their own immigrant roots. Chinese and other East Asians often took the blame for overfishing, while Italians and other southern Europeans received criticism for overhunting. Several decades passed before scholars began to understand that the commission deserved less credit than it claimed and the immigrant fishers and hunters received more blame than they deserved.53
After 1900 the state legislature began to enact a long list of fishing and hunting codes. By the end of the decade it had established much of the basic legal and bureaucratic infrastructure for fish and game conservation that remains in effect in California today. As the commission’s duties—along with its budget and staff—increased, it extended its regulatory work into new arenas and bolstered its law enforcement capacities. It would soon become clear that the commission’s job was not only to propagate and conserve wild animals but also to mediate debates about who should have access to and control over those species. This was a complex task, and the commission in California, like those in other states, often failed to promote the most equitable and sustainable solutions.54
MONARCH, REDUX
Monarch the bear lived in captivity for twenty-two years, most of which he spent in the zoo at Golden Gate Park. Toward the end of his life he no longer attracted crowds, though he did receive visits from naturalists, who sketched him, photographed him, fed him apples, or just stared in wonderment at this living symbol of the breathtaking changes that had taken place in California during the course of a single ursine lifetime. In May of 1911, zookeepers put the elderly, arthritic, nearly toothless beast to sleep. At the time of his death, Monarch was a corpulent 1,127 pounds. No one knows how many California grizzlies outlived him in the wild, but he was surely among the last of his kind (see figure 6).55
One of the naturalists who visited Monarch in San Francisco was the charismatic artist, author, educator, conservationist, and founding chair of the Boy Scouts of America, Ernest Thompson Seton. Years later, Seton offered a concise account of the grizzly’s decline in the American West. Grizzlies, he wrote, had been “left at the mercy of men with no mercy.”56 Few statements could more eloquently disguise the complexity of the truth. Many hunters and ranchers did fail to show the grizzly compassion, even as its numbers dwindled. Yet the grizzly’s history in California is far too complex to reduce to a facile morality tale. The California grizzly, like so many other species, got caught up in a great economic, political, cultural, and ecological transformation. For a time these changes benefited the grizzly; only later did they lead to the bear’s demise.
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.
| CHAPTER TWO | • | A New Movement |
Monarch’s arrival in San Francisco in 1889 captivated the city, but his death in
