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 and his allies focused on the sale of wild-caught game for two main reasons. The first and most obvious was that at the time, many conservationists believed that market hunting was the main cause of wildlife declines. A second but equally important reason was that state-level hunting and fishing regulations were already well established and widely accepted, whereas other options, such as habitat protection, had little if any legal or political precedent.
Despite longstanding legal precedents for state-level hunting and fishing codes, the Berkeley circle’s campaign sparked a vigorous political debate that soon grew to encompass a variety of much broader issues. A debate about wildlife soon became a debate about the public good versus private interests, government regulation in a market economy, the role of bureaucratic versus democratic decision making, and the importance of race, class, gender, and citizenship in shaping access to and control over lands and natural resources. This debate began later in California than in other states with Progressive political majorities in the Northeast, the Midwest, and the Pacific Northwest. It also took a different course and came to a different conclusion, at least for a time. Yet by 1915, conservationists across the country were looking to California and the work of the Berkeley circle as a model for what had gone right and what had gone wrong in the Progressive Era wildlife movement. The insights they gained would shape subsequent conservation efforts into the New Deal era of the 1930s and beyond.
What is perhaps most remarkable about the Berkeley circle’s work during the Progressive Era is how much it anticipated future developments in conservation science and environmental ethics. This is not to say that the group’s members were somehow ahead of their time—they were very much creatures of it. Yet their story challenges, or at least complicates, the widespread belief that many features of contemporary conservation, including concern for nongame and uncharismatic endangered species, did not emerge until the second half of the twentieth century. By 1915 the Berkeley circle’s members had developed an intellectual foundation for what, over the next two decades, with the addition of a strong focus on habitat management, would develop into a comprehensive vision for wildlife science and conservation backed by almost every major ethical rationale that supports the work of conservation biologists today.5
The Progressive Era wildlife debates in California are important to the story of American endangered species conservation for another reason. Scientists and legal scholars who write about the Endangered Species Act often cite its widespread popularity at the time of its passage, in 1973, as evidence that conflicts about species conservation emerged only later, in response to the act’s unintended consequences. It would be unwise to underestimate the ESA’s capacity to provoke controversy, but this version of the story tends to truncate the history of endangered species debates. Controversies that have surrounded the ESA since the late 1970s are part of a much longer legacy of disputes about species loss and conservation that began more than a century ago, have waxed and waned, and continue in modified forms today. To understand the origins of these struggles, there is nowhere better to start than with the life and work of the Berkeley circle’s leader, Joseph Grinnell.
THE HOUSE GRINNELL BUILT
Joseph Grinnell was born in 1877 on the Kiowa, Comanche, and Wichita Indian Agency near Fort Sill in Indian Territory. His Quaker family traced its ancestry New England’s earliest French Huguenot colonists, and his father worked as a physician on the reservation. They soon moved to the Pine Ridge Agency, in Dakota Territory, where Joseph spent his early childhood with the Oglala Sioux. During their time at Pine Ridge, Joseph and his father earned the friendship of a local patriarch, Chief Red Cloud. In 1885 the Grinnells moved to California and settled in Pasadena, then a small town surrounded by remote mountains and wild animals. Joseph spent the rest of his childhood and young adulthood hunting, fishing, and studying natural history near his home. One summer, he even found grizzly tracks in the lower Arroyo Seco. In 1898 he left for his first expedition, a voyage to Alaska, where he collected some fourteen hundred birds and eggs. He returned to California the following year and began his graduate work in zoology under the direction of Charles H. Gilbert and David Starr Jordan at Stanford University. In 1901 he became the youngest fellow in the history of the American Ornithologists’ Union (see figure 7).6
Grinnell was still pursuing his doctorate and teaching part time at the Throop Polytechnic Institute, the future California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena, when he met Annie Alexander. Alexander was a remarkable woman. Born in 1867 in Honolulu, she was an heir to the Hawaiian Commercial and Sugar Company fortune. Her father, Samuel, introduced her to natural history at a young age, and in 1904 he took her on a trip to hunt big game in Africa. The two were setting
