when he wrote, “An extinct form of life can never be restored. In this ethical viewpoint we perhaps find the strongest argument of all. But add to this the economic viewpoint and we have an argument in favor of wild life conservation that defies every assailant.”30
Grinnell’s commitment to the aesthetic and intrinsic values of wild animals did not prevent him from killing them in large numbers. He was a prodigious collector who bagged thousands of animals during his lifetime and facilitated the slaughter of tens of thousands more. He offered his motives, his credentials, and the uses to which he put the remains as justification for this carnage. According to him, animals that were killed for food or profit only benefited a few people for a few days, but animals preserved in a museum would benefit society for centuries. He encouraged amateur naturalists to avoid collecting eggs and to watch birds with opera glasses instead of killing them. But he chastised professional naturalists who shot pictures when they should have been shooting guns and argued with animal welfare advocates who called hunting inhumane or questioned the need for further scientific collecting of rare species. In 1915 he published a manifesto on the subject, “Conserve the Collector,” which argued that future biological research would depend on scientists having open access to vertebrate specimens, even in protected parks and reserves.31
Grinnell also lectured Bryant on the subject. As part of his job at the California Division of Fish and Game, Bryant handled requests for permits to collect specimens of protected species. He balked when his friend and fellow Grinnell protégé, Loye Miller, requested a permit to collect a white-tailed kite. Miller was a respected young researcher who would go on to found the Department of Life Sciences at UCLA. When Grinnell heard about the delay, he intervened on Miller’s behalf. “I do not believe that the species is anywhere near the point of extermination,” he wrote in a letter to Bryant. “There cannot be less than 100 of the birds alive in the State. . . . Specimens of the species should be preserved for science; and they can be without, I believe, jeopardizing the existence of the species.”32
If the population of a charismatic raptor such as the white-tailed kite dropped to one hundred individuals in California today, scientists would consider it on the brink of a regional extinction and would call for a major mobilization of conservation resources. Yet Grinnell seemed almost blasé about the bird’s small population. The white-tailed kite has since rebounded in California, and today it is fairly common, but that outcome was by no means assured in 1915. Grinnell was correct in arguing that sport, market, and subsistence hunting, predator control, and habitat destruction were more important than scientific collecting in driving the decline of such species. Yet he must have known that with so few individuals the loss of even one could alter a population’s demographic trajectory and that small populations were especially at risk from scientific collecting. Grinnell was overconfident about the white-tailed kite’s status, but his mistake did not result from indifference to the species’s plight. Instead it stemmed from his stubborn support for science and his attribution of blame. “This wastage is not to be debited to the collector,” he insisted, “but to the average and very ignorant and numerous hunter.”33
By 1916 Grinnell and Bryant had articulated a multifaceted argument for the conservation of California’s native fauna. It combined economics with ethics, utilitarianism with aesthetics, and instrumentalism with a concept of intrinsic value. They argued that wildlife was important for science, education, recreation, tourism, agriculture, natural resources, and even something akin to our contemporary notion of ecological services—the idea that wild species and healthy ecosystems perform essential functions for society that would be costly and difficult to replace by artificial means. Grinnell and Bryant were not alone in developing these ideas; they were part of a large network of conservationists throughout the United States and beyond. Yet these conservationists were not all of the same mind regarding the vital issues of the day. Three key groups shaped wildlife conservation during the Progressive Era, and each had a distinctive view on the contentious topic of hunting regulation.
HUNTING AND THE POLITICS OF CONSERVATION
Debates about fish and game regulation involved a variety of economic, political, and ethical issues, as well as basic conceptions of social status and identity. Groups on all sides claimed to have the support of moderate political majorities that advocated the most equitable and democratic solutions. But to gain such support, they portrayed social and economic differences as antagonistic dichotomies: rich versus poor, citizen versus alien, white versus nonwhite, rural versus urban, masculine versus feminine, ethical versus unethical, honorable versus dishonorable, public versus private, occupied with leisure versus consumed by work. The struggle over hunting regulation and its enforcement in California, as in other parts of the country, thus grew to encompass issues far beyond the conservation of wildlife and became a surrogate for much larger conversations about the social and moral order.
The three main groups of conservationists that debated these issues in California were the same as those that participated in fish and game controversies in other parts of the country. Among the advocates for additional regulations were the professional and amateur naturalists, such as the members of the Berkeley circle, who advocated for measures to conserve wildlife as a public good. Then there were the humanitarians—Protestant clergy, women’s club members, and temperance unions—who worried that cruelty toward animals, including unnecessary hunting, damaged the moral fiber of society. And finally there were the sportsmen, a group mostly made up of wealthy, white, urban men who wanted to secure a privileged place for recreational hunting and fishing as a way to maintain what they considered the rough, masculine virtues of the fading frontier and to combat the feminizing aspects of Victorian culture. They also tended to view working-class men, immigrants, and anyone who relied on fish and game to make ends meet as illegitimate users of these resources.34
In practice these three groups overlapped, but rhetorically they often worked to maintain their boundaries. Sportsmen indulged in bird watching with female companions and sought to mobilize women’s groups for conservation campaigns, but they disregarded, and even belittled, sentimental arguments for animal welfare. Women’s groups played outsize roles in many conservation efforts, including the establishment of some of the country’s first environmental organizations, but they railed against the corrosive moral influence of bloodsports and were often excluded from the grounds of private sporting clubs. Individual women who crossed gendered boundaries or controlled significant financial resources, such as Annie Alexander, who did both, wielded considerable political influence, but they were few in number.
As for the naturalists, many amateurs were women, but most professionals were men who were also accomplished hunters. Naturalists often required sportsmen’s support to fund their projects and organizations. But a large fraction were middle-class academics and professionals who avoided identifying with sportsmen’s groups, which seemed to constitute a kind of New World aristocracy. In public, for example, Joseph Grinnell distanced himself from the sportsmen’s clubs, but in private he worked with them and courted their support. He or his assistants submitted anonymous dispatches, under the pseudonym Golden Gate, to the country’s preeminent sporting magazine, Forest and Stream, updating its subscribers on the California conservation campaign. Grinnell worked to retain the sportsmen’s financial support, including a $4,500 donation in 1914 on behalf of the Berkeley circle’s conservation efforts. And throughout his career he remained a member of the Boone and Crocket Club, a famous cabal of prominent sportsmen that included the former U.S. Forest Service chief Gifford Pinchot, Aldo Leopold, and the club’s founder, Theodore Roosevelt.35
It is impossible to say exactly how different groups of hunters and different forms of hunting contributed to the game declines of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Market hunting must have made a significant impact. In 1895 and 1896, markets in Los Angeles and San Francisco alone sold 501,171 game birds, and this was only a fraction of the statewide total.36 In a biological sense, however, market hunting was no different than subsistence or recreational hunting conducted lawfully under the same seasons and bag limits. The class,
