style, and intention of the shooter mattered less than the number of animals taken, where, and when. What is clear is that hunting of all types—for sport, sale, science, and subsistence—rearranged wildlife populations, decimating some and creating new opportunities for others.
Hunting was, of course, not the only problem facing fish and game in the early twentieth century. Astute conservationists realized that complex factors—such as pollution, disease, exotic species, and habitat loss—all contributed to the decline of native fauna. No one knew this better than Grinnell, who had spent his early career watching the transformation of California’s wildlife habitats. At the time, however, conservationists had few policy or management tools available to address larger issues related to land use and environmental change. So most wildlife conservation efforts focused on hunting: who should be allowed to do it and for what purpose, how it should be conducted, and where and when it should be done. By the 1910s, many conservationists had come to believe that the only way to restore depleted wildlife populations was to turn hunting into a purely recreational endeavor by banning the sale of wild-caught game.37
STATE REGULATION
During the Progressive Era, the states retained almost all of the legal authority over the fish and game within their boundaries, with the exception of a few areas such as Indian reservations. This authority derived from a series of court rulings in the nineteenth century that named the states as the lawful successors of the British crown and the colonies under common law. In the case of Martin v. Waddell (1842), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that after the American Revolution, the states became sovereigns with a general police power and the jurisdiction to maintain navigable waters, soils, and other natural resources in public trust for the common use of their citizens. The public trust doctrine remains a cornerstone of state wildlife and natural resources law.
Half a century later, in 1896’s Geer v. Connecticut, the court went even further when it ruled that the states owned the fish and game within their boundaries. This decision drew criticism for its flawed conception of property, and in 1979 the court overturned Geer when it ruled that Congress had the authority to govern wildlife on federal lands within state boundaries under the supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution. Yet Geer was only one of many court decisions that empowered the states to take the lead in most areas of fish and game conservation—a role they continue to play today.38
By 1910, most states, including California, had extensive catalogues of fish and game codes. Yet these regulations remained limited to the harvest and sale of wild animals acquired through hunting, gathering, trapping, or fishing and did not include other measures such as habitat protection. There was little legal precedent for habitat protection, and few politicians believed state governments should own or manage nonessential properties. Instead of acquiring land or restricting its use, states sought to strengthen the rights of private landowners through measures such as increasing the scope and power of trespass and nuisance laws.39
Conservationists advocated for new regulations on take and sale, but they encountered two main problems: cooperation and enforcement. The first was the lack of cooperation among the various agencies involved—within a state, among the states, and between the states and the federal government. Many conservationists regarded this as the single most important problem for fish and game. As early as the 1870s, government officials began to call for uniformity of closed seasons and bag limits so that hunters in one state could not monopolize the fish and game that the citizens of a neighboring state were attempting to protect. One vocal advocate for state cooperation was the activist, photographer, and Oregon state game warden William Finley. In 1913 he complained that sportsmen in Oregon had grown “tired of keeping seasons closed on certain birds for the sole purpose of allowing the California hunters to kill without regard to the breeding season.” The band-tailed pigeon, he wrote, was disappearing for exactly this reason “and may become extinct before many years.”40
The federal government’s first two national wildlife laws both aimed to increase cooperation. The Lacey Act of 1900 made it a federal crime to engage in interstate commerce with wild animals that had been taken in violation of state laws. It also allowed the federal government to regulate the import of exotic species into the United States and authorized federal programs to restore native species in areas where they had declined. The purpose of the act, which came just four years after the Supreme Court’s Geer decision, was to strengthen the states by buttressing their laws with federal enforcement. Yet as the first national wildlife law, it created a context for further federal involvement in wildlife conservation. The Lacey Act not only increased cooperation among the states and the federal government, but also set an important precedent for the application of the U.S. Constitution’s commerce clause as a rationale for federal environmental policies.
Intrastate cooperation also posed a challenge. Counties and municipalities passed ordinances that contradicted state laws and conflicted with those of neighboring jurisdictions. Different state agencies pursued their own agendas and even struggled to coordinate their internal programs. The California Division of Fish and Game had the responsibility of administering conservation laws in a state twice the size of New England. It attempted to do so by forging partnerships with other agencies, organizing the state into districts, and soliciting support among its diverse and divided constituents. “We recognize,” the Board of Fish and Game Commissioners wrote in 1913, “that we are administering a public trust, that to us has been assigned the duty of protecting and conserving the fish and game interests of the State for the benefit of all the people, and that to be successful we must have their active coöperation.”41
The board’s call for cooperation was both a plea and a threat. The Fish and Game Commission had adopted the motto “conservation through education,” but each year it dedicated more of its resources to law enforcement. Enforcement of fish and game codes was weak or nonexistent in most states until the twentieth century. Between 1902 and 1915, however, California established one of the country’s most aggressive fish and game law enforcement programs. It dispatched wardens to every corner of the state, deputized more than three hundred U.S. Forest Service rangers, and prosecuted about ten thousand cases of fish and game code violations. Fines collected from the convictions went back into the Fish and Game Commission’s coffers. Along with fees from hunting and fishing licenses—which favored and legitimized those who had the money to purchase them—these funds enabled the commission to hire 120 employees, based at offices in Sacramento, San Francisco, Fresno, and Los Angeles.42
Despite these efforts, law enforcement remained a major challenge. Game wardens could not detect more than a small fraction of the violations. According to Ernest Schaeffle, the commission’s executive officer, conservationists were “compelled to realize that laws are being violated every day and that the fish and game supply is suffering correspondingly.” Hunters ignored new laws, landowners refused to allow officials to work on their property, and sympathetic judges declined to hear game cases. “He has read history to very little purpose,” wrote one such California judge, who was unaware that game codes were a “fruitful source of oppression of the masses of the people. . . . It was better to exterminate the game at once than to preserve it for the special benefit of a favored few.”43
People violated the new fish and game codes for many reasons. In some cases, these laws reversed older statutes that many people thought still made sense. For example, proposals for new regulations to ban the sale of wild-caught game reversed previous laws in many states that had required hunters to bring their excess catch to market. The rationale behind the earlier laws was that demand, not supply, should dictate the size of the commercial harvest. In other cases, people violated the new codes, such as closed seasons, to feed their families or because they were following cultural traditions from their homelands. Sometimes people were simply not aware of the new codes, but they also broke the law to protest regulations that appeared to single them out for discrimination.44
Racism
