hired team to fit the bear with chains for the trip ahead. That process required several days, and it cost Monarch his canine teeth, which he splintered while trying to rip off his shackles. After the chains came the temporary gag, a thick rope lashed through the bear’s mouth and strapped around his ears to form a bridle, which was attached to a collar made of heavy Norwegian iron. Once Monarch was fully restrained, his captors removed the gag and finished readying him for the long journey north.5
The trip took about two weeks. The first section, from the camp to the nearest wagon road, was the most difficult. Each evening Kelly’s team would chain Monarch to a tree, and each morning they would load him up for the day’s trip. This required roping the bear, binding him to “a rough skeleton sled,” or “go-devil,” then dragging the whole contraption, bear and all, down the mountain. It was not easy to find a team of horses that would submit to the task, and each morning Monarch fought back with “dogged persistency.” He was an enormous and powerful animal, but in the end he was no match for four men on horses with chains and lassos. When they reached the road, the crew built a bigger cage, and Monarch spent the rest of the trip riding on wagons and trains. The bear had but one “tantrum” along the way, when a group of onlookers in the ramshackle depot of Mojave poked and prodded him with sharp sticks to try to make him stand. He had almost burst out of his cage when Kelly arrived to chase the gawkers away and pacify the bear with a sliced watermelon. After that, Monarch settled into the calm routine of a defeated but dignified captive.6
The journey left a lifelong impression on both man and animal. By the time they reached San Francisco, according to Kelly, Monarch would “allow me to handle his chain and would take food from my hand. . . . Close acquaintance with the grizzly inspired me with genuine respect for his character and admiration for his indomitable courage.” But the trip was tough on Monarch. According to the Examiner, the grueling voyage had left the great bear “travel-worn and thin. . . . His broken teeth trouble him some and it will be some time before he will feel as well as he did before he was caught.” The paper assured its readers, however, that Monarch was “brightening up, and when the abrasions of his skin, made by ropes and chains, are healed up and his hair grows again on the bare spots he will be more presentable.”7
On November 10, around twenty thousand people gathered at Woodward’s Garden—a long-shuttered zoo, museum, and theme park that was then in San Francisco’s Mission District—to attend a reception celebrating Monarch’s debut as the only California grizzly in captivity. It was a merry outing for most of the attendees. But for Kelly the day’s festivities offered little cause for cheer. Looking back, he recalled that after Monarch’s capture, the bear had “exhausted every means at his command to break out, and when convinced that he was beaten, he spent one whole day in grievous lamentation and then ceased his futile efforts. Monarch is a brave old fellow and he ought to be free in his native mountains. If he still regrets that he was captured I sympathize with him for I’m more than half sorry myself.”8
Kelly never said exactly why he was sorry. But he knew that California’s wildlife was declining rapidly and that zoos were miserable places for most animals. His experience with Monarch had challenged him and changed him, and it seems safe to say that he had decided that wild creatures, particularly large and intelligent animals such as grizzlies, belonged in wild places. This was not a common belief at the time, but Kelly would be far from the last Californian to reach that conclusion.
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE CHAPARRAL BEAR
Before the arrival of European explorers, settlers, and missionaries in the late eighteenth century, grizzlies roamed throughout most of what is now California. They lived on the seashores, in the valleys, in the foothills, and in the mountains all the way up to the alpine zone. They favored grasslands, wetlands, woodlands, and brushlands—especially chaparral—but they ranged widely throughout the region’s diverse landscapes, from the Sierra Nevada and the Cascades to the Coast, Transverse, and Peninsular Ranges, into the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys, and along coastal bluffs and prairies including the San Francisco Peninsula and the Los Angeles Basin (see map 2). The only part of California that grizzlies probably did not frequent was the eastern deserts. They did, however, wander all the way out to the desert fringe, especially during the sporadic years when the piñon trees produced their sumptuous crops of buttery pine nuts.9
Unlike their relatives farther north, California grizzlies lived in a region with year-round resource availability. They remained active day and night, consumed a wide variety of foods, and had no need to hibernate. Grizzlies scavenged the carcasses of beached marine mammals, grazed on perennial grasses and seeds, gathered berries, and foraged for fruits and nuts. They rooted around like pigs in search of roots and bulbs, and after the introduction of European hogs, the bears ate them too. At times and places of abundant food—such as along rivers during steelhead spawning seasons or in oak woodlands during acorn mast years—grizzlies congregated in large numbers. Such a varied and plentiful diet produced some enormous animals. Male California grizzlies could grow to more than fifteen hundred pounds. This equals the maximum size of the largest grizzlies alive today, Alaska’s Kodiak bears, which achieve their exceptional girth by the rather different strategy of specializing on salmon and hibernating for much of the year.10
No one knows how many grizzlies lived in California before European contact. The great naturalist Joseph Grinnell, who served as the first director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at UC Berkeley and spearheaded California’s first grassroots wildlife conservation campaign in the 1910s, calculated a pre-1830 population of 2,595 adult grizzlies. He based this number on historical records, assumptions about resource availability, and the size of grizzly ranges in other regions. He also noted that under favorable conditions, grizzlies were capable of rapid population growth.11 Yet Grinnell’s numbers are only estimates. All we can say for sure is that grizzlies were probably always common in California, and much more so than their smaller cousins, the black bears, whose populations grizzlies appear to have limited through territorial aggression and competitive exclusion. Black bears are common throughout much of California today, but they probably only became so after the grizzlies’ eradication.
Despite their robust size and large population, grizzlies were never the dominant land animal in California. For the first million years of the species’s existence, the grizzly was just one member of a spectacular group of Pleistocene megafauna that included such formidable beasts as the saber-toothed tiger, the dire wolf, the giant ground sloth, and the woolly mammoth. Around thirteen thousand years ago, near the end of the last ice age and shortly after the arrival of the first human hunter-gatherers, many of these species began to decline. Some persisted for millennia in isolated areas, but within a few thousand years most had disappeared. Species with the largest body masses were the first to go, and they went extinct at a much greater rate than did the smaller ones. Grizzlies ranked well down the size hierarchy of the Pleistocene megafauna, but they were one of the largest terrestrial animal species to survive the subsequent extinctions. By ten thousand years ago, they were the second-most-dominant land animals in California, after humans.12
MAP 2. Key sites in the history of the California grizzly.
As late as the 1980s, many scholars of this period thought that California Indians did not have the capacity to challenge or control the grizzlies in their midst. This belief derived from scattered accounts by Spanish chroniclers who claimed that killing problem grizzlies proved their countrymen’s benevolence toward the helpless natives. The Indians’ supposed inability to control grizzlies was an example of their failure to civilize their country and thus contributed to a larger narrative of indigenous savagery and vulnerability that helped to justify colonization.13
Recent scholarship on pre-Columbian environmental manipulation by indigenous
