California before the Spanish was not a primeval wilderness; it was one of the most densely populated regions on the continent outside present-day Mexico, with human inhabitants who altered its environments through hunting, fishing, gathering, burning, and horticulture. Grizzly bears and people coexisted in uneasy proximity and often killed one another. But this was no balance of power. People almost certainly excluded bears from key resource sites, hunted them for food and ceremonial uses, and may even have culled their populations for community safety or to prevent raids on valuable resources. Grizzlies were formidable neighbors, but then as now, people ruled the land.
The Spanish did, however, bring superior firepower to their first encounters with California’s bears. In September of 1769, a motley band of soldiers from the Gaspar de Portolá expedition landed on the shores of what is now San Luis Obispo County, near Morro Bay, and marched inland in search of freshwater and wild game. Not far from the coast, they found “troops of bears” foraging in a marshy basin. The famished soldiers mounted their horses and began the chase. None of these animals had ever heard or felt gunfire, and they were caught exposed in open country. One grizzly took seven shots and maimed two of the Spaniards’ mules before chasing the men away. A 375-pound female, small by California standards but enormous to Spanish eyes, died only after receiving nine bullet wounds, including a final shot to the head. The bruin provided a hearty meal, both “savory and good,” and gave the soldiers a taste for bear meat that, just a few years later, would prove their salvation. The site became known as La Cañada de los Osos: The Valley of the Bears.15
The Spaniards settled in the north at Monterey, and then at San Carlos and San Antonio, but their missions were miserable, squalid places. They had meager supplies, and the landscape that surrounded them seemed to offer few resources. The missions in the south, at San Gabriel and San Diego, were even worse off, and Junípero Serra, the leader of the Spanish mission system in Alta California, sent provisions to the southern outposts overland by mule. Within three years of their arrival in California, the residents of the northern missions also began to fear starvation.
Enter Don Pedro Fages Beleta, the Spanish navy captain who served as the maritime chief of the Portolá expedition. After Portolá’s departure, in 1770, Fages became Alta California’s second Spanish military governor, and he concocted a daring plan to resolve the increasingly desperate situation. He and his small band of soldiers marched 140 miles, from Monterey back to Morro Bay, to find food. They reached La Cañada de los Osos in 1772 and remained in the area for three months, during which time they killed some thirty grizzlies and sent about nine thousand pounds of jerked bear meat back to the northern missions. Fages became an instant hero, and for his accomplishments he earned the nickname El Oso.16
Why did Fages need to travel 140 miles to find food? There are several possible answers. First, the Spaniards were picky and prejudiced eaters. They were accustomed to consuming large quantities of red meat, but they preferred the beef of proper Spanish cattle. They knew little about hunting, fishing, or trapping, other than shooting bears, and because they believed they were the ones doing the teaching, they rejected the advice of the area’s indigenous inhabitants. But there is something else to this story. Fages needed to travel 140 miles to find food because in 1772, wild game in Alta California appears to have been relatively scarce.17
Before European settlement, a population of some three hundred fifty thousand American Indians used the region’s fish and wildlife resources and altered its ecosystems in myriad ways. Consider two well-known examples: Fisheries biologists have estimated that indigenous people in the Central Valley alone caught up to 8.5 million pounds of salmon annually. The largest Euro-American commercial harvests taken in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ranged from four to ten million pounds. Indians also managed landscapes to maintain terrestrial game, such as deer, using fire to clear brush and promote forage, and they undoubtedly took large numbers of these animals too. Some of these practices had already diminished by the late eighteenth century, but indigenous environmental manipulation and resource harvests continued at significant levels for several decades. The consequences of these activities for fish and wildlife must have been profound and complex, but it seems clear that indigenous hunting and gathering limited the abundance of wild game in Alta California into the second half of the eighteenth century.18
This situation changed swiftly and dramatically during the mission era. Between 1769 and 1834, the number of Indians living along the coast between San Diego and Sonoma dropped by an apocalyptic 75 percent. Disease and migration contributed to further declines through the end of the Mexican rancho era in 1848. By 1855 there were only about fifty thousand Indians left in California. For the few who survived, ecological changes, including the proliferation of exotic plants and animals, made it more difficult to pursue traditional subsistence life-styles based on the harvest of native species.19
Aside from its human consequences, the demographic collapse of California’s Indians had enormous consequences for the region’s ecology. Hunting, gathering, fishing, burning, and horticulture all dwindled. European livestock proliferated on the range, denuded the vegetation, and formed huge feral herds. Some native wildlife species were forced to compete with introduced European species for resources. But for many others, particularly those that did not compete with or suffer from the presence of feral livestock, the mission era represented a period of diminished human pressure, abundant resources, and population growth.20
This process began almost immediately, and it soon reached epic proportions. As early as 1786, the French navigator Jean François de La Pérouse wrote that no country was “more abundant in fish and game of every description.” Tales of California’s bountiful elk, antelope, deer, salmon, ducks, geese, and of course bears became commonplace in travelers’ and settlers’ accounts. In 1826 Frederick William Beechey, of the British Royal Navy, found the San Francisco Bay region “abounding in game of all kinds, so plentiful, indeed, as so to lessen the desire of pursuit.” In 1841 the American settler John Bidwell described the Great Central Valley as containing “thousands of elk, antelope, deer, wild horses, . . . incalculable thousands of wild geese, ducks, brants, cranes, pelicans, etc.,” as well as “a great abundance of salmon in every stream.” A complete list of such accounts could continue for many pages. California’s boosters almost certainly exaggerated these reports in their attempts to attract new residents. Yet descriptions of plentiful wildlife were so common, among so many diverse and independent observers, that it would be folly to reject their essential vera-city. By the 1830s, the same region in which El Oso had needed to travel 140 miles to find wild game had become a paradise for fish and wildlife—including grizzlies.21
No group of species profited more from this transition than the large carnivores, which benefited from a reduction in hunting but even more from an increase in resource availability. Eagles preyed on newly introduced agricultural livestock, including goats and piglets. Wolves stalked vast flocks of feral sheep. Coyotes and bobcats devoured house cats and Norway rats. Condors and vultures gathered around gruesome calaveras, or “places of skulls,” where they and other scavengers picked at the discarded remains of animals slaughtered for the hide and tallow industries. And thousands of grizzlies became fat on the carcasses of Spanish livestock. Grizzlies are opportunistic eaters. They can survive on largely herbivorous diets, but they will consume extravagant quantities of meat when the chance arises. Livestock provided an unprecedented caloric resource, and by 1848 the population of bears in Alta California had probably reached its historic peak. On the eve of statehood, the region contained about seventy-five hundred naturalized Spanish settlers, or Californios, one hundred thousand Indians, sixty-five hundred miscellaneous immigrants, and some ten thousand grizzly bears—a staggering ratio of more than one grizzly for every twelve people.22
The historical record from California during this period abounds with stories about bears. In Southern California, grizzlies were “more plentiful than pigs,” a situation that made ranching in the mountains above Santa Barbara and Los Angeles “utterly impossible.” In central California, grizzlies loitered around the towns of San Luis Obispo and even Monterey, where El Oso had failed to find any
