region’s first Anglo-American pioneers, recalled that near his Napa homestead, grizzlies “were everywhere upon the plains, in the valleys, and on the mountains . . . so that I have often killed as many as five or six in one day, and it was not unusual to see fifty or sixty within twenty-four hours.” In 1827 a grizzly bear astonished the crew of a boat sailing near Angel Island, in San Francisco Bay, when it surfaced nearby and began swimming toward them. The sailors dispatched the animal with “four balls . . . at close range” before it had an opportunity to board their vessel. As late as 1850, a grizzly wandered into the settlement at Mission Dolores on the outskirts of San Francisco.23
The Californios hunted and killed grizzlies. Yet unlike the Puritan farmers who had arrived in New England with a pious hatred of all things wild, the Catholic ranchers who settled in Alta California a century and a half later had no particular enmity toward the native animals. By the 1830s the region had an overabundance of livestock, and the ranchers, who never made much of an effort to maximize their profits, felt little urgency to control the predators or build their herds. Grizzlies became subjects of sport and leisure, and they assumed a central place in the grand festivals that defined the time (and still do in the popular imagination). Bear lassoing was one popular, if hazardous, diversion (see figure 3). Grizzlies also participated in the bear-and-bull fights that occurred in towns throughout the region. These fights continued a European tradition thousands of years old, but they reached their most elaborate development in Alta California. The bears almost always won these bloody contests, but the fights often turned into harrowing spectacles whose result was never a foregone conclusion.24
FIGURE 3. Roping the Bear at Santa Margarita Rancho of Juan Foster, by James Walker (1818-89), c. 1870 (oil on canvas). Courtesy of the California Historical Society; gift of Mr. and Mrs. Reginald F. Walker Coll., CHS2009.165.
By 1840, Anglo-American pioneers were beginning to arrive in Alta California in larger numbers. Most had little appreciation for Californio culture and even less regard for wild animals. These newcomers killed grizzlies for a multitude of reasons—or sometimes for no reason at all—and they pursued their project with relentless enthusiasm. Grizzly killing soon became a rite of passage and a sign of manly virtue among a certain class of self-styled and self-promoting mountain men who sought fame and fortune in the Great West. They made guest appearances, toured with traveling shows, and published popular accounts, often ghostwritten, of their daring exploits. Hunters would even sell captured cubs as pets or performers. In Sacramento in 1858, one could purchase an untamed California grizzly cub for $15.50 and a trained bruin for $20.50, which was probably worth the modest markup. Men such as George Nidever, Colin Preston, and Seth Kiman all claimed to have killed dozens or even hundreds of bears, and each became briefly famous. But none achieved the mythical status of one John Capen Adams.25
FIGURE 4. Adams, the Hunter, and His Bears, by Edward Vischer, 1873. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
“Grizzly” Adams arrived in California from Massachusetts in 1849, and from 1852 to 1856 he hunted and trapped bears in the Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountains. Adams killed dozens of grizzlies. But he domesticated and cared for many others, including a feisty, fifteen-hundred-pound behemoth named Old Sampson, and his more sedate longtime companion, Ben Franklin, whom he walked on a leash and fitted with a packsaddle. Adams became famous for parading his menagerie through downtown San Francisco, and in 1856 he founded the Pacific Museum on the corner of Clay and Kearney Streets in the heart of that city. The establishment was more of a circus than a museum, and Adams was more of a clown than a curator. In the building’s cramped quarters, he staged bizarre evening shows that included bears as well as elk, deer, lions, tigers, snakes, roadrunners, monkeys, and “numberless small animals,” all choreographed to a “fine brass band” (see figure 4).26
As Monarch’s capture demonstrated, grizzlies did not succumb to death or the indignities of captivity without a spirited fight, and California soon contained scores of men who had proved their masculine virtue at the expense of death or disfiguring injuries. “If you kill a bear,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine declared in 1861, “it is a triumph worthy [of] enjoying; if you get killed yourself, some of the newspapers will give you a friendly notice; if you get crippled for life, you carry about you a patent of courage which may be useful in case you go into politics. . . . Besides, it has its effect upon the ladies. A ‘chawed up’ man is very much admired all over the world.” Adams died in 1860, at the age of forty-eight, from medical complications following a series of massive, bear-inflicted head wounds, several of which he received from the animals in his care.27
California’s macho bear hunters were not the only people attempting to define the state’s grizzlies. Another perspective, popular among Victorian moralists, portrayed grizzlies as benign creatures, righteous citizens, and even good parents. As early as 1850, U.S. Naval Chaplain Walter Colton wrote that the grizzly’s child-rearing skills shone “like a good deed in a naughty world.” Joaquin Miller, one of the most colorful characters in the late-nineteenth-century American West, had little in common with Chaplain Colton. He reportedly contracted scurvy while working as a cook at a mining camp and spent time in jail for stealing a horse before being elected a judge in Grant County, Oregon. But he agreed with Colton’s assessment of the grizzly’s character. In 1900 he published a book called True Bear Stories, much of which was undoubtedly false, in which he described the grizzly as “a good-natured lover of his family.”28
The heyday for California’s chaparral bears lasted little more than half a century—halted not only by hunting, capture, and commodification but also by the transformation of the state’s rural landscapes into spaces of capitalist agricultural production where bears simply were not welcome. In the decades following the gold rush of 1849, the state’s new Anglo-American elite succeeded in dispossessing the Californios of their lands and began converting the state’s valley grasslands and wetlands into orchards and wheat fields. Ranching continued in the foothills and mountains, but the great drought of 1863–64 devastated California’s overstocked rangelands and killed at least half of the state’s cattle. Sheep weathered the drought better than cows but were more vulnerable to attack by large carnivores, and the woolgrowers, with their newfound political clout, took the lead in predator elimination.
No one knows how many domestic animals the grizzlies killed, but many clearly became habituated to livestock, and this earned them a place on the agricultural blacklist, along with numerous other species. Cattlemen awarded bounties for the scalps of special offenders, and hunters could profit several times from a single kill. After a hunter collected his reward, he would dismember the animal and sell off its oil, meat, hide, internal organs, and claws. This created a strong incentive for grizzly hunting. According to the naturalist Henry W. Henshaw, few species had “suffered more from persistent and relentless warfare waged by man than this formidable bear. . . . The number of bears is each year diminished, till in many sections where formerly they were very abundant they have entirely disappeared.”29
Despite these landscape transformations and eradication campaigns, grizzlies remained common in some areas for decades. Sightings continued through the 1860s in the San Francisco Bay Area, from Carmel to Santa Cruz, Palo Alto, San Jose, and Livermore, where Grizzly Adams had lived in his wilderness cabin. In the 1870s, grizzlies were still abundant near Yosemite Valley and in the vast belt of chaparral-covered mountains that stretched across Southern California from Point Conception in Santa Barbara County to Fort Tejon in Kern County and the Peninsular Ranges east of San Diego. As late as the 1880s, grizzlies frequented the Arroyo Seco outside Pasadena, now home to the Rose Bowl, where they indulged in the unhealthy habit of raiding apiaries owned by beekeepers armed with poison and guns.30
The number of recorded encounters between
