decades of the nineteenth century. Grizzlies were shot in Santa Cruz County near Ben Lomond in 1886, in Ventura County near Mount Piños in 1898, and in Orange County at the head of Trabuco Canyon in 1908. A man named Cornelius B. Johnson killed Southern California’s last known grizzly near the town of Sunland, in the San Fernando Valley north of Burbank, in October 1916. Johnson used some stale beef from a local butcher shop as bait for a Newhouse No. 5 bear trap, which he set out near some vineyards and weighed down with a fifty-pound drag log. He discovered the animal, a full day after it had become ensnared, half a mile into the foothills and nearly five hundred feet higher in elevation. The 254-pound bear had dragged the trap and log up the canyon until the whole tangled mess of bear and iron and wood got stuck in the brush. By the time Johnson found the exhausted sow, she was waiting to die.31
No one knows how long the last California grizzlies survived in the wild. In 1924, reports appeared of a massive, speckled, cinnamon-colored bear prowling the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada near Horse Corral Meadow in Sequoia National Park. Witnesses said it had a hump on its shoulders, which is one of the features that most easily distinguishes grizzlies from black bears. A local rancher named Jesse Agnew claimed to have killed another grizzly in the same area just a couple years earlier. Agnew’s story received the support of C. Hart Merriam, the chief of the U.S. Biological Survey, who examined a tooth from the bear and proclaimed it a grizzly. The last reported sighting came in 1925, from a cattleman named Hengst, near the headwaters of Cliff Creek deep in the park, but no specimens, photographs, or other physical evidence ever emerged. And then the sightings stopped. It had taken just seventy-five years of statehood for Californians to exterminate their most spectacular land animal.32
A SYMBOL OF STATEHOOD AND BEYOND
The California grizzly may have gone extinct, but it did not disappear. In 1890 the historian and naturalist Charles Howard Shinn envisioned a future when the bear, having “impressed himself irrevocably upon the imagination,” would achieve immortality. Farms and cities would replace wilderness, and the grizzly would fade away from the countryside. In its passing, however, the species would take its place alongside the American pioneer and other cherished anachronisms in a new chapter of national folklore—a “noble myth” of westward expansion, comparable in its grandeur to the epics of medieval England and ancient Greece. It was impossible to say exactly what this heroic legend would contain, because it would remain incomplete until the final California grizzly had vanished from its last mountain redoubt. For Shinn, the grizzly’s extinction was not only inevitable but also essential for the patriotic reunification and rebirth of a country still reeling from half a century of internecine violence and frenetic change that included the Civil War, Manifest Destiny, and the Gilded Age.33
Shinn was not the only observer who believed that wild animal extinctions were necessary and inevitable in American progress. During the previous two decades, a wide variety of commentators, capitalists, and politicians had made similar statements about other species in other parts of the American West. They argued that the settlement of the region required a great transformation of nature and society—one that would see unruly wild beasts and uncivilized native peoples give way to domestic animals and an industrious white society. The California grizzly was just one creature among the many that had no place in this new American future.34
Shinn had good reason to believe that the grizzly would become a permanent feature of California’s foundation mythology. His article coincided with the U.S. Census Bureau’s announcement, in 1890, that the country no longer had a western frontier, which it defined as a single contiguous line beyond which the population density decreased to less than two people per square mile. The West was now, at least in official terms, settled. The western frontier had occupied a prominent place on the mental maps of white Americans since the seventeenth century, and its closure created an uncommon opportunity for collective reflection and mythmaking. This process was already well under way in California, where the grizzly bear had emerged as an icon of both the fading frontier and the new society that was replacing it.
In the Bear Flag Revolt, of June 1846, a band of Anglo-American interlopers, acting at the behest of U.S. Army Major John C. Frémont, marched into the town square of Sonoma, fifty miles north of San Francisco, and replaced the Mexican flag there with a makeshift banner featuring a star, a grizzly bear, and the words CALIFORNIA REPUBLIC. The bear symbolized power and defiance for a ragtag group of insurgents whose intention was to seize control of land that the Mexicans had wrestled from the Spanish, and the Spanish had usurped from the Indians. The California Republic was short-lived. It ended less than a month later, when army forces occupied Monterey and the Bear Flag rebels sided with the United States in the Mexican-American War. California joined the Union in 1848 and achieved statehood in 1850. A redesigned version of the insurgents’ original Sonoma banner became its official flag in 1911 (see figure 5).
The Great Seal of the State of California, adopted at California’s constitutional convention on the eve of statehood in 1849, also features a grizzly. This bear shares its space with grapevines, representing agriculture; a miner, embodying resource extraction; sailboats, signifying trade; and the Roman goddess Minerva, symbolizing wisdom, poetry, craft, and commerce. Native Americans, Franciscan missionaries, and Californios are nowhere to be found.
Shinn was right to identify the grizzly as an enduring symbol of early California. But he was wrong to think that most people would look back on the bear’s destruction as a necessary step in American progress, and he underestimated its versatility as a cultural icon. By the time the California grizzly went extinct, people had seen it as a man-eater, a cattle killer, a test of masculine virtue, an exemplar of domesticity, and a source of meat for their starving communities. They had pressed it into service as a totem, a trophy, a varmint, a delicacy, a matador, and a jester (as in Grizzly Adams’s grotesque basement circus). They had mobilized it as a symbol of revolt and statehood, of the fading frontier and the residual wilderness, of reckless consumption and the promise of conservation. People had even used grizzlies to hunt other grizzlies. The grizzly provided Californians with such a powerful symbol not only because it played a unique role during a formative historical period but also because it typified a much larger transformation that reordered the state’s ecosystems and rearranged its animal populations. We now turn to that larger context of wildlife exploitation and ecological change.
FIGURE 5. The California state flag.
THE BELEAGUERED MENAGERIE
Not all wild animal species responded in the same way to the social, economic, and ecological changes that transformed California during the nineteenth century. Some, such as the grizzly, probably experienced brief periods of superabundance, in response to diminished human hunting and increased resource availability, only to become rare during the final decades of the century. Species that thrived in fields and farmlands probably increased their numbers. But many others declined in population due to habitat loss, increased competition, and predation from larger, more aggressive species. The net result of all of this change was that by 1900, many of the state’s most valuable and charismatic fish and game species reached their lowest levels ever recorded, before or since. We must understand the grizzly’s story within this broader context.
Marine species were among the earliest to suffer from exploitation. Beginning around 1780, the sea otter supported the first major wildlife industry in Alta California. By 1800, ships were arriving there from around the world, and sea otter pelts, which had become North America’s most valuable natural resource by weight, were appearing in markets as far away as Shanghai and London. This was California’s first “gold” rush. By 1840 the fur trade had nearly led to the sea otter’s extinction. A sea otter harvest would briefly reemerge around 1890, and this second phase of hunting again almost annihilated the species, as well as several other marine mammals. The North Pacific Fur Seal Convention of 1911, the world’s first wildlife conservation treaty, banned further exploitation, but by this time fewer than two thousand sea otters remained
