Wildlife Changes

In the pyramid of life that comprised the natural world of California there is little doubt that the large predators were at the top. For them to thrive, there must be an abundance of prey, and for these to thrive, there must be an abundance of the plant foods that sustain them. Thus if you see an area where the predators seem fat and happy, you can suspect that all is well with the total environment. In California when the Spanish settlers first arrived in 1769, there was certainly an abundance of what was then the top predator on land, the grizzly bear.

It would be wrong to say that the grizzly was a bad-tempered animal. At times it could be quite cheerful and content in its bearish way. But it was easily and unpredictably offended. Then, it would fly into a rage and might tear the offender apart. The Indians had deep respect for the large bears and usually managed to coexist with them peacefully. So, too, did James "Grizzly" Adams, a colorful and loquacious gold-rush era hunter who roamed the wild country of California with his two tamed grizzlies, raised from cubs and taught to tolerate humans. His accounts, although not always trustworthy, confirm the relative abundance of bears throughout California. Adams also reported on the presence of true wolves, along with the ever-abundant coyote. On one occasion he encountered a female jaguar, with a cub, in the Tehachapi Mountains.^[1]

All early accounts of conditions in California before European hunting began to seriously impinge on the wildlife and wild country indicate that California Indians and wild animals lived in relative harmony. It was not that Indians did not hunt. They did, and indeed depended on deer, elk, pronghorn, and other species for part of their food supply. But they did not kill for profit and had deep respect for the animals on which they depended. In consequence, animals that are now wild and wary, such as mountain lions and black bears, were then relatively tame and not quick to flee from human presence. A view of this relationship was provided by pioneer Hale Tharp, as told by Walter Fry and Toby Whyte:

There were about 2,000 Indians then living along the Kaweah River above where Lemon Cove now stands. . . . The Indians told me that I was the first white man that had ever come to their country. Few of them had ever seen a white man prior to my

The famed hunter James Capen Adams and his pet grizzly Ben Franklin, as portrayed
 by Charles Nahl. Few Californians maintained Adams's complex and imaginative 
relationship with bears, preferring simply to slaughter them for food or sport. "The 
California Grizzly," remarked a writer for  Hutchings' California Magazine  in 1858, "is
 exceedingly ferocious, and powerful; and unless treated to a deadly bullet, it is a hard
 customer to manage in an encounter." From Theodore H. Hittell,  The Adventures of 
James Capen Adams, Mountaineer and Grizzly Bear Hunter of California  (1860).
  California Historical Society, FN-30962 .

There was an abundance of game. Deer were everywhere, with lots of bear along the rivers, and occasionally a grizzly bear. Lions, wolves, and foxes were plentiful.

During the summer of 1858, accompanied by two Indians, I made my first trip into the Giant Forest. When we arrived at Log Meadow there were a great many deer and a few bear in the meadow, and the animals paid little attention to us. The deer came around our camp, and some of the bears sat upright in order to get a good look at us. I shot a small buck for camp meat. The shot did not seem to frighten the other deer or any of the bears.^[2]

More striking was the testimony of a Chumash elder, Grandfather Semu Huaute, who refers to a wilderness north of Santa Barbara: "You know, daughter, before the Spaniards came to California, the bears and us used to gather berries together. The bears were real friendly. We got along real well. We could talk to each other, and we had a good understanding. When the Spaniards came, they found it pretty easy to shoot the bears. After that the bears wouldn't go berrying with us any more."^[3]

The Spaniards hunted bears and, although the grizzly population increased greatly in the countryside because of the new food supply—Spanish cattle—they succeeded in controlling the bears' numbers somewhat around the missions and pueblos. But it was the dispersion of people into the wild country in the gold-rush days, first as prospectors, then as miners, finally as settlers, that led to the massive depletion of wildlife. Of course the grizzly, who challenged people and often attacked, was one of the first to go. One indicative example was Humboldt County, where, according to the settlers, grizzlies were obnoxiously abundant. Early pioneer Calvin Kinman had counted forty grizzlies from one high hill in the Mattole country, but probably the last bear to live in the region was killed in 1868. In Santa Cruz County, grizzlies were also common until 1886, when the last one was reported dead. In the Sierra, they lasted longer, but the last grizzly seen, but not killed, was in Sequoia National Park in 1925.^[4]

The fate of the grizzly and other animals illustrates the Gold Rush's adverse effects on the land animals of California and their habitats. However, offshore the same depletion and near extermination of marine mammals occurred. There, the decimation began even before the advent of mining, without the influence of tens of thousands of gold seekers. Two aquatic animals—the sea otter and the beaver—were the targets of the fur rush beginning more than a century before the Gold Rush. The sea otter was abundant along the California coast, particularly around San Francisco and Monterey bays and the Channel Islands. Perhaps 300,000 or more swam in the offshore waters. Unfortunately for the otters, they had a dense, warm brown coat with a silvered frosting of guard hairs. This came to be regarded as highly desirable among fur wearers in Moscow, Peking (Beijing), and elsewhere among the world's elite.

The trouble started in 1740, when the Russian government sent Vitus Bering to explore the northern Pacific toward Alaska. In the Aleutian Islands, the native Aleuts brought him large numbers of otter skins, which on the return of his expedition proved to be highly popular in Russia and China, and by the late 1700s, Russian ships were hunting the animal along the California coast.^[5] The Spanish exploitation of sea otters, probably using Chumash hunters, began before 1785, when the first government regulations on the trade were issued. Between 1786 and 1790 alone, nearly 10,000 skins were exported from Mexico to Asia via the Manila galleons. The Russians, partly to improve their access to the fur trade, established bases at Fort Ross in 1812 and in the Farallon Islands, from which they went forth with their Aleut hunters to kill sea otters. One hunting party in San Francisco Bay in 1811 massacred 1,200 otters. The French also played a minor role; in 1786 the expedition of Jean-François de Galaup, Comte de La Pérouse obtained 1,000 skins, which they sold in China for $10,000. The price went up from $10 to $60 a skin by the 1790s. Americans became involved in the early 1800s and were still active by gold-rush times. The best known American hunter, George Nidever, was particularly busy in the Channel Islands and offshore in Baja California from 1834 to 1855.^[6] By gold-rush times the otters were becoming scarce, and prospecting held a greater allure for the hunters. Nevertheless, the otter population had been reduced to perhaps thirty-two survivors by the time it was given full protection in 1911.

It was not only sea otters that suffered from this marine carnage. The Alaska fur seal was greatly reduced; and the Guadalupe fur seal was pushed to near extinction and, along with the elephant seal, survived only on Guadalupe Island in Baja California. As I wrote in an earlier work,

Few people realize even today, with the current interest in whales, how many kinds of sea mammals occur in California waters. There are twenty-six species of cetaceans, the whales and dolphins, seven species of seals and sea lions, and one sea-going otter. . . . Just as great herds of elk and antelope [pronghorn] moved across the plains of the Central Valley, in pre-European days, so also did great herds of sea mammals travel above the plains of the continental shelf, moving up the slopes of the islands and occasionally down into the depths of the submarine canyons. The abundance and variety of these sea mammals were greater than those of their terrestrial counterparts.^[7]

The marine mammals under greatest hunting pressure were those that came upon the shore to rest or breed, but even the truly marine species did not escape. By the early 1800s, whaling ships from New England were in California waters chasing after right whales and sperm whales. Shore-based whaling started in 1851 and concentrated on gray and humpback whales. But all of the great whales were under attack, and with most, numbers were quickly reduced to the point of endangering the survival of the species.

The mammal that contributed more than its share to the fur rush was not a marine or coastal-waters species but an inhabitant of fresh water—the golden beaver. This large rodent reached its greatest abundance, not in the forests of the Sierra or the coast, but in the Central Valley and particularly the marshlands where the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers came together to flow into the San Francisco Bay. Unlike its relatives of the Great Lakes forests and Rocky Mountains, the golden beaver did not usually build large dams or lodges that protruded above the water surfaces. Usually, beaver dens were dug into the river banks and the entrances were below the water line. Since beaver are mostly active at night, an abundance of beaver in a river may not be noticeable.

Beaver trappers reached California in 1826, when a party led by Peter Skene Ogden of the Hudson's Bay Company came south from Fort Vancouver in Canada in the same year that the American trappers Jedediah Smith and James O. Pattie led parties from their bases near the Great Salt Lake and Santa Fe. Skene and Smith were particularly successful and took thousands of beaver between 1826 and 1828. They were to be followed by enough others to greatly reduce beaver numbers before the Gold Rush, when most hunters gave up trapping in the search for what was hoped to be an easier source of wealth, but eventually other fur bearers suffered the beaver's fate. According to Joseph Grinnell and his coauthors, "After the first period of rapid depletion, the second half of the nineteenth century brought an extension of trapping to the remaining and less conspicuous fur bearers in California. Thus the exhaustion of this resource [beaver] was extended to include nearly all the kinds of fur animals."^[8]

The grasslands and marshlands of California were home to abundant tule elk when the first Europeans arrived. Dale McCullough of the University of California, Berkeley, has done the most complete study of these animals and has estimated their aboriginal numbers at 500,000.^[9] Richard Henry Dana in his Two Years Bette the Mast described "hundreds and hundreds" of these animals on the Marin headlands, which he watched when his sailing ship anchored in San Francisco Bay in 1835.^[10] Missionary-explorer Pedro Font noted the abundance of elk in the San Francisco peninsula and east bay in 1775 and 1776.^[11] Early American settler William Heath Davis reported seeing as many as three thousand elk "that swam from Mare Island to Vallejo and back," and John Bidwell wrote of elk "by the thousand" in the Napa and Santa Clara valleys in 1841.^[12] It was the tule marshes and grasslands of the Central Valley, however, that supported the greatest numbers of elk, and it was there that they made their last stand.

The Gold Rush touched off the slaughter of elk because of the demand for meat in the burgeoning mining camps, towns, and cities, coupled with a shortage of beef or mutton. For a time, market-hunting of elk, deer, and pronghorn, along with waterfowl and other game, became a lucrative livelihood for those who preferred shoot-

Egg pickers gather the harvest on one of the Farallon Islands, some thirty miles off the
 Golden Gate, in 1880. The wild rush west of thousands of gold seekers created an enormous
 demand in California not only for game, but also for fish and fowl and eggs. Between 1850
 and 1856 the Farallone Egg Company alone brought over three million eggs—chiefly those
 of the common murre—to the San Francisco markets.  California Historical Society, 
FN-30975 .

ing to grubbing for gold. While there is little doubt that market-hunting depleted elk populations, it was the spread of agriculture, and the corresponding destruction of elk habitat, that really led to their near extinction. With agricultural demands came the drainage of the tule marshes, the canalization of rivers, and the fencing of farmlands. Meanwhile, great herds of domestic cattle, sheep, horses, and other livestock competed with elk for the forage produced on lands not suited to crops. In the words of T. S. Van Dyke,

As the swamps began to be drained and the cover burned off, and roads made through the drying ground, it was again the same old story of the white man. By 1875 the antelope were a curiosity on the great plains, where so many thousands lately glimmered through the dancing heat, while the elk were almost as rare in the great rule swamps

that so lately seemed inaccessible. By 1885 only one band was left, and that was on the immense (half-million acre) ranch of Miller and Lux in the upper part of the valley, some twenty miles from Bakersfield.^[13]

Van Dyke visited the last herd in 1895 and found that only twenty-eight animals had survived despite the protection provided by Henry Miller. From these and perhaps only one other pair of elk reported by Game Warden A. C. Tibbets in 1895, the present population of tule elk, now numbering over two thousand, descended, but genetic diversity has been lost.

The near extermination of elk was matched by that of the pronghorn. The antelope-like grazers roamed the sea coast from Monterey to the Los Angeles basin, and the interior from the upper limits of the Sacramento Valley south into Baja California and east into the Great Basin and the Mojave Desert. But the pronghorn were animals of the grasslands, not adapted to forest, chaparral, or rule marshes. Thus, unlike the elk or black-tailed deer, they had no place to hide from the hunters. Their keen eyesight and fast running speed were no match for firearms, and they were rapidly wiped out from their main center in the Central Valley, the coastal areas, the desert fringes. Only in the northeastern corner of the state, in the sagebrush plains, did pronghorn survive. One could blame their decline on gold-rush mining, and it was, no doubt, a contributing factor, but it was the resultant lack of government protection and popular support for conservation, combined with the spread of pastoralism and agriculture, that were the main causes.