Condor Read online

  The forty-niners called themselves “Argonauts,” after the men who followed Jason past all of those Greek monsters to the Golden Fleece. But by some accounts the miners were the monsters. The writer Joaquin Miller, a contemporary, remembered these men as “hairy, bearded six foot giants, hatless and half dressed…who shouted in a savage banter” when they weren’t stuffing their faces full of “the eternal beans and bacon and coffee, and coffee and bacon and beans.” In his book about the gold rush called Rush for Riches, historian J. S. Holliday wrote of “lonely men who sought companionship in tented stand-up bars, grog shops, hotels, and gambling ‘palaces.’” And while shortages of other basic goods were sometimes widespread, nobody ever seemed to run out of grog.

  In 1853, the quantities of liquor imported and presumably consumed included 20,000 barrels of whiskey, 4,000 barrels of rum, 34,000 baskets of champagne, and 156,000 cases of other wines. Beer came in 24,000 hogsheads, 13,000 barrels, and 23,000 cases, while shipments of brandy arrived variously in 9,000 casks, hogsheads and pipes; 13,000 barrels, 26,000 kegs and 6,000 cases. And there were comparable statistics for “unspecified liquor.”5

  The forty-niners were armed to the teeth when they arrived in California. Holliday compares them to a volunteer army massed at the base of the mountains, bristling with weapons of every possible size and vintage. The weapons of choice included tiny derringers and long knives hidden in boots; antiquated muskets dating back to the American Revolution; shotguns used in countless duck hunts back on the farm; firearms stolen by Indians and then stolen back; cavalry rifles and the Spanish blunderbuss from the Mexican-American War; French wheel-lock target-hunting rifles; Colt model 1849 pocket and dragoon pistols; left-handed versions of the Kentucky rifle used by Daniel Boone; air rifles such as the Hawkins Big 50 rifle, better known as the gun that killed the California grizzly.

  One forty-niner described his wagon train as a rolling armory, writing that the coats on all the men “are surrounded with a belt in which are stuck two ten-inch rifle pistols and an eight-inch dirk knife, which with a United States rifle or double-barreled shotgun completes our uniform.”

  Everything these wagon trains went past might as well have had a bull’s-eye painted on it—to pass the time, the future miners shot at rocks, trees, bones, animals, and birds, not to mention Indians and each other.6

  Gunplay and other forms of mayhem were also common in the mining camps: shootings, stabbings, beatings, lynchings, rapes, and arsons were said to be everyday events, along with what Holliday called a “society cankering rapacity” heightened by the “ill-concealed bulges of pistols tucked into every waistband.”

  Condors near the mining fields were shot dead for the hell of it or crippled because they were there. When two men working for a mining company found a condor sleeping on a ledge near the American River in 1855, one of them, Alonzo Winship, reportedly climbed up to take a closer look and hit it with a shovel. The condor woke up with a broken wing and what must have been a splitting headache; when it started scrambling down the hill, Winship and his shovel followed. According to an unreliable writer who interviewed Winship and his friend Jesse Millikan, the chase continued until the wounded condor stopped running and fell down.

  Winship walked to the bird to pick it up.7 Big mistake. When the man got close, the condor leapt up and attacked, waving its beak around like a mugger waves a stiletto. To escape the bird, our reporter says, Winship climbed to the top of a boulder, where the condor couldn’t reach him. Winship sat on the rock and yelled for help. The condor with the broken wing walked around looking “vengeful.”

  Winship’s friend Millikan ran away. Then he came back with a long wooden pole, and Winship got off the boulder and grabbed the far end. The two men tried to bring the condor to the ground by getting on either side of the bird and pressing the pole down on top of its shoulders and wings. In the end, the bird got stuck and the men pushed it to the ground. One of them then jumped on and wrapped a coat around the condor’s head, at which point it surrendered.

  Life got even harder for the condors in the 1850s as failed miners rushed toward what seemed to be a second chance to get rich quick: the commercial hunting business. All you had to do was take a wagon full of hunters off into the woods, and before you knew it you’d have lots of meaty carcasses to sell to the overpriced restaurants back in the mining towns or to starving pioneers arriving from the East.8

  The results were catastrophic. Close to half a million tule elk were shot and sold in just a few years, missing only one small herd. Giant populations of deer met a similar fate, as did populations of pronghorn. Other teams of hunters zeroed in on the birds, taking out wagonloads of grouse, quail, duck, geese, and shorebirds, in the course of an afternoon. One group of market hunters collected twenty thousand murre eggs in two days. Others shot frogs, snakes, and ground squirrels.

  Nobody important tried to stop the hunts until it was too late. Usually the hunters put themselves out of business by wiping out their product lines. There were no limits on hunting then, and few were even considered. The loss of all that wildlife was thought to be the price of progress, and everyone except John Muir wanted all the progress they could get.

  The market hunters moved out of California, killing and selling tons of wild meat to wagon trains coming in on the overland trails. A story in The California Grizzly followed one such group of hunters through eastern Washington in 1853, as they piled their wagons high:

  There were five horses packed with buffalo robes, of which we had about thirty-five; next four horses packed with bear skins, and several large bear skulls; then two packed with deer skins; two with antelope skins; one with fox and other small skins; seven with dried meat for the use of animals on the journey…one with boxes containing the young bear cubs last caught; two with boxes containing wolves, untamed; a mule with foxes and fishers in baskets; and a mule with tools, blankets and camp luggage. Almost all the horses beside the seven specially devoted to the purpose carried more or less dried meat—even those we rode. But the most remarkable portion of the train consisted of the animals which we drove along in a small herd; these were six bears, four wolves, four deer, four antelopes, two Elks and an Indian dog.9

  This hunting crew was led by Grizzly Adams, a self-proclaimed friend and famed hunter of grizzly bears, and soon to be owner of one of the country’s best-known animal menageries. Adams usually hunted for the sport of it, but this time out he hoped to make money selling meat to the wagons on the Oregon Trail. Naturally, the Grizzly One had a rude encounter with a condor on this trip. But before that happened he more than justified his reputation as a man who rarely failed to get his beast. Many years later in the basement of a building in San Francisco, he told the story of the expedition to the writer T. H. Hittell.

  Hittell begins the story as Adams and a partner, identified only as a Mr. Gray, lead a heavily armed team of “lost and wandering souls” across the dry side of the Sierra Nevada, stopping now and then to send a line of hunters stomping through the trees. Animals that tried to flee were shot either by the hunters behind them or by the hunters hiding out in front.

  After a few days, Adams said, the hunters were followed by a wide variety of predators and scavenging birds, to the point where it was sometimes hard to sleep at night while listening to the “chorusing cries of wolves, coyotes and mountain lions.” Then, one night when most of the hunters were asleep, a pack of hungry wolves raced out of the woods at the wagons full of carcasses. Adams told Hittell that he sat up with a rifle and plugged one of the wolves in midstride, stabbing it a couple of times for good measure. The other wolves turned around and ran back into the forest.

  Adams shot a mountain lion the very next day, he told Hittell. After that the team hit a dry spell, marching “over hills and dale and in and out of canyons and arroyos,” which were freezing cold and white with snow. When the team made it down below the snow line, Adams immediately gave the order to start hunting again. He told Hittell that the wagons quickl
y gained a pile of antelope, with Adams dropping a buck. “Supper included roasted mountain-lion meat, which tasted good to the fatigued men.”

  The hunters also seemed to shoot at everything that moved, picking an eagle at one point. They also shot at crows, magpies, hawks, prairie dogs, grouse, lots of rabbits, and innumerable squirrels. One night, Adams’s partner was awakened by scary noises. Adams gave a whistle and heard a bear snort back. At that point the famous hunter moved away from the place where the carcasses were piled. When the beast stepped out into the light of the fire, Adams and his partner both jumped up and shot it through the gut.

  The condor was an afterthought. Adams told Hittell he spotted one in a grove of trees near the end of the trip, surrounded by a mob of lesser vultures that would have been keeping their distance while preparing to follow the condor’s cues.

  “The trees were black with buzzards, which…soared and darted down at the camp,” wrote Hittell.

  One giant bird was particularly aggressive, as if he were the King of the Vultures. Adams fired at the great bird and broke one of its wings. When he approached the wounded condor, now flopping on the ground, the huge bird made such a show of ferocity that he decided to give its powerful beak a wide berth.

  Adams handed his pistol to an Indian and told him to shoot the condor in the head.

  Grizzly Adams didn’t want to waste his time on condors. When he got old and gave up hunting, he would change that attitude. For years Adams tried to add a California condor to the protozoos he led down the main streets of American cities—lines of big fierce animals collected and “befriended” by the famous hunter himself. The menagerie was anchored by a pair of grizzlies Adams had long kept as pets; at various times the line behind the “loyal” bears included monkeys, wolves, eagles, elk, cougars, and baboons. Adams, marching with the bears, wore a wolf skull as a kind of hat: the pelt of the wolf, still stuck to the animal’s skull, spilled halfway down Adams’s back. City people were supposed to follow these parades to a building with more animals inside it. That’s where old man Adams made his living selling tickets.

  There are no records of a California condor in these lines. Apparently, the only condor Adams ever saw was the one he told his Indian to shoot. At one point, he bought an Andean condor. It wasn’t the same.

  California condors got meaner and bigger in the late 1800s, assuming everything you read in the papers and magazines was true. Wingspans that had never stretched for more than ten feet grew to fourteen feet and more. Condors that had eaten only dead things began swooping down on bleating lambs and family pets. The talons on the feet of the condors seemed to grow much longer and sharper. In 1858, Hutchings’ California Magazine published a drawing of the bird flying off with a helpless rabbit impaled on its big black talons.10

  This was the condor the people “Back East” expected to find “Out West”: a good-for-nothing outlaw and double-crossing thief that deserved to meet its maker. The fact that condors of this kind were fictional didn’t seem to matter much at all.

  Those who felt the need to explain would have argued (incorrectly) that a bird that makes its living eating rotting flesh has got to be some kind of a public health threat. On top of that, as almost every rancher in the state would tell you with perfect certainty, the condor was a big-league thief. Everybody seemed to know a hunter who’d bagged a great big animal once and then remembered he had pressing business elsewhere, only to return to find that the trophy kill was now a skeleton surrounded by a dozen woozy condors, or two dozen condors, or a hundred or two hundred condors. Ornithologist Adolphus Heerman said that scenario repeated itself frequently while he was conducting a survey of animals found near the likely path of the railways.

  We have often passed several hours without a single one of the species being in sight, but on bringing down any large game ere the body had grown cold these birds might be seen rising above the horizon and slowly creeping towards us, intent on their share of the prey. Nor in the absence of the hunter will his game be exempt from their ravenous appetite, though it be hidden carefully and covered by shrubbery and heavy branches: I have known these marauders to drag forth from its concealment and devour a deer within an hour.11

  —Pacific Railroad Surveys, as cited in

  “The Annals of Gymnogyps to 1900”

  The largest convergence of condors on record is alleged to have taken place in 1850 on a ranch in central California, according to a journalist not widely known for accurate reporting, A. S. Taylor. Taylor interviewed a rancher who was taking a wagonload of beef to market one day when his wagon hit a bump that apparently caused the beef to bounce out of the back and onto the ground. Amazingly, the rancher didn’t hear the thump or feel the wagon get lighter. When he finally did turn the horses around and return to the scene of the bump, the rancher claimed to have looked up and seen more than three hundred condors hovering over what was left of the fallen meat. Taylor writes that the rancher was amazed by the speed with which these condors appeared out of nowhere, “as if they had dropped out of some cavern in the sky.”

  Taylor’s stories, once widely read, are now known mostly for their whoppers, like the ones that repeated the mistaken claim that the eggs of condors were not the pale bluish-green they actually were, but jet black. All the same, a gathering of more than three hundred condors is at least a possibility, and gatherings of more than two hundred are easy to accept: reliable reports of dozens of condors converging were once common. I know ornithologists who’d trade some of their body parts for the chance to see three hundred condors in one place today.

  It was about 1850 that condors started getting sick and dying in great numbers, and getting sick and dying is not something condors tend to do. Over the millennia, for obvious reasons, this species has become amazingly resistant to the microscopic organisms that bloom in rotting carcasses, but now the birds on some dead animals were convulsing until their lungs collapsed; they were dying of suffocation.

  This is what happens when you eat a meal laced with huge amounts of strychnine, the animal-killing poison of choice among ranchers in those days. Strychnine was the weapon of mass destruction in the war between the ranchers and grizzlies. That war was raging on all fronts in the late 1800s, with some towns funding “community hunts” and others bringing in hired guns. Many of these hired guns claimed to kill their grizzlies by the dozens, and one man said he killed at least two hundred in the course of a long and fruitful career as a bear exterminator.

  In most of the state, the grizzlies were in full retreat when the market-hunting teams came in to get them. Afterward the bears were usually riddled with arrows and pumped full of lead, and some were impaled on spikes at the bottoms of hidden trenches. At times the bears were hunted down and shot en masse by mounted federal troops; at other times they were roped and captured by teams of Spanish horsemen. Guns hidden near carcasses were rigged to fire when the bears started pulling at the meat. Susan Snyder, a writer and archivist at the Bancroft Library at the University of California-Berkeley, lists some of the reasons the grizzlies had to die in a book called Bear in Mind:

  Grizzlies were killed for their meat, gallbladders, oil and sometimes for their pelts. They were hunted out of fear and the need to protect property; for sport, for power and for target practice. The annihilation of the California Grizzlies was synonymous with progress, civilization, control, management and commerce. They were killed because they had no respect for property, because the country had to be made safe for beef, because they possessed the inherent capability of doing damage. As adaptable as grizzlies are, their defenses did not increase as new weapons were developed to use against them—strychnine, whaling guns, pendulum traps, liquor-laced bait and other ingenious means of slaughter.12

  The grizzlies that held out the longest were the ones that lived in places rarely visited by humans. In California, most of those places were mountainous and thick with chaparral. Outside hunters didn’t seem to get a lot of local help here; when they thought they we
re getting help they were sometimes getting scammed. Tales of especially ferocious bears seemed to grow as the species dwindled. In the end, these “ghost bears” came to be a source of perverse local pride.

  Some of the nastiest bears around were rumored to live in the mountains that joined the coastal range with the Sierra Nevada, at least that’s the story told by the reporter sent down from San Francisco. These were the bears that were said to stalk the treacherous mountain passes, waiting for unsuspecting passersby. Clipped obituaries in local papers such as The Newhall Signal often followed:

  Mr. Beal was found dead a few days ago in the vicinity of Gorman’s near Fort Tejon. His skull was crushed and his body fearfully mangled by the grizzly bear. His Winchester rifle was broken to pieces and the portions scattered about, quite a distance from the body. The gun barrel contained an empty shell.

  There’s no proof that grizzlies living in the Transverse mountain ranges were either extra big or extra mean: maybe the locals who came to look for them were just better exaggerators. Alan Kelly, a famous correspondent with the San Francisco Examiner in the 1880s, began a book by expressing disgust with lies like these—and then he went on to describe the havoc wreaked by a monster grizzly known variously as Old Clubfoot, Old Whitehead, and Old Mutah. According to Kelly, Old Clubfoot lived in the mountains near the town of Piru, where he slit the throats of hundreds of cattle and at least one Mexican herder. When a local hunter followed Old Clubfoot’s tracks up Piru Creek one day, the bear “loomed up madder than a hornet” and chased the hunter through the woods. Eventually, the hunter outsmarted Old Clubfoot and filled the grizzly full of lead. Or so wrote Kelly: