Condor (7 page)

Schmitt crawled through the chaparral for days at a time in the 1980s. He never met a bear or a mountain lion, but he did learn to recognize the sound angry hornets make when a bear eats half of their nest. He says he often thought of grizzly bears while crawling in the ruts they'd created—how it must have felt to be so big and move so gracefully, melting in and out of the tiniest gaps in endless walls of brush. Schmitt's reveries sometimes got him lost, he once told me, and being lost in the chaparral has certain rewards. Exiting tunnels surrounded by the densest brush, Schmitt emerged into
meadows never mowed down by cattle or even lightly grazed by deer, let alone visited by hikers. The lowest branches on full-size oak trees would rise just a few inches off the ground.

They were little time warps, Schmitt says, recalling one bit of chaparral landscape so beautiful that he didn't even want to walk around. “An untouched meadow of native bunch grasses, tightly hemmed and guarded by the densest of chaparral brush,” he said. “I've occasionally seen some nice and even extensive beds of bunch grasses in condor country, but they were tiny fragments compared to what I was looking at.”

He followed a black bear trail to the middle of the untouched meadow, wondering whether it had once been used by Indians, grizzlies, dire wolves, and saber-toothed cats. “I feel my sense of wonder building,” he said. “I closed my eyes and spread this meadow out across the alien foothills of the entire eastern side of the San Joaquin Valley, and then across the whole of the L.A. Basin.”

He thinks of this imaginary landscape when he sees the condors soaring. After all, they were there. They saw the grass get eaten by the cattle and replaced by the weeds, or recolonized and covered up by more chaparral.

 

Before the arrival of the cattle herds, hundreds of thousands of native Californians subsisted on a diet of nuts, berries, roots, leaves, fish, and not much meat. They killed game from time to time, but did not tend to count on it: those meals were for special occasions.

The men who ran the missions threw those nuts and berries into the trash, forcing the Indians to eat what they gave them. Indians who did want to eat from these piles were told to change their minds—it was a real “Let them eat steak” atmosphere. Some na
tives adapted readily to this new diet. One friar wrote that at the mission he ran, it wasn't long before the “average” Indian was asking for ten pounds of beef a day, and some were asking for more. The friar did not say what the Indians were doing with these wagonloads of meat and fat, but the implication was that they were eating it until they couldn't eat any more.

Richard Henry Dana, the wayward New Englander who wrote
Two Years Before the Mast
, said that mealtime wasn't any different in the galleys of ships in the harbors. “During all this time we lived upon nothing but fresh beef,” Dana wrote. “Beefsteaks three times a day, morning, noon and night cut thick and fried in fat with the grease poured over [the top]. Round this we sat attacking it with our jackknives and teeth.”

New England was the mecca for shoemakers in the late 1700s and early 1800s, and for most of that time, the demand for the hides from California cattle was as bottomless as the supply. Cobblers and middlemen in the docks in New England bought every hide the sailing ships could carry, and the ships found ways to carry tens of thousands at a time. The vessel on which Dana crewed packed forty thousand dried and flattened hides into its hold, and other ships may have carried twice that. From 1822 to 1846, more than a million cowhides reached Boston every year, along with tons of candle tallow made from boiling cow fat. Naturally, the natives were awarded that job.

But a few got lucky. They were allowed to ride with the legendary Spanish horsemen called vaqueros, who worked endlessly to bring the jittery herds to slaughter. Some of the herds stretched more than a mile across, and the horsemen had earned their reputation. Awestruck bystanders watched them ride like demons, twirling lassos with extreme dexterity and skill. Errant cows were almost always brought down with a single arcing throw of the rope.

Sometimes the vaqueros showboated at rodeos, roping and killing all sorts of animals, including California condors. Usually they threw their lassos around the necks of the birds, which doesn't sound especially sporting. Presumably these condors had been rendered incapable of flight before the event. Presumably the throats of the birds were slit when the performances were over.

Soaring condors would have stayed close to the horsemen working on the unfenced ranchos. Vaqueros sometimes killed and skinned cows on the spot to get their hands on an attractive hide. And when the great clouds of dust started rising, it meant the herds were being driven to the rodeo grounds for what was known as the
matanza
, which in English simply means “the slaughter.” Fifty to one hundred of the fattest cows would be killed and cut into pieces, with the meat going to the missions, the fat to the tallow pots over the fires, and the hides to the beaches to be stretched, dried, sorted by color, and inspected for impurities.

What a wretched mess the
matanzas
must have left behind them. Near the missions, carcasses without their hides piled up near the “killing trees” the cattle were tied to and then slaughtered; when those piles got too big, the natives had to drag them off and throw them in ravines. Indians who smelled like they'd gone swimming in cow fat tended the tallow fires, slowly stirring the boiling, smoking messes in the vats. Bears and vultures living on the moon would have been attracted by the stench; condors, lacking a sense of smell, would have followed them down. There were reports of grizzlies that swam across rivers and climbed the walls of the missions to get in on the fun. Some walked straight through the centers of towns to get to the killing fields. The condors would have circled down soon afterward, seen the dust and smoke, and gotten there first. They would have gathered by the hundreds in the trees, waiting for the chance to scour the bones.

Through all of this, for many years, the herds kept growing. By the late 1840s, it was often useful to chase down any stray cattle. There were reports of feral herds that grazed between the boundaries of various missions, or in the great swampy valley to the east of the coastal mountains. Spaniards tended to avoid that part of Alta California: when the hostile Indian tribes weren't after you, malarial mosquitoes were.

The cattle era peaked in the 1860s, having outlived the mission system, the Spanish and Mexican governments, many millions of Indians, and most of the California grizzly bears. The decline that followed isn't over yet—there are still some cattle out there—but the end draws closer every day.

 

The Sacred Expedition sent north to map out missions and save the souls of Indians was in trouble by the time it reached San Diego Bay. Many of the soldiers on the ship that sailed up from La Paz had contracted scurvy; they would have collapsed under the weight of the leather armor and the heavy weapons. Those that did continue were described as looking “skeletal” by a friar who rode with them. Juan Gaspar de Portolá, a military man, led the ghastly horsemen north again, hoping to end up in Monterey.

The Sacred Expedition rode through what the archivist Harry Harris wrote was “utterly unknown and unexplored territory, every mile of it condor country.” At one point they camped in an alluvial plain full of willow trees and Indians of “good character.” Father Pedro Fages seemed especially stricken by the beauty of the future L.A. Basin, but then a series of earthquakes hit and the expedition rode on.

Later, on some hills near what is now the town of Watsonville, they came upon a burnt-out village that had apparently just been
abandoned. The natives who had lived there apparently torched their homes before departing, for reasons unrevealed to the Spaniards riding through the smoky mess. The only thing that hadn't been burned was the carcass of a young California condor. Father Juan Crespi wrote that the carcass had been mounted on a pole in the center of the ruined village. The condor had been skinned and “stuffed with grass,” continued Father Crespi. “It appeared to be a royal eagle” left behind to send a message. In “The Annals of
Gymnogyps
to 1900,” Harris guessed that the bird was being “raised and fattened for…the most important festival on the calendar”: the ritual sacrifice of the immortal bird-god Chininginich. “Prematurely doing away with this demigod under the circumstances recounted indicates some connection with their hope of personal safety,” Harris wrote. “And their belief in the [ability] of
Gymnogyps
to prevail over the death of his friends.”

Perhaps the natives thought the bird-god would protect them from mounted, armored soldiers—men who would eventually attempt to force them to accept the Christian God. Thoughts such as those would soon become offenses punished by death. But this time, apparently, the bird-god held, and the Indians were never found.

T
he California gold rush hit the condor's world like a meteor from the East. When it did, the mountains crumbled and the rivers died; afterward, squalid human settlements festered like diseases. While the rush was on, a writer went to see the forests near the town of Placerville, returning to report that nothing remained but hillsides covered with stumps. The local river was also gone, said the same man: the water that had once rolled past the town had now been channeled into a mess of hoses that slithered toward the mining sites.
¹

Condors weren't common in the flatlands to the west of the Sierra Nevada—the place where the flow of the rivers slowed and allowed the gold to settle—but this was a catastrophe in which the side effects were worse than the event itself. When the forests near the mines were gone, for instance, the loggers moved up the western side of the Sierra Nevada with the force of an after-blast. Some of the world's Gothic-looking forests were lost in the process. These are the
forests John Muir described as “the clearest path into the universe,” places so beautiful they'd become a “synonym for God.”
²

Condors roosted in some of those trees, scanning the horizons and waiting for the wind. Thanks to Muir, there's no need to wonder how it felt when the winds hit. He once climbed a hundred-foot Douglas spruce in the middle of a powerful storm. Holding tight to the branches at the top of this tree, Muir felt as if he'd stepped into a flood.

“Yonder it descends in a rush of water-like ripples and sweeps over the bending pines from hill to hill. Nearer we see…leaves now speeding by on level currents, now whirling in eddies, and now escaping over the edges of the whirls, soaring aloft on grand upswelling domes of air. Smooth deep currents, cascades, falls, and swirling eddies, sing around every tree and leaf.” Condors read the winds Muir did, except that they had better eyes. They would have left the area before a storm like this one could get close, knowing that its winds are not the ones they like to use. But, if by some strange reason they had chosen to stay, they would have known how to skirt the eddies and find the grand upswellings. How they did it—what they saw in the wind—is almost as much a mystery today as it was when Muir was up that tree.
³

Condors may also have nested in the trees in these grand forests, raising chicks and watching over fledglings. Whether there were more than a few of them is a matter of speculation, but if towering trees with rotted-out cavities near the top were what was needed, the condors would have had a lot of choices. Condors also needed trees with big dead branches near the top for perching and looking around. These would be the branches struck by lightning or singed by fires that burned in the canopies. Muir once wrote of watching fires burn like that, “flaming across the green branches at a height of perhaps 200 feet, entirely cut off from the ground fires, looking
like signal beacons.” He saw dozens of these canopy fires burning in a forest at once, with those in the distance glowing like “great stars above the forest roof.”
⁴

What the condors wanted were the trees that were like condors: gnarled giants with bald, scarred heads and sweeping views of the world. After the gold rush, these were the trees whose stumps were sometimes used as dance floors; trees that had to be felled and
then
blown up with dynamite before the bits would fit into the sawmills.

The market for the wood of these giant trees was minuscule in 1848. Then three hundred thousand people rushed into the region, changing everything forever. When the first flecks of gold were found at Sutter's mill, the human population of California consisted of ten thousand Mexicans, an unknown number of Indians, and hardly anybody else. Five years later, “anybody else” outnumbered Mexicans ten to one and Indians by a margin no one counted, and plans were being laid to build a railroad line that would bring more Yankees west.

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.

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:

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 quickly 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.

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.