Condor (8 page)

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.
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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.

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
:

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 were 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:

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:

This is only one of Kelly's many fabrications. Furthermore, it seems the locals really took him for a ride. According to historian Charles Outland, the guides Kelly hired to help him hunt for grizzlies never took him anywhere near the bears, preferring to wait for him to go to sleep, then fake bear prints near the entrance to his tent. In the morning, they would swear that these were the paw prints of Old Clubfoot himself, after which Kelly would be led off in hot pursuit of the monster.

Kelly did return to San Francisco with a grizzly he called Monarch, which was probably the last of the California grizzlies when it died in captivity. He writes about trapping this bear in his book. Outland says he probably bought it.

These tall tales are important because people believed them at the time, and these beliefs helped keep them away from the condor's mountain strongholds. Fears of being eaten by grizzlies in the Transverse Ranges must have helped protect the condors living up above the chaparral, as did the relatively common notion that people in the area were mostly crooks and thieves.

Even the law-abiding citizens seemed to be a little off: Ari Hopper, a local rancher who would figure in the condor's future, is said
to have acquired his foghorn voice by accidentally drinking a large container of lye. The roads that wound up and over the peaks might as well have led directly to hell. The worst of these roads was that which zigzagged up and out of the southern end of the Great Central Valley, passing over newly opened earthquake fissures and under walls of rock that always seemed on the verge of collapse. Near the Tejon Pass the mountains got so steep that the wagons had to be taken apart in order to haul them up and over the summit. The only people who liked this process were the local gangs of bandits. The most famous of these bandits was the Mexican-American antihero Tiburcio Vasquez, who staged a series of daring raids on wealthy Yankees near Los Angeles before spending his last two years robbing wagons near Tejon Pass. When mounted posses tried to hunt down Vasquez, he and his gang disappeared, hiding in a maze of giant boulders now called the Vasquez rocks.
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Fears such as those sealed the region's reputation as a kind of forbidden zone. One late-nineteenth-century visitor called the place a “terra incognita,” inhabited almost exclusively by “grizzly bears, mountain sheep, California lions, rattlesnakes and other such friendly animals.”

The owner of a grocery store called Lechler's in the town of Piru used to hang bits and pieces of this history on his walls, and if you gave Harry Lechler the chance, he could make up all the extra stories you wanted on the spot. My brother, Peter, and I used to hang around in Lechler's in the early sixties, when Peter was in the first grade at Piru Elementary School and I was in the third. I remember lots of dusty miner's tools and a bear head hanging on the wall. Harry Lechler seemed to know every story ever told about those mountains, ranging from tales about the ghost of Old Clubfoot to ones about the true location of the Los Padres gold mine.

Lechler also liked to stress that the first recorded gold strike in California history did not take place at Sutter's mill in 1848, but under an oak tree in a canyon a few miles from his store on March 9,1842. On that day a man named Jose Lopez dug up some onions and saw gold clinging to the roots. Hundreds of miners rushed up from Mexico and from other parts of California, and some carried their gold dust in the hollowed-out quills of giant feathers plucked from the wings of condors.
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At the start of the twentieth century, there may have been as few as twelve surviving California condors, according to a former secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Alexander Wetmore never explained how he came to that conclusion, and many western ornithologists dismissed his guess. Unfortunately, almost everyone agreed that the condor was headed toward Wetmore's low-end estimate, and many feared the bird was doomed. “There is no doubt that the species is in the process of extinction,” wrote ornithologist J. G. Cooper in 1890. “I can testify myself that from my first observation of it in California in 1855, I have seen fewer every year.” Cooper thought the reasons for the condor's downward spiral were clear: One was the trend toward smaller grazing lands and larger citrus orchards; the other was “the foolish habit of men and boys” honing their shooting skills by trying to blow the heads off all the condors they saw. In 1890, a state law made it a crime to shoot at condors just because they were there, but it had never been enforced.

Apparently, Cooper hadn't seen the condor for eight years when he wrote those words, not since he'd encountered one on a beach in what is now called Orange County in the spring of 1872: “I approached it, being on foot and not attempting to conceal myself, as I was armed only with a hammer and not prepared to attack the bird.” Surprisingly, the condor did not fly away as Cooper walked
toward it. Rather it looked at the hammer-toting scientist with its “eyes wide open, as unconcerned as if it considered me a brother biped.”
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Cooper got closer. The condor stared. Cooper got closer still. “As I had never succeeded in shooting one of these birds on account of their shyness and because I rarely carried a rifle, shot being nearly useless for killing them, I debated whether or not I should take advantage of this lucky chance and kill it with my hammer.”

This is where the double-crossing outlaw condor created by the gold rush would have “savagely” charged at Cooper, but the bird near the beach in Orange County was either sick or bored. It barely moved a muscle when Cooper came within striking distance, “except to open its bill in a lazy way when I pointed the hammer at it.” At the end of this weird standoff, Cooper did the other unexpected thing: instead of bringing his hammer down on the condor's head, he decided to leave it alone. “I turned and left it to fulfill its destiny,” he said.