The California Grizzly: State Symbol, State Absence

The California grizzly bear appears on the state flag, raising its head in profile against a white background, a symbol chosen for its wildness and power in eighteen forty-six. By nineteen twenty-four, the California grizzly was extinct. The collapse took less than eighty years.

Before eighteen forty-eight, roughly ten thousand grizzly bears lived in California, in the oak woodlands and river valleys and mountain meadows. The Yokuts people who lived in the San Joaquin Valley conducted organized hunts for grizzly bears using fire and coordinated drives, treating the bears as a source of food, ceremony, and respect. The gold rush changed the relationship entirely.

Miners and ranchers viewed grizzlies as threats to livestock and to safety, and they killed them systematically with guns, poison bait, and steel traps. There were no limits and no closed seasons. Mariposa County, sitting at the edge of the San Joaquin Valley and the Sierra Nevada foothills, was prime grizzly habitat, and the bears were gone from the county by roughly eighteen ninety.

A newspaper account from January of eighteen fifty-eight describes four grizzlies attacking a prospecting camp near Mariposa County, killing three men and leaving a survivor to spend two days in a tree before escaping. That kind of encounter, repeated across the state, provided the rationale for extermination. The last confirmed California grizzly was killed in nineteen twenty-two in Tulare County.

The bear on the flag has not existed in California since before most of the flag's viewers' grandparents were born.