Free Condor by John Nielsen Page A

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