Free Condor by John Nielsen Page B

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.
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    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 beenabandoned. 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.

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COLLATERAL DAMAGE
    Pistols and rifles rang out everywhere. Everyone took aim without troubling to ascertain where his bullet might stop.
    â€”Vincente Perez Rosales, forty-niner
    The biggest mistake the condor ever made was not evolving bulletproof vests.
    â€”Lloyd Kiff
    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