Sea-Otter Hunters
The first visitors from the United States to come to California were men engaged in hunting sea otter along the western coast of North America. The skin of a full-grown sea otter was five feet long and more than two feet wide, with a thick, black, glossy fur highlighted by silvery hair. A pelt's value when shipped to the Chinese port of Canton was about $300. Sea otters could be found at many points along the coast from the Aleutians to Baja California, and some of the greatest concentrations were in the bays and channels of Alta California.
Ebenezer Dorr, captain of the aptly named ship the Otter, sailed along the California coast in 1796 and collected hundreds of sea-otter pelts. Dorr put into Monterey for fresh supplies of water and wood, but Spanish mercantile restrictions prohibited him from engaging in any trade.
Other American ships followed the lead of the Otter. They occasionally defied Spanish prohibitions and engaged in clandestine trade with local otter hunters. Trading was encouraged by local officials only after the achievement of Mexican independence in 1821, but by then the sea otter had been nearly exterminated along the coast of California.
On November 26, 1826, Jedediah Strong Smith, leader of an expedition of American beaver trappers, reached Mission San Gabriel after an arduous crossing of the Mohave Desert and the San Bernardino Mountains. Smith and his party were the first white men from the United States to cross overland to California, thereby effectively opening the fur trade of the far Southwest.
California Governor José María Echeandía was perplexed by Smith's arrival. Suspecting that he was a spy, the governor ordered Smith arrested. He was released only after promising to leave California.
As Smith traveled northwestward over the Tehachapis and into the southern Central Valley, he found a trapper's paradise. There he collected a large quantity of pelts and then turned eastward and left California by way of Ebbetts Pass. Smith thus accomplished the first recorded European-American crossing of the Sierra Nevada.
Smith shared with other trappers the story of his successful hunting in California. One trapper later recalled that he "reported California to be the finest country in the world--having a charming Italian climate & a soil remarkably productive...& Beaver were abundant in all the Creeks & Rivers."
The hide and tallow trade was important not only for its immediate economic effects but also because the writings of men engaged in the trade greatly heightened American interest in California.
On board the ship Pilgrim in 1835 was a young Bostonian named Richard Henry Dana. For eighteen months, Dana and his shipmates collected hides along the California coast. He also made close observations of California's land and people.
When Dana returned to New England, he published his recollections in Two Years Before the Mast (1840). He described for his countrymen in precise detail the beauties of the California landscape, its capacious harbors, abundant wildlife, and salubrious climate "than which there can be no better in the world." He was contemptuous of the Californios, "an idle thriftless people" who could "make nothing for themselves." He was amazed that they bought "bad wine made in Boston and brought round by us" when their own country abounded in grapes. "In the hands of an enterprising people," he concluded, "what a country this might be!"