doc241 - Schoenherr Home Page in Sunny Chula Vista

was still good hunting. Philip Crosthwaite was one of the earliest and best known otter
hunters. He stated that there were two companies of hunters at San Diego, in 1845,
which were fitted out each season by Captain Fitch. The hunting season was during the
spring
Page 108
[William Heath Davis]
and summer months, when the otters could be found among the kelp, often asleep, and
shot with rifles from boats. This work required a peculiar equipment of patience, keen
sight, steady nerves, and marksmanship. Each company sent out three canoes together
which hunted in the day and lay up on the beach at night. There were places on the
shore known to the hunters, where wood and water could be found, and at night they
landed at such spots through the surf and made their camp. As late as 1857, two otter
hunters were drowned in the surf on the beach near Point Loma, while trying to land in a
small boat. Otters are, of course, now extinct in this vicinity. In 1845 the skins were
worth $40 each at Fitch's store. There are no statistics of the extent and value of the otter
catch, but it was very considerable.
Page 109
That strange animal, the sea-elephant, was also a native to this coast, and for a
short time was a victim of the chase. Very early settlers tell how, on stormy days, the
yelps of the elephants lying on the sand at what is now Coronado Beach could be heard
in San Diego above the roar of the breakers. They were also plentiful in the haunts of
the otter, along the coasts and islands of Lower California. They seem never to have
formed an extensive object of the chase by the population. The story of their destruction
is short and sad. Some of the Yankee whalers heard of them and conceived the idea
that there might be money in elephant oil. There was a rush for them; they were slaughtered
by thousands, and soon exterminated. It is said that some of these ships secured
an entire cargo of elephant oil in a single season's chase. At any rate, these curious
animals are gone, forever, from these parts. And does the reader ask, "What is a seaelephant?"
Merely a big seal--the biggest of his family--with a snout so prolonged as to
be suggestive of an elephant.
The Spanish population never pursued the chase, either by land or sea, with
noteworthy daring and vigor. It was great sport for the expert vaqueros to lasso a bear
now and then and lead him home, to be baited to death by dogs and bulls; it never occurred
to their uncommercial souls that this sort of thing could be turned into a moneymaking
enterprise. Cattle were plentiful and cheap; why should a man incur fatigue and
danger in the pursuit of articles of luxury which the state of society did not require? Such
things were left to the restless and incomprehensible Americans. Cattle were something
the Spanish could understand, and it was all very well to shoot an otter now and then as
it lay asleep in the sun on beach or kelp; but to spend one's days amidst the toil and
danger of the ocean chase, was much too strenuous. The finest of otter skins were
worth no more than the hides of four or five bullocks, and there was neither use nor sale
for whale oil, until the American ships came.