San Francisco's Animal Past
"Deer and Kangaroo at Woodward's Gardens," stereoscopic image by Eadweard Muybridge, 1869 (Eastman House)
A doctoral candidate in the Stanford Department of History, Andrew Robichaud was the Center's Thomas D. Dee II Graduate Fellow during the 2013-2014 academic year. Working with the Spatial History Project, Andrew explored the role of animals in 19th-century cities, with a particular focus on San Francisco.
In the summer of 1866, Robert Woodward opened the doors of his San Francisco estate to the public. For a small admission fee, visitors could explore the gardens and museum, which were perched on a hillside near the old Mission Dolores. The crown jewel of Woodward’s Gardens was its extensive zoological park—the first of its kind in San Francisco, and one of a growing number of zoos in American cities in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Public and private zoos like Woodward’s brought animal life and entertainment into American cities in new ways, offering urban residents up-close interactions with creatures from around the world. For the next three decades, Woodward’s Gardens would remain a centerpiece attraction in the city for residents and tourists alike—what Woodward called a “Resort for the People!” Woodward himself became known popularly as “P.T. Barnum of the West.”
I became interested in Woodward’s Gardens as an important institution in the transformation in urban animal life in late-nineteenth century San Francisco. At the exact moment Woodward was bringing lions, bears, exotic birds, and sea lions into the city, new municipal ordinances were pushing other animals farther from downtown. When the Gardens first opened in 1866, the small creek that carved through the hillside of Woodward’s Gardens emptied into Mission Creek, and, less than a mile downstream, trickled past a collection of slaughterhouses and hog ranches known later as “Old Butchertown.” In those few years in the late 1860s—if the winds were blowing right—the stench of offal and the squeals of hogs might have mixed with the smell of popcorn and the laughter of children. By the 1870s, those spaces were separated through new laws that effectively zoned slaughterhouses, hog ranches, and other “noxious trades” many miles to the south. Woodward’s Gardens flourished as these other animal businesses disappeared. This changing landscape of urban animal life is the central focus of my dissertation.
Earlier this year, I discovered an archival collection of letters received by Robert Woodward, which are housed in the California State Library in Sacramento. These letters not only speak to the cultural centrality of Woodward’s Gardens across California and the American West, but also offer an unusual glimpse into animal geography and intricacies of the live animal trade in late-nineteenth century America. Woodward received hundreds of letters each year offering animals for sale: mule deer from Modoc County, a cinnamon bear and foxes from Red Bluff, reindeer and caribou from British Columbia, wild cats from the Sierra Mountains, prairie dogs from Wyoming Territory, seals from Santa Barbara, and bears from the Central Valley and Mendocino. As part of a larger network of zookeepers, Woodward traded or sold some of these animals internationally—to P.T. Barnum in New York, and to dealers and zookeepers as far as London and Germany.
The Dee Fellowship at the Bill Lane Center offered an opportunity to explore this distinctive collection more thoroughly as I worked through the final stages of my dissertation. Through my affiliation with the Stanford Spatial History Project—with the help of undergraduate Mark Sanchez—we have begun mapping the geographic origins of these letters and the species offered for sale. In these maps we can begin to see both the real and imagined expanse of the San Francisco market. The letters also provide a rare glimpse into the vast, variegated, and rapidly changing animal landscape of California and the American West.
