A tearing sound ripped across the canvas-colored sky. The sow grizzly tugged her head out of the hole in the dead whale’s flank and gave a warning growl to her two cubs, who obediently crouched down in the damp sand. The bear peered upward toward the sound and gave a woof of alarm as she sighted the gigantic black shape sweeping down upon her. With a last clatter of braking wings, a condor alighted atop the carcass of the whale. Ignoring the bear, the bird paced back and forth along the spine with ponderous dignity until it found a satisfactory patch of decomposing blubber and began its meal. Satisfied that the condor posed no threat, the grizzly dropped back to all fours, and she and her cubs returned to their interrupted feast. There was, after all, plenty.

This scene could have occurred anywhere along the coast of Oregon and northern California for untold thousands of years, up until perhaps 150 years ago. Grizzly bears and California Condors are just two of the species that the Klamath-Siskiyou region has lost in the past two centuries. Today, as area residents, scientists, and policy makers grapple with how to preserve and restore healthy environments, the questions must be considered: What have we lost? Why did these species go extinct, while others survived? What would our region look like if the lost species were restored?

What Have We Lost? The first written accounts of the Klamath-Siskiyou come to us from Peter Skene Ogden, an explorer and fur trader employed by the Hudson’s Bay Company. In the winter of 1826-27, he came down the east side of the Cascades with a band of French trappers, passed through the Klamath Basin, followed the Klamath River west to a point south of Pilot Rock, and then turned north. He entered the Rogue Valley near the present Siskiyou Summit, and worked his way north to the Umpqua River before returning to the Klamath River and retracing his route east of the Cascades. Ogden’s journals contain some memorable scenes, but for the modern naturalist, the remarkable thing is how little information and description they contain about the extraordinary world he passed through, and that was doomed soon to disappear. Ogden was a man on a mission, a hard-headed man with little time for either science or philosophy. His mission can be summed up in a single word: beaver.

The avowed policy of the British-Canadian Hudson’s Bay Company and its autocratic Governor at Fort Vancouver, George Simpson, was to create a “fur desert” in the Oregon country. This was a carefully-considered strategy of ecological destruction. Its goal was to exterminate beavers in southern Oregon, in order to stop the northward expansion of American trappers out of California.