In March 1853, after sailing seven weeks straight from Nicaragua, 5 monkeys and 50 parrots reached San Francisco. Caged on the wharf, chattering and squawking, the animals likely drew a crowd. Perhaps some onlookers gathered to admire the parrots’ plumage, which added flashes of scarlet and lime-green to this spring day. Other folks may have expected the monkeys to put on a show, like the primates they knew from childhood circuses and stories.
The captive creatures wound up as pets and street attractions, meant to entertain San Francisco’s flood of newcomers, who came hoping to profit from the Gold Rush. Some monkeys sported blazers, cranked hand organs and—as one 19th-century newspaper put it—did “all the usual antics performed by monkeys.” Parrots mainly served as pets, so prized that lost birds were reported in classified ads—like a listing from one Mrs. Ross offering a $50 reward (about $1,900 today) for her missing parrot, Pretty Joey Ross.
New research has uncovered evidence of these animals, which were stolen from their wild habitats and hauled to San Francisco in the 1850s. Details on the importers are sparse, but some probably nabbed the creatures, opportunistically, as their ships ferried U.S. East Coasters around the southern landmasses, en route to San Francisco. Other enterprising merchants made trips especially for marketable goods—including live fauna—from Central and South America. To shed light on the animal trade, Cyler Conrad, an archaeologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the University of New Mexico, dug through archives of historical documents and archaeological finds. His findings, published in March in Ethnobiology Letters, detailed how city-dwellers used imported monkeys and parrots for amusement.
These unwitting pets now join a growing list of animals affected by the Gold Rush. The list includes Tule elk, a species only found in California that miners hunted from abundance to near extinction. Fewer than 30 elk remained in 1895, and thanks to later laws the population has climbed back to around 5,700 individuals today. Also among the animal causalities, giant tortoises captured live in the Galapagos Islands were shipped to San Francisco and cooked into steaks, stews and pies. At the time, the tortoise numbers were already dangerously low due to whalers’ appetites earlier that century. The Gold Rush demand for tortoise meat pushed the creatures closer to the brink; today they remain on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. By adding these animals to Gold Rush history, Conrad and others are rendering a fuller—and grimmer—picture of both the period’s ethos and its ecological toll.