Mission District drew crowds to view brutal bull-bear battles
The neighborhood around Mission Dolores is pleasant and bustling. Visitors file out of buses to tour the adobe church, while a couple of blocks away the queue for the Bi-Rite Creamery stretches around the corner.
Few if any of the people in either line know that from the Spanish colonial days to the Gold Rush, this peaceful neighborhood hosted some of the most brutal contests ever held in North America: bear and bull fights.
The Spanish probably began holding battles between grizzly bears and bulls not long after they arrived in San Francisco in 1776. In 1816, a Russian ship called the Rurik dropped anchor in San Francisco Bay, and the governor of California invited the crew to observe such a fight.
The Spanish troops “are sent out into the wood for a bear, as we should order a cook to fetch in a goose,” marveled the ship’s
captain, Otto von Kotzebue. Expert horsemen, the troops used multiple lariats to secure a bear’s legs and render the animal helpless.
The bear and a captured wild bull, both chained, were then thrown together on a beach. Von Kotzebue merely described the ensuing battle as “very remarkable,” noting that “although the bull several times tossed his furious opponent, he was overpowered at last.”
Rurik’s naturalist, Adelbert von Chamisso, was appalled by the fight. “Unwilling and bound as the animals were, the spectacle had in it nothing great or praiseworthy,” von Chamisso wrote. “One pitied the poor beasts, who were so shamefully handled.”
The Spanish and then Mexican vaqueros, or horsemen, also frequently killed grizzlies for sport, lassoing them as the animals were feasting on the carcasses of slaughtered cattle. In his classic book “SeventyFive Years in California,” William Heath Davis wrote that one night in the 1830s, his wife’s father, Don Jose Joaquin Estudillo, and 10 soldiers from the Presidio lassoed and killed 40 bears in the woods near Mission Santa Clara. After the bears were lassoed, the vaqueros used their horses to strangle them. “The fun was kept up until daylight,” Davis wrote.
Bear and bull fights were still going strong when the world rushed into San Francisco in 1848 and 1849. In a journal excerpted in Malcolm E. Barker’s anthology “More San Francisco Memoirs 1852-1899: The Ripening Years,” a young Swiss named Theophile de Rutte gave a gruesomely detailed account of one of the weekly bull and bear fights held near crumbling old Mission Dolores in June 1852.
A Mexican troupe advertised the encounter in the streets, and “everyone in town attended,” de Rutte wrote. “Reaching the site, I saw a kind of open-air pit surrounded by boards stacked three feet high. The spectators gathered behind this thin barrier as if, instead of a combat between two beasts, they had come to witness a performance at Franconi’s.”
In the center of the ring stood a huge cage containing the bear. At the appointed hour, 12 Mexican horsemen rode in and formed a circle. One of them released the bear from his cage. Before he could leap over the flimsy wall, he was lassoed, tied up and chained to a post. A magnificent black bull was then brought in, poked with banderillas, and further agitated by fireworks.
The enraged bull charged at the bear and hurled him five or six feet in the air. “Before he could stand up, a second thrust caught him in the fleshiest part of the body and he tumbled again ten feet further away,” de Rutte wrote. The bull repeatedly tossed the bear, sending him rolling like a ball as the crowd roared its approval.
Finally the bear managed to stand up, leaned on the post, “raised his two paws in the air as if to protect his head and waited for the assault.” The bull smashed into the bear, which howled in pain but seized the bull’s head and clutched it to his chest. The bull desperately tried to escape, but was caught in an unmovable vise.
“Then we saw the bear lower his massive head over the neck of the bull and begin calmly to tear at his nape,” de Rutte wrote. “From time to time he lifted his bloody snout to utter a grunt of satisfaction, and then he bit a little deeper onto his opponent’s vertebrae.
“From where I stood, I saw the wound grew larger and I heard the bones crack under the bear’s teeth,” de Rutte continued. “Blood was spurting and the poor bull’s knees sagged until he collapsed. The crowd, as if jolted, filled the air with cheers for the victorious grizzly which, satisfied with his victory and undoubtedly exhausted from so much emotion and effort, lay down next to his victim’s carcass, and with his blood-stained tongue began quietly to lick his paws.”
Dreadful as bull and bear fights were, they were positively civilized compared with a gladiatorial spectacle described in the April 1859 issue of Hutchings California Magazine. The piece reported that in 1851, a nearly weeklong bull and bear fiesta at Mission Santa Clara featured not only 12 bulls and two grizzlies but a “considerable number” of Indians, of whom four were killed on the second day.
“When the latter were gored by the sharp horns of the bull, the band would strike up a lively tune to smother his cries or moans, and the people appeared to be immensely pleased at the performance,” the author wrote.
Moral outrage over animal fights gradually built, and in March 1851, the Daily Alta California denounced them as “a vestige of barbarism” and a “disgrace to the citizens of San Francisco.” On May 1, 1852, the Board of Aldermen passed Ordinance 228, making it illegal to hold bullfights or to exhibit or fight other animals east of Larkin and Ninth streets, or to advertise the fights on Sundays.
Such ordinances were not always punctiliously obeyed — and Mission Dolores fell outside the prohibited area anyway. But the brutal entertainment’s days were numbered. By 1855, the Mission District had, mercifully, seen its last bear and bull fight.