Life in the California Gold Rush was notoriously hardscrabble and lacking in the comforts of home. But, as anthropologist and archaeologist Cyler Conrad writes, one perk was an abundance of exotic animals to gawk at or even keep as pets. He focuses specifically on monkeys and parrots.
With the start of the Gold Rush in 1949, Conrad writes, San Francisco almost instantly turned into a significant global port, with people and goods flowing in from around the world. Along with more prosaic creatures bound for miners’ dinner plates, the arriving ships brought entertainment in the form of exotic creatures. For example, one voyage from El Realejo, Nicaragua, in 1850 brought fifty parrots and five monkeys to the city.
Conrad notes that, since miners arrived in California from many places, some may have been familiar with tropical animals already. But a large portion came from the eastern United States and most likely knew of monkeys only from stories, or perhaps a visiting circus.
In California, some enterprising individuals put monkeys on display, charging for a look at their antics. At least one hand organ player outfitted his monkey with a red jacket—apparently an early instance of a type of street entertainment that spread across American cities by the early twentieth century. As one observer described the scene in 1850, “the melodious strains of the instrument never failed to arouse the enthusiasm of the homesick, whilst the tricks of the monkey served to amuse the leisure of the rough miners who were incapable of entering into the feelings inspired by his music.”
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A Gold Rush of Witnesses
An 1856 drawing of a popular San Francisco saloon known as the Cobweb Palace depicts a crowd of humans joined by two dogs, a pig, a parrot, and six monkeys—at least two of whom seem to be doing mischievous battle with men in the crowd.
More monkeys pop up in the Gold Rush historical record; for example, in lost-pet ads, an 1852 lawsuit over a stolen pet monkey and fox, and stories in newspapers from 1854 describing someone “parading about leading a horse attached to a soda wagon, a diminutive monkey perched on the back of the animal.”
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There were also many advertisements seeking the return of lost parrots, which were apparently both highly valued and capable escape artists. However, Conrad writes, these don’t seem to have been the ancestors of the wild parrots who now call San Francisco home. Those probably arrived as part of a different wave of interest in exotic pets later on.
“[T]he long-distance voyages required to arrive in San Francisco and the gold fields, the unfamiliar food, signs, smells, and weather, the lack of family, and the lack of an established social network, suggest that the Gold Rush populace relied on animals—regardless of type—for their bond and companionship,” Conrad writes. “Animals filled a void created by the often-overwhelming experience of the Gold Rush era, and it was the exoticness of the time that enabled the exoticization of these human-animal interactions.”
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