California's early luxury-fur economy was built on an international scramble for pelts rather than gold. After Captain James Cook's crew discovered in 1778 that sea-otter skins could command extraordinary prices in China—reports described profits approaching 1,800 percent—American merchants from New England, Spanish authorities, Russian traders, and British and French expeditions converged on the Pacific coast. In 1786, the French navigator Jean-François de La Pérouse obtained roughly 1,000 sea-otter skins near Monterey and sold them in China for about $10,000. Spanish official Vicente Vasadre y Vega quickly imposed a collection system requiring otter skins to be sold to him and recruited Indigenous Christians connected to the California missions to bring in pelts. The trade transformed coastal wildlife into an export commodity while exposing Native communities and hired hunters to violent competition, coercive commercial arrangements, and dangerous maritime work.
The most aggressive phase came after 1809, when the Russian-American Company established Fort Ross and contracted American vessels to transport Aleut hunters and their baidarkas into Spanish and Mexican California. Spanish forces captured or shot Aleut hunters operating in San Francisco Bay, yet Russian and American parties continued exploiting the estuaries and islands. One 1812 expedition reportedly took 1,160 sea otters in only three months; by 1817, otters around the Bay were practically gone. Fur seals suffered the same fate: American ships took at least 30,000 skins from the Farallon Islands in 1810, but annual catches collapsed to roughly 1,200 by 1822, and the animals were eventually extirpated from the islands. By the late nineteenth century, California's sea otters were near extinction, with a pre-trade population estimated at about 16,000 eventually reduced to a remnant colony of approximately 50 animals discovered near Big Sur in 1938. The ecological and legal fallout lasted generations: the United States began managing sea otters as a protected resource in 1911, international agreements restricted fur-seal hunting that same year, and California ultimately banned the manufacture, import, and sale of new fur products beginning in 2023.
