San Franciso's founders saw the Pacific Basin as mare nostrum, a virgin bonanza literally tributary to the city they claimed as their own. Filibusterers sailed out the Golden Gate in the 1850s and 60s to liberate chunks of Mexico, Nicaragua, Borneo and Hawaii, along with their resources and labor, for the United States and themselves.

Among the greatest plums was Alaska, acquired from Russia in 1867 by Secretary of State William H. Seward. Bank of California chief William Ralston and his partners were anxious to exploit the nearly untapped seal herds of the Pribilof Islands in the South Bering Sea.

One of those partners was Louis Sloss; another was General John F. Miller, collector of the Port of San Francisco, who maintained useful ties to President Ulysses Grant, under whom he had served in the Union Army.

The Alaska Commercial Company was formed on January 1, 1868, with Louis Sloss as president. The following year, Sloss appointed Miller president of the company after the latter had acquired exclusive rights to harvest the Pribilof seal herds. Louis Sloss and Mark Gerstle, in fact, ran the business, particularly after Miller went to the U.S. Senate in 1881 to represent California and the Company in the Capitol. The ACC became the fount of the Sloss-Gerstle dynastic fortunes, and the de facto government of Alaska.

In one of many official family histories, the Pribilofs are described as two little specks in the Bering Sea which were to be carefully and wisely harvested into a commercial and social empire. The islands were then home to 80 percent of the worlds fur seals. They were harvested strictly according to government regulations, apparently written by Miller.

Aleut sealers took an average of 100,000 skins per year during the twenty years of the ACC lease. In termite terms, one can regard seals as a renewable resource, but the ACCs take greatly exceeded the seals' breeding capacity. By 1882, the Pribilof herds began to show a drastic decline in numbers, and the ACC began to kill younger seals and to expand operations into areas that had previously been ignored.

Nonetheless, company records show that the annual take did not decrease; by 1889, when its lease ran out, the company had harvested a reported 1,850,000 seal skins, for which it had paid the U.S. government nearly $9.5 million. Its stockholders had harvested a reported $18 million in profits over the same period.

Treating the Arctic as a classic mining region, the Alaska Commercial Company extended its transportation and supply routes until it had 91 stations in Alaska, the Yukon and Siberia. Through these posts, trappers kept the company well supplied, not only with seal furs, but with red, white, blue and silver fox, otters, marten, mink, wolf, wolverine, bears (including polar), muskrat, ermine, lynx, beaver, sable, ivory, swanskin and whalebone. Furs and feathers were shipped to London for auction, then reshipped to the United States for processing and resale.

By the laws of supply and demand, the increased rarity of Arctic animals spurred on their slaughter. Year by year, the valuable and once-plentiful fur-bearing animals of North America are becoming more rare - in fact, extinct, and thus more valuable and interesting, reported one observer in 1905. Another likened the skins to valuable heirlooms: Because of its superior warmth, beauty, softness, fineness, etc., seal fur must continue to be fashionable until no more is to be had. As it grows rarer, it must of course grow more valuable. Those who possess handsome pieces of it may show them at novery distant day much as they would now show a blue diamond.

The official family histories of the Sloss and Gerstle clans and all their collateral branches depict the founders as paragons of vision and probity in business, devoted as husbands, fathers and community leaders in their personal lives. They built family compounds in city and country (Slosses and Gerstles maintained an expansive Victorian estate overlooking San Rafael) where wives and children were given every advantage that Alaska could provide, far from the messy killing fields of the Pribilofs.

None of the histories examines the Company's ecological impact as it consumed the living ore of the Arctic; in fact, Sloss and Gerstle never saw Alaska, but directed operations at a healthy remove through their partner, Captain Gustave Neibaum, and employees.

When the Company's lease expired in 1890, the federal government gave it to a company headed by San Francisco furrier Isaac Liebes. It was financed by William Ralston's old partner in the Bank of California, Darius Ogden Mills. The Pribilof mine, however, was nearing exhaustion. Alarmed by thinning herds, Treasury agent Charles Goff warned that there be no killing of fur seals... for an indefinite number of years.

Fur yield continued to drop until the United States outlawed sealing in 1914 to prevent complete extinction of the animals.

When the Pribilof lease expired, the Slosses and Gerstles reinvested their capital in a variety of enterprises, including salmon canneries, a tannery, mines, transportation, utilities and especially land reclamation and speculation in California. They were particularly interested in traction, investing in street railroads in Chicago, New York and Philadelphia, and, with Claus Spreckels, financed the building of a railroad meant to rival the Southern Pacific in the San Joaquin Valley.

Yet unlike Spreckels and other San Francisco financiers, they and their sons seldom dominated companies but owned stock or served on boards of directors, often representing family holding companies. Their names are therefore not well known to the general public today, and their interests are hard to trace without elaborate corporate cross-referencing and intimate genealogical familiarity.

It is, however, clear that the families were heavily involved in the development of the Sacramento Valley. In 1905, the Northern Electric Railroad Company was incorporated to build an interurban system from Chico to Oakland in competition with the Southern Pacific. Among the railroads partners were mining engineers earlier involved in hydraulic mining operations on the Yuba River; after these operations were outlawed in 1884, the engineers turned their expertise to long-range electrical transmission which would in turn serve to drain marshes, milk cows, build cities, and power enormous gold dredges (which they also owned on the Sacramento's tributaries). Engineers and entrepreneurs were virtually all tied with the syndicate that assembled Pacific Gas and Electric or its rival, Great Western Power, whose corporate goal it was to develop the resources of California and attract ever more immigrants to fill up the state's empty spaces.

The personal and familial links represented by the nexus of San Francisco capital can be diagrammed spatially: a number of family-owned office buildings or businesses allied with the Alaska Commerical Company were within no more than three blocks of its headquarters at Sansome and California Streets, or they occupied offices within the ACC Building itself (e.g. the Natomas Reclamation Company, which left an expansive legacy of sterile dredge tills east of Sacramento). Cherny and Issel have noted how nicely genetic, fiduciary and spatial intimacy coincided in San Francisco.

The sense of unity displayed by the city's business community evolved in a propitious setting. San Francisco enjoyed economic autonomy matched only by New York's... Nearly all of the city's businesses were owned and operated by San Franciscans, whose interests ranged from Alaskan fisheries to Hawaiian sugar plantations, from Mexican mining operations to hydroelectric power in the Sierra, from logging in Washington to San Joaquin wheat fields. They operated on an imperial scale, but most of their corporate boardrooms were within a few blocks of one another. They ate lunch in the same Financial District restaurants or in exclusive club rooms, saw each other regularly at the meetings of corporate and civic boards, worshipped in a few prestigious churches and synagogues, and watched fondly as their children married the children of friends [or cousins].

Above all, the goal of these men was to increase the population of California and thus, the value of the thousands of acres of land which they owned.

William Thomas, president of the California Water and Forest Association, spoke for them all when he told the Merchants Association in 1900 that "The bare statement of the objects of the Association should arouse the patriotism and public spirit of every good citizen of the state and particularly of the merchants of San Francisco who have waked to the self-evident fact that their future depends upon the development of the interior. With a territory larger than that of New England and the Middle States, capable of supporting a population denser than that of any country in the world, California has a population about as large as the city of Chicago and not one-tenth of its public spirit."

It was to fill this vacuum that PG&E, Great Northern, the Northern Electric Railroad, and the various land reclamation companies such as Natomas were formed at the turn of the century, partly with profits derived from the skins and tusks of northern mammals. Capital made from the consumption of Arctic resources turned then to the consumption [development] of California land in the commodity form of real estate.

The third and fourth generations of Sloss-Gerstles did not display the same enterprising gusto as had the founders and the family's fortunes declined relative to what they had been. In 1917, the Northern Electric declared bankruptcy, putting a severe strain on pooled capital. Dr. Mark Gerstle, Jr. died without a cent after going through six marriages and numerous affairs.

Seals, foxes, bears and birds once enriched the Gerstle family, the more so as those species vanished. So too did the Sacramento Valley as it filled with people for whom the Slosses and Gerstles once provided the power and transportation, so that finally, California was priced out of the reach of even Gerstles.

-Excerpted from Gray Brechin's book in progress, Imperial San Francisco, published in "Upriver, Downriver," Fall 1993