Most of us are accustomed to occasionally seeing a mounted moose or elk head on the wall of a restaurant or lodge; it’s a little discomfiting but perhaps not unusual. But it’s a different story when the mounted head is a giraffe’s, rearing out from the wall for the length of its long neck—and when it’s next to an enormous elephant head with flared ears and a trumpeting trunk, and when that’s next to a rhinoceros whose horn is sharp enough that you feel like you should sign a liability waiver to be in the same room with it. It’s definitely attention grabbing. No one’s talking about the elephant in the room, so thank goodness there’s a bar here.
I’m talking about Foster’s Bighorn, a restaurant and bar in Rio Vista, California, about an hour south of Sacramento. Last summer on a road trip, my family stumbled across this treasure-filled house of taxidermy—which also serves a decent burger. It’s a fantastical throwback established in 1933 with the results of big game hunting all over its walls. Even if you don’t approve of hunting, you’ll be awed by the size of the elephant head and its matching tusks, and can maybe comfort yourself that the creature died a century ago.
The enterprise started when Hayward-born big game hunter Bill Foster retired from hunting in 1953 and decided to work in the bar surrounded with his trophies. Foster was hunting from the late 1920s to the 1940s, in Africa, Alaska and Canada. Unregulated big game hunting—as opposed to today’s more ethical “fair chase hunting”—was very popular around the turn of the century, and some proponents like Theodore Roosevelt were even considered conservationists. At a time when few people were able to travel to Africa and see these animals in the wild, taxidermied wildlife—though entire bodies, not just the mounted heads—were acquired by museums as an educational boon. Footage of the hunts was shown in cinemas to thrill audiences, a wildly popular pastime back in the day.
Today, of course, collections like the one at Foster’s don’t seem as commonplace. It’s not just the size of the specimens, it’s the volume of them that makes your jaw drop: Every inch of the walls, it seems, is covered in unusual mounted heads—close to 300 of them in total. We ate dinner under those 600 eyes and chatted with Chris Wakeman, who had then recently taken ownership when we met him. He said Foster’s is known as the “horniest bar in the West” and says that he has lots of other memorabilia that isn’t on display: motion picture reels of the safaris, a pith helmet. Wakeman’s been upscaling the nearly century-old place while respecting its history and wants to capture the boating traffic that eases by on the Sacramento River (there’s a dock at the end of the street).
Besides the taxidermy, visitors can examine a series of striking black-and-white photos of the original safari hunts—the images are arrayed in three rows facing the long, 65-foot historic bar. I badly wanted a drink myself after facing so many glassy eyes, but I also respected the fact that these were artifacts from another era. I once researched the Snow Museum in Oakland (though it’s been gone from the tiny Snow Park by Lake Merritt since the 1960s, its collections helped form the basis for the Oakland Museum of California), so I knew that the Snow family had gone on big game expeditions to bring back trophies. I wondered if there was a connection with this collection and, reading the back of the menu, it turned out there was.
Bill Foster shot all the animals, took the photos and typed the captions under each. He apprenticed under Henry Snow, Oakland’s own big game hunter who amassed an incredible collection of taxidermy animals from Africa, and Snow’s son Sidney also joined the cause. The highlights of the Snows’ collection were three white rhinos, rare then and rare now. (There are literally two left in the world alive, both female, in Kenya. Stop for a moment and think what that means for the species: They won’t be able to reproduce. This is it.) The largest of the three weighed 5,000 pounds with a 22-inch horn and was ironically too large to exhibit at the Snow Museum.
The rhino head on the wall at Foster’s is also a white rhino.
The Snows made motion pictures of their safari trips, which were viewed internationally. I wasn’t able to learn exactly what the apprentice connection entailed, but Foster’s awareness of himself as a documentarian is clear when you read his photo captions.
Under an image of a rhino running (unknown if it’s “the one”), Foster wrote “Large rhino on northern frontier of Kenya. These fellows charge at the least little movement.”
Accompanying a photo of the elephant’s demise (you can see it here), Foster wrote, “This is the elephant head on the wall in the dinning [sic] room. Natives chopping through the neck to sever the head from the body so as we could prepare it for mounting.” These are definitely language and sentiments from another era.
About the elephant’s tusks, he wrote, “Eighty five pounds per tusk. This is very rare black ivory and very much in demand.” When you see the tusks in the restaurant today, it’s the pair under the elephant’s head. The tusks realistically embedded in the elephant’s face are made of wood, far less heavy than ivory, so that they won’t fall on unsuspecting diners. An etched number on the actual tusks shows the customs number for bringing them into the U.S.
Under the giraffe photo, Foster wrote, “Reticulated giraffe shot on the Tana River Country. We measure it at 17 feet from bottom of hoof to the top horn on his head. Not much sport in shooting as a game animal but worthy as a trophy. This one hangs in the dinning [sic] room wall.” I mean, he said what we’re all thinking.
I caught up with Wakeman again recently by phone to hear how things were going. He said just a few weeks ago, he had redone the upholstery in the dining room in a color called reef, “which gives it a vintage look. It’s night and day.”
He shared with me a story about Bill Foster, that Foster had been asked to “help” (i.e., shoot) an aggressive Kodiak bear on Kodiak Island, Alaska—which now adorns the wall right above the door to the kitchen—and in exchange for his services, he was given a pair of walrus tusks. Those tusks were at one time the third largest set in the world, according to Foster’s lore. The world record was apparently logged in the Big Game Record Book of the Boone and Crockett Club, an organization that supports “fair chase hunting” in North America, begun in 1887 by Theodore Roosevelt and anthropologist George Bird Grinnell. Its name commemorates Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. However, since the record book only mentions current and not past winners, I was unable to confirm this fact. The walrus tusks are tucked inside the elephant tusks on the wall. Wakeman’s a ton of fun to talk to and says that he’ll joke to new visitors that if they can find the other half of the elephant, he’ll give them a free drink.
You’re probably wondering: Is all of that big game on the menu, too? Of course not—so no cheetah two ways served here—but there is bison and elk on the menu in the form of lean burger patties. Other than that, the fare is pretty standard: fish and chips made with beer battered Alaskan pollock, chicken alfredo, ribeye and New York steak and a Delta favorite, the catfish sandwich deep fried and served with remoulade on a French roll.
Rio Vista’s an hour and a half northeast of San Francisco if you’re considering a day trip to pay homage to these creatures who once roamed the savannah.