The first Europeans had a wonderful first vision of California. In the late 18th and early 19th century, the ship captains give us marvelous descriptions of enormous pods of spouting whales coming through the Golden Gate, seabirds wheeling in the air, and tremendous runs of king salmon and smelt. The common description was that it looked as though you could walk across the straits on the backs of the salmon coming through. The geese and ducks would fly in and darken the sky with their numbers. There were huge herds of Tule elk and pronghorn antelope down in the Santa Clara Valley south of here. Then there were the condors and eagles and grizzly bears. It was a tremendously marvelous and fertile area.
One early description is from George Vancouver, a British sea captain who had sailed with Captain Cook in the 1780s. He formed an expedition of his own that explored a lot of Alaska and what's now Vancouver Island and Vancouver Straits. In November of 1792, he came into San Francisco Bay, stopped at the Presidio, and decided to go down the peninsula to Santa Clara by boat and then horse. He talks about the high degree of luxuriant fertility, verdant open spaces enriched with stately forest trees of different descriptions.
"Our journey was estimated at eighteen leagues in which distance the country afforded no house, hut, or any place of shelter except such as the spreading trees presented. About noon, having been advanced about 23 miles, we arrived at a very pleasant and enchanting lawn situated amid a grove of trees at the foot of a small hill by which flowed a very fine stream of excellent water.
"We had not proceeded far from this delightful spot when we entered a country I didn't expect to find in these regions. For about twenty miles, it could only be compared to a park, which had originally been closely planted with true old English oak. The underwood that had probably attended its early growth had the appearance of having been cleared away, and had left the stately lords of the forest in complete possession of the soil, which was covered with luxuriant herbage, grasses, and beautifully diversified with pleasing eminences and valleys."
Traveler after traveler would come through and find these big bold oak trees and this wonderful clear understory of land. And the common description from every person that came through was that it looked like an old English park.
In 1833 George Yount, a fur trapper, settled up in the Napa Valley in what's now Yountsville, not far from Calistoga. He said, "It was the nothing more than a wide and extended lawn, exuberant in wild oats and the place for wild beasts to lie down in. The deer, antelope, and noble elk held quiet and undisturbed possession of all that wide domain. The above-named animals were numerous beyond all parallel, and herds of many hundreds, they might be met so tame that they would hardly move to open the way for the traveler to pass. They were seen lying or grazing in immense herds on the sunny side of every hill, and their young like lambs frolicking in all directions. The wild geese and every species of water fowl darkened the surface of every bay and firth, and upon the land in flocks of millions they wandered in quest of insects and cropping the wild oats which grew there in the richest abundance. When disturbed, they arose to fly. The sound of their wings was like that of distant thunder. The rivers were literally crowded with salmon. It was a land of plenty, and such a climate that no other land can boast of."
Here's a description from a guy named Thomas Jefferson Mayfield, who came to California as a kid in 1850. He traveled over into the San Joaquin Valley. He describes the different kinds of flowers.
"As we passed below the hills, the whole plain was covered with great patches of rose, yellow, scarlet, orange, and blue. The colors did not seem to mix to any great extent. Each kind of flower liked a certain kind of soil best, and some of the patches of one color were a mile or more across. I believe that we were more excited out there on the plains among the wild flowers than we had been when we saw the valley for the first time from the mountain the day before. Several times we stopped to pick the different kinds of flowers and soon we had our horses and packs decorated with masses of all colors."
So this family entered the San Joaquin Valley, loaded up with all of these flowers over them.
California was this extraordinary and lovely land of great fertility, of abundant wildlife, of great flowers. It was always considered by Europeans to be a wilderness. Somehow or other, this was the natural state of the land. The Indians that were living there were environmentally inconsequential. They just kind of lived there. They lived there and a few acorns fell off the trees, and they ate the acorns, and then they'd go off and hunt a few deer and gather a few seeds. They lived off the excess of the land.
It was thought that California Indians had lived here for thousands of years without altering the land, without changing anything. They had left it the way they had found it. But this is not what natural California looks like. If you leave it alone, you do not get forests that look like natural parks. You do not get meadows that grow this way. I don't want to overstate the case. It wasn't as though every square inch had been cultivated, but to a large extent California was landscape managed by human beings in a very particular way.
There was a wonderful old Pomo gentleman that I knew rather well named Ben Lucas from the Stewart's Point Reservation. I remember once walking out there with Ben on the hills above Stewart's Point. It was springtime and the elderberry was flowering. I said, "Ah Ben, isn't that elderberry just beautiful?" He said, "Well it's beautiful, but it makes me sad because, when the elderberry flowers, it means that we can't go down to the bay, to the ocean anymore and collect shellfish, because the shellfish has become poisonous. When the berry ripens in the fall, that's the signal that you can go down and start collecting the shellfish again."
I remember once up in a Hupa reservation, there was this fellow Ray Baldy walking around, and this little wren began to tweet away, singing its little heart out. This itty bitty bird. I never knew something so small could have so much noise in it. But it was tweeting away out there. Ray said, "Oh good. That means the salmon will be here in another four days."
I started to collect some of this information, as it fades away rather rapidly. All of these people had a phenomenological calendar of some sort. It was a very specific calendar. It was specific to particular areas. It was a wonderfully supple and flexible kind of calendar, in which natural events were keyed one to the other.
So you knew that when the strawberry ripened, you would have a festival, and then so many days later you'd know that you could go up to certain hills and collect the Brodiaea bulbs. You could wait so many days and do this, and so many days and do that, and then something else would happen.
All of these events were linked, one to the next. Every locality had this intense and highly localized relationship to a place. It was a very specific knowledge of land. Let me give you another example. Everyone in California had rabbit drives at certain times of the year, very often in the spring. Whole villages would get together, and they would either burn them out, or there'd be this big celebration and they'd run them into nets. They had special rabbit sticks like boomerangs and would fling them at their legs, and then at the end there was all of this feasting, and people would eat a lot of rabbit and then they would use their skins and make rabbit skin blankets.
You end up taking the skins and you cut them, and spread them out, and twist them. You make them like rope, and then you weave these wonderful rabbit skin ropes, and they make all of their rabbit skin blankets for the year. It's the kind of thing that in the modern age, people try not to talk about too much. The sportsmen don't like it because it doesn't seem very sporting, and the vegetarians don't like it because it's not tofu. Nobody likes the idea of it, but nevertheless they had a really good time. What I want to point out about it is that, when you view this in terms of land management, it has certain very interesting implications. They would tend to do it in the springtime, which is the time that new plants were growing up. A big population of rabbits would be directly competing with you and everything else for all of those plants.
They ate lower on the food chain than we do, eating things that later on people developed contempt for, things like squirrels and mice and gophers and grasshoppers, which everybody said tasted like shrimp. And oak moths and moth larvae, which everybody said tasted like shrimp. And shrimp, which everybody said tasted like moth larvae.
But eating all of these kinds of animals at certain times of the year was a very powerful kind of land management tool, and the food was shared communally, which is a marvelous device that prevents overconsumption. When people hunt and gather stuff individually, they have to stockpile because next week they might be sick or have a lousy week. When it's shared over a broad range of people, then nobody really has to stockpile, so sharing is an amazingly efficient way of using resources.
They would also burn the land. When the first Europeans came, they were horrified at what they called the "addiction" that Indians had for burning the land. At certain seasons of the year, it looked like Los Angeles in terms of smog. It looked like there was smoke rising from every place.
If you go into the county laws of California, right there in the very first law books of every county is a regulation to forbid the burning of public land, which was specifically aimed at Indians. It was a way to arrest Indians for burning the land. They knew exactly why they burned. They burned because it cleared the understory and undesirable trees. Whole parts of Klamath River that are today Douglas Fir forests choked with coniferous trees were at one time, when the first Europeans came, open meadows with sugar pine.
They burned because it cleared out the brush and fostered certain kinds of grasses with large seeds that were useful. It improved the game habitat. They would burn at certain times of year because people around here ate acorns, and the oak moth was a terrible infestation on the oak tree. There's one stage where the oak moth goes into the ground and lives within the ground, and if you burn at that particular time of year, then you get rid of the oak moths for that year.
They knew exactly what they were doing. Those forests that Vancouver was talking about, those large English parks that people were going through, were not a natural environment. That is what happens when you're continually burning and continually clearing, when you're fostering the growth of large trees.
Another kind of cultural technique that people used was repeatedly clipping and coppicing basketry plants. Another reason to burn is that bear grass and other kinds of basketry plants come out as straight shoots after they're burned.
There are some plants like willows and hazel and red bud that basket weavers were continually trimming because, when you trim them down to a nub, then the next year they grow up with nice tall, straight shoots that are really great for basketry. If you don't trim them, then they all get crooked and kinky and they're no good.
The California Indians were called digger Indians by the whites who first came here, and there was an amazing irony that the first whites who came here in numbers were the gold miners. So there they were, out there digging in gravel, and they contemptuously referred to the Indians as digger Indians because they were out digging for roots a lot of the time. This was clearly something terrible and disreputable. They had digging sticks, and I used to read these descriptions of Brodiaea bulbs, which is a little lily that people would eat. These gigantic feasts of people coming home with huge baskets full of this stuff. You wonder, Where in the world did they get them all from? I mean, this is hard work with a digging stick.
This amazing woman, Kat Anderson, was working at Yosemite at one point, and she began to listen to some of these older Indians talking about how they went out to gather. She asked them, "How did you go out to gather these bulbs? When did you go out? When was the right time to go out? You didn't just go out any time--when did you go out?"
It was a very precise time when they went out, and there was a very precise way in which they dug these plants. What they would do would be to go out with a digging stick, and push the digging stick in and pry it up. If you do it at the right time of the year, you discover that, not only is there a bulb, but all around each bulb are nearly 50 little teeny bulbettes just beginning to form.
Then part of the gathering is that you rip the top off, you rub the bulb off, you throw your bulb in your basket and you go on and collect another one. The other thing is, despite a whole lot that's said about how Indians didn't own the land, the fact is they did own land. Different families had collecting rights in particular places. So you would go back to the same place year after year. So Kat did that. The second year she went back to exactly to same place, she discovered instead of there being a few Brodiaea bulbs, there were many more Brodiaea bulbs. She'd been loosening the soil and scattering those bulbettes out. She went back the third year, there were incredibly more Brodiaea bulbs. She went back the fourth year; after five years it began to look like those old descriptions of California, like that amazing description from Mayfield, patches of flowers of the same kind that would be growing all over the place. Almost a cultivated landscape.
In modern times, they say you don't need this kind of thing. In modern times, we don't eat this kind of thing. But if you want it to be there, you go out and gather it anyway. The idea was that, by gathering something, you increase the productivity of the land. You increase the number of Brodiaea bulbs. Instead of going out there as a predator and depleting the world of Brodiaea bulbs, by this action of gathering you keep it.
The huge clam beds were also created. They were not wild systems, and there were regulations. There were regulations on salmon fishing; there were regulations on game taking. There were techniques by which you would hunt certain animals and not other animals. There was game management. There was a very, very foggy line between domestic and wild. Animals would come through. There was a much more porous relationship with the animal world.
One of the greatest tools of land management was property ownership. In California, some things were owned. Fishing places were owned, trees were owned, gathering rights were owned, land was owned. That ownership was, I think, a way of allocating scarce resources. Part of that ownership involved not only a right to gather, but a responsibility to the land.
When warfare broke out in California, which it did on a fairly localized level, it was usually over somebody invading a resource that belonged to your family or belonged to your tribe. When you owned something, it was an incentive for moderation. You might have responsibilities to a particular tree, for example, and you would show restraint because you knew you would have to come back to it next year.
We have a lot to learn from these systems of ownership that on one hand give rights, but also demand responsibilities. The California Indians had very conscious systems of conservation and control, and private property was indeed one of them. It kept bunches of people off the land. It gave only a few people access to the land. If your family wanted access to this particular piece of land, you would have to ask for it. There would be a trade-off of some sort. It provided processes of regulation so that you could have moderation.
But there was other land that was held in common. There was other land that was not particularly owned. One of the most beautiful pieces of conservation was a quarry up around Oroville. It was chert, which was a hard rock used for making points, arrowheads, and the like, in an area that doesn't have a heck of a lot of obsidian or other minerals. It was very, very valuable.
In a way, it was owned in common. In this particular case, any male of that particular area could go into this quarry. It was like a cave; it was already dug in. They'd been quarrying this thing for God knows how long. It had been dug into this hill. Every male could go in once a year. Once a year, you could take out as much as you could get with a single blow of a hammer. And then you had to leave offerings of money beads on the way out. If you broke these laws, there were tremendous religious proscriptions. I think you became a hunchback or something like that. Something terrible would happen to you if you broke it.
It was religious. It was a tribute to the power of this place, and it was encoded in religion. Part of it was conservation. Part of it was limiting everybody's access to that place, making certain that nobody would take more than their share, making certain that it would last for several generations.
Then you had different places like the pell among the Yurok. A dam, a fish weir, would be built. In a way it was common, but first the religious officials would go and get whatever fish they could use. Then the common people would come in the class system, get as much as they would. But the weir could not be built more than a third of the way across the river and even then all of the fishing had to be done in the morning, and then the weir was opened so the fish would get through.
The entire fishing season was regulated so that it would end in about three weeks. They knew exactly why they were doing it, so the upstream people would get their fish, so that the fish would spawn. All the way up and down the whole Klamath River drainage, among the Yurok, among the Karok, among the Shasta, going up the Trinity River, among the Hupa, among the Wintun, among all these peoples speaking different languages, there was a whole series of, in effect, international fishing treaties.
There were regulations and laws, and the penalties were ferocious if you broke them. You had different kinds of territories and hunting territories, and it was proscribed who could use them and who couldn't use them and who had to bring gifts and so on. These were complex societies. We love to think that we live in a complicated world and Indians lived in a nice simple world. The values that people have in these long-standing traditional societies that have lived in the same place for thousands of years are coded in the language, coded in their religion, coded in custom, and coded in clan relationships. It's a very marvelously deep knowledge.
To be a human being, you need more than one generation to take this stuff up. You had a kind of transmission of several generations, and a lot of it is still around. It's really important to get a view of humanity as not living apart from, or being destructive to the world. It's people who actually live within, and by their actions can be a blessing to the world.
Excerpted from a talk given at the 1998 Bioneers Conference in San Francisco. For information about the annual Bioneers Conference contact the Collective Heritage Institute toll-free at 1-877-BIONEER; website: www.bioneers.org.
©1999 Talking Leaves
Summer/Fall 1999
Volume 9, Number 2
A Sense of Place