The Loma Prietan
February 2001
Back in the Good Ohlone Days
by John Maybury
Before Silicon Valley, before the Gold Rush, before the Spanish missionaries and conquistadors, Ohlone people lived in harmony with nature in the Bay Area, 50 different tribes speaking seven or eight different languages, enjoying abundant seafood, waterfowl, wild game, acorns, buckeyes, and berries.
Caltrans consulting archeologist Mark Hulkema studies Ohlone culture, reading Spanish missionaries’ diaries of their first encounters with the natives and peering into archeological digs of their buried history. Hulkema grew up on the bay side of the Peninsula, where computer companies have replaced fruit orchards. He came to appreciate the outdoors on camping trips with his parents. He became aware that the Ohlone, who flourished in the Bay Area, were a "vibrant and dynamic" people.
When Columbus and Cortez were discovering and conquering, California was still unmapped territory. Trade winds blew Spanish galleons returning from Asia loaded with goods toward the California coast, but all the scurvy-sickened Spaniards saw was clouds and fog. Finally Cabrillo in 1542 sailed north looking for
a rumored northwest passage. He made it as far as Monterey, slipped on a rock, broke his arm, and died of gangrene poisoning. Thirty years later Drake sailed into San Francisco Bay and made contact with the Miwok tribe. When Russian fur trappers arrived in the 1740s, Spain was alarmed. (Hulkema says the best Ohlone artifacts are to this day in the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia.)
To protect the missions in Baja California, Gaspar de Portola set out from San Diego in 1769 with 300 troops. Natives along the way were so friendly that Portola often camped at a distance so his men could get some sleep. The Ohlone liked to party hearty. At Pajaro the Spaniards saw a giant stuffed condor in an Ohlone village. At Año Nuevo they noted a round dance house and a cemetery marked by poles. At Half Moon Bay, the Europeans hunted geese in the marshes and harvested mussels in the rocks off Devil’s Slide.
In full armor, they hiked up and over Buri Buri (now known as Sweeney Ridge) and saw the Farallon Islands, San Francisco Bay, and Point Reyes. They also saw smoke from dozens of campfires around the bay. They marched down the Peninsula and around the marshy South Bay to the other side (thus Contra Costa). Father Crespi, expedition chaplain, wrote in his diary about abundant grizzly bear droppings.
The weary soldiers then pushed on to the Carquinez Straits and the Delta, again finding a watery barrier to their northward quest. At this point they gave up and returned to San Diego. Miraculously, not a single man was lost on this trek. Next year Portola went back up to Monterey and established the mission there. By 1776, missions had spread up El Camino Real (The Royal Road) all the way to San Francisco.
The Ohlone ate seaweed, shellfish, and sea mammals. They became rich by trading their plentiful shells and beads for food and other needs. Ohlone shells and beads have been found as far east as Utah, accounting for volcanic obsidian found in Ohlone digs. Abalone shell fish hooks fluttered like lures, allowing the Ohlone to catch lots of fish. They used beach tar to waterproof their huts and baskets and to attach arrowheads made of chert to shafts made of animal bone and poison-oak branches. They tenderized abalone meat with dimpled stones. They turned mussel shells into spoons and tools. They burned back the edges of pine forests to create grazing meadows for the deer they hunted. They managed grasslands with controlled burns to promote spring growth and to make the oak trees produce more acorns for food. They restricted production of beads to control the economy.
Ohlone people used tule reeds to make houses, baskets, and boats. They ate tule flowers and bulbs. They heated rocks and put them in watertight-weave baskets to boil water for leaching the toxic tannic acid out of acorns, then pounded the acorns into meal, using stone mortars and pestles, and baked it wrapped in leaves on hot rocks. Other food they steamed by pouring water on hot rocks, luau style. They harvested natural bay salt crystals for seasoning their food, also adding wild berries for color (and you thought your dad invented blueberry pancakes!).
They dug up soaproot and iris bulbs to roast and eat (unroasted, toxic bulbs were used to stun fish in lakes and ponds). They skewered and roasted grasshoppers and caterpillars ("a buttery flavor," according to Hulkema). They made a paste or powder out of the protein-rich insects to add to acorn mush. They squeezed berry juice and discovered the joy of fermented berry cider.
They tattooed their shins to indicate social status. They decorated their baskets and headdresses with colorful bird feathers (woodpecker, meadowlark, magpie, and raven). The men huddled and relaxed in sweatlodges before hunting, rubbing themselves down with herbs to hide their human scent, and dressing in animal skins to complete the camouflage.
Highly efficient Ohlone hunters could get close to their prey: the fewest calories for the most takedowns. Their powerful deer-sinew bows allowed them to hunt solo, not in groups of spear carriers. This led to major changes in hunting and social patterns among the Ohlone around 1100 A.D., including great increases in wealth, as shown by huge abalone pendants, fancy headdresses, quartz crystals, and a new religion called Kuksu.
Ohlone firestarters used a dry wood drill (Hulkema says he tried friction and found it hard to do). The Ohlone grew tobacco and smoked it in carved stone pipes. They made whistles and horns out of bones and reeds. They used cinnabar to paint their bodies. The men grew long beards and mustaches. They built large dance halls and studded their headdresses with antenna-like reeds. They shook rattles made of pebbles placed inside of dried gypsy moth cocoons, clanked abalone shell bangles, and stomped hollow-log foot drums.
Back then the bay was deep (not full of silt, which came down with Gold Rush mining) and full of sting rays, sea otters, salmon, and whales. Herds of elk would swim out to Angel Island. A Spaniard noted the deafening sound of frogs croaking, elk bugling, and birds calling.
Unfortunately, the Ohlone were so polite and timid that aggressive European religion and disease soon overcame them. The Spaniards segregated the Ohlone by sexes. Sexually transmitted diseases wiped out 80 percent of the natives. Ohlone labor built the thick walls of the missions we worship today. Priests paid Ohlone slaves with beads, undermining the fragile Ohlone economy.
A few survivors lingered on. Some became superb horsemen working for Spanish rancheros. In the Gold Rush, state-funded vigilantes and bounty hunters killed Ohlones. The last-known Ohlone joined other native people living and working at Alisal Ranch in Sunol, where anthropologists and archeologists visited them until one by one they died off or scattered to the wind. But somewhere, Hulkema believes, Ohlone blood still flows in some Americans’ veins. For him, the Ohlone story is not over yet.