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Alexis Madrigal: Welcome to Forum. I’m Alexis Madrigal.
The San Francisco Bay was quite a different place 250 years ago. It was ringed with salt marshes. All of Mission Bay was still a bay. Creeks abounded, flowing from the nearby hills to the bay or ocean. This was an estuarial, tidal place — a place of wetlands, mud flats, and sand dunes.
Our descriptions of these places do not come from the longtime inhabitants of this land, the different indigenous groups that made this place home for many generations. Instead, the earliest recorded impressions come from those who came to settle the Bay Area for the Spanish crown. Father Pedro Font accompanied the De Anza expedition from the desert Southwest to San Francisco. He was priest, cartographer, and kept a detailed diary of the group’s wanderings. On arriving at the Golden Gate, he looked down across what would become the Presidio and Marina, sweeping over to what is now downtown, and made an observation that calls out across time: “Although in all my travels I saw very good sights and beautiful country, I saw none which pleased me so much as this. And I think that if it could be well settled like Europe, there would not be anything more beautiful in all the world, for it has the best advantages for founding in it a most beautiful city with all the conveniences desired by land as well as by sea.”
Setting aside the obvious problematic components of this — what did Font see? What was the actual landscape like? And what were the societies like that Font’s group came to colonize and displace?
Here to take us back those 250 years, we’re joined by Steven Hackel, professor of history at the University of California, Riverside, and author of Junípero Serra: California’s Founding Father. Welcome.
Steven Hackel: Nice to be here. Thank you so much.
Alexis Madrigal: We also have Michael Wilcox, senior lecturer in Native American Studies in the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford, who serves as the tribal historic preservation officer for the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe of the San Francisco Bay Area and is a founding board member of the Muwekma Ohlone Cultural Preservation Land Trust. Welcome, Michael.
Michael Wilcox: Thank you. Welcome.
Alexis Madrigal: And we have Laura Feinstein, Resilient Landscapes Program Director at the San Francisco Estuary Institute. Welcome, Laura.
Laura Feinstein: Thanks for having me.
Alexis Madrigal: Laura, let’s start with you — and with this landscape and this bay. A lot of the work you and the Estuary Institute have done has been on historical ecology, trying to figure out what the land, sea, and landscape around here would have looked like. What would you have seen?
Laura Feinstein: If you had stepped onto a ridgeline in 1776 and looked out on the Bay Area, you would have seen redwood forests along the hillsides, in the deeper crevices and along the creeks — trees bigger than the ones you can find in Mendocino County today. Across the open hillsides, there would have been native grasslands speckled with oak trees. If you followed a creek down as it reached the flatlands, the water would spread out — the creeks hadn’t been channelized the way we’ve done to them now, so every winter they would spread across their banks and create freshwater wetlands around them. You’d see sycamore groves and willow trees. And as you went further down that gradient, the creeks would start to meet bay water, mixing with salt water, and you’d see tidal wetlands taking over, with fish feeding among the plants. Further out, mud flats where thousands of shorebirds fed. And finally, the bay.
One of the most remarkable things about all of it was that the gradients — from freshwater to saltwater, from land to sea — were so much longer and more gradual than they are today. That meant enormous potential for a huge diversity of species, and for species like Chinook salmon to migrate between fresher and saltier waters at different stages of life. And sprinkled around on the hills every few miles — Indian villages.
Alexis Madrigal: Michael Wilcox, that’s such an interesting description of this place — in part because we know now that even though the Spaniards who arrived here thought of it as a completely natural, unaltered, wild landscape, that really wasn’t the case at all.
Michael Wilcox: Yeah. In recent years, historians have been focusing on transformations of food systems and of the natural environment through what’s called fire ecology. When people enter into landscapes managed by indigenous people, they tend to assume, as you said, that what was there was simply natural. But when people are pulled off the land into missions, that disrupts not only the food systems people relied upon — it transforms the natural environment in ways that are not predictable.
One of the main drivers of change was the introduction of cattle into California. Cattle were the economic engine of the mission system, and the numbers are pretty staggering. At the peak, there were perhaps two hundred thousand head of cattle, horses, and other livestock in the Bay Area. If each animal needs between seven and a half and ten acres of land to graze per year, that’s essentially the entire Bay Area.
Alexis Madrigal: And so you go from a food system in which — from what we understand — there was plentiful food, a non-agricultural society, or rather a set of societies, that were able to sustain themselves through harvesting wild and lightly tended products, working relatively few hours, and keeping the ecosystems of the area in balance.
Michael Wilcox: Yeah. Most people think of societal success as tied to permanent village settlements and the accumulation of resources — big buildings, metallurgy, agriculture. But what’s really interesting about California and the Bay Area in particular is that you don’t need agriculture here. Agriculture requires an intervention into the reproductive system of a plant or animal for year-round survival. It can create great surpluses — but for the Bay, you don’t need that. In fact, it’s actually a disadvantage to become an agriculturalist, because it’s not the best strategy when what you need can be obtained by moving between different elevations in the bay.
Think about what those wetlands offered — what an amazing ecosystem. There’s no need to accumulate anything to sustain yourself if you can move from place to place, up and down the creeks and ridges and all the way to the ocean to acquire your food. And it’s much better food. It’s better for you. If something’s not available in one place, you move to where there’s a better source. The nutrients are amazing. Just one example: chia. Everyone knows chia today, but there were dozens of different kinds of plant seeds that native people here used. The health of the people here was pretty remarkable.
Alexis Madrigal: Steven Hackel, let’s talk about the other side of this moment of contact. One of the things that your books really put a fine point on — which I think I knew somewhere in the back of my mind — is that when we think of colonial Spanish history, we think of Cortés, Tenochtitlan, all the things going on in central Mexico. But that was, in 1776, a couple hundred years in the past. The transformations of Mexico were long complete. And yet from, let’s say, 1600 until right before 1776, the Bay peoples had very little contact with Spaniards.
Steven Hackel: That’s true. The original colonization of Mexico was a 1510s and ’20s phenomenon. Spain moved gradually north up through Baja California, exploring various parts of the Pacific Ocean. At some point Spain did consider establishing a settlement in California as early as 1603, but they realized that ships returning from the Philippines didn’t actually need a way station in California — it was just as easy to keep sailing south back to central Mexico. So you’re right: Alta California, upper California, was not really home to Spanish settlers or explorers until 1769, the early 1770s, the mid-1770s — much later. But the systems that were then initiated, the demographic changes, the institution of settlement and rule, were very similar in many ways to what had occurred two centuries earlier, much further south in Spain’s empire.
Alexis Madrigal: You wrote a book that really focuses on the mission at Monterey. What knowledge did indigenous people have — at least as best we can tell — when the Spaniards arrived to stay? And obviously these accounts are conflicting, and they often come through the colonizers’ eyes.
Steven Hackel: I think there was a general awareness of colonization, of Spanish intruders further south, especially as they proceeded up Baja California in the late seventeenth century. But direct contact hadn’t occurred until much later. I think there had to have been an awareness of perhaps opportunity in terms of trade, but also of the danger — conquest and oppression — that could come with European intruders.
Alexis Madrigal: That’s so interesting. Laura, when we look back on the landscape you’ve described, are there any areas that remain intact today where you might say — this is what it might have looked like, this is what this particular slice of ecosystem could have been?
Laura Feinstein: They’re few and far between, and the remaining landscapes that reflect what things used to look like are fragmented — smaller patches than what was there before. But one place I might go to get a sense of what the wetlands might have looked like in the 1700s would be up the Petaluma River. The wetlands there used to be about twice as large as they are now, and they weren’t separated from each other by levees or patches of farmland — they would have been continuous. But you can still get up the Petaluma River and into areas where you feel completely surrounded by wetlands on either side of you. You can still see the tide go in and out and cover vast distances on either side of the river. That can give you some sense of what it would have been like.
Alexis Madrigal: We’re looking back on what was going on in the Bay Area 250 years ago as the United States nears its 250th anniversary. We’ve got Laura Feinstein, Resilient Landscapes Program Director at the San Francisco Estuary Institute; Steven Hackel, professor of history at the University of California, Riverside; and Michael Wilcox, senior lecturer in Native American Studies at Stanford. We’re taking your calls — what questions do you have about the Bay Area 250 years ago? Call us at 866-733-6786. Email forum@kqed.org. I’m Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned.
