seasonal additions to their diet were the plentiful grass and flower seeds, roots, fruits, and berries. They also used the bountiful supply of fish and shellfish from the Bay, the creeks, and the ocean. Indeed, when early explorers were offered gifts of food, they commented that native fare was palatable, even tasty.
Although the tribelets traveled between Bay and foothills most of the year to gather food, they did not stray far from the small territories they considered their own. A few groups made longer expeditions to trade with others for beads, salt, pine nuts, obsidian, abalone shells, and wood for bows. Regular trade routes crossed the hills between Bay and ocean.
The Ohlones were able to provide well for their people and lived in relative peace with their neighbors and in harmony with the land. Save for the periodic burning of the native bunchgrasses and underbrush in the meadows to keep them open for better hunting and acorn-gathering, and the paths worn by centuries of their footprints, these peoples had little impact on the land or the animals around them. Early Europeans reported that the natives moved among the wildlife and small game without arousing their fears. As Malcolm Margolin states in The Ohlone Way, animals and humans inhabited the very same world, and the distance between them was not very great.”
The coming of the European, with guns, horses, and cattle, changed all this. The antelope, elk, and bear soon disappeared, and other animals retreated from sight. Changes in the land were profound. Cattle grazing and the inadvertent introduction of European oat grass nearly eliminated the native perennial grasses. For the native peoples, change was swift and complete with the advent of the Spanish missions.
The Spanish-Mexican Period
Two centuries after Europeans first explored the California coast by ship, the overland expedition of Gaspar de Portolá discovered San Francisco Bay in 1769. This event paved the way for permanent Spanish settlement. Mission Dolores and the Presidio of San Francisco, as well as Mission Santa Clara, were founded in 1776. A year later, the Pueblo of Guadalupe in San José was built. Mission Santa Cruz on the Coastside was founded in 1791.
After the founding of these missions and their supporting ranches and outposts, most of the natives had been moved from their villages to missions and ranches, their families broken up, their old ways lost. In just over half a century the stable culture that had changed little over thousands of years disappeared. In the final tragedy, the native people succumbed by the thousands to imported diseases to which they had little or no resistance.
In the brief period of Mexican rule the missions and their supporting farms were secularized, and the ensuing disruptions of mission life further demoralized the remaining natives. Then, with the Gold Rush came land-hungry Easterners, who gained title to the few remaining lands occupied by the native peoples, displacing these first Americans who had lived in harmony on the Peninsula for so long. The United States census of 1860 listed only 62 persons on the Peninsula as Native Americans.
In the early Spanish days the entire Peninsula was divided into a few vast supporting ranches for the missions and Presidio. Herds of cattle and sheep grazed over the hills. Grains, vegetables, and fruits from the ranches on the Bayside near San Mateo and from the coast north of Santa Cruz supplied these Spanish outposts.
When Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821, the government secularized the missions and their ranches. To encourage settlement of the land the Mexican governors of California made grants of land to individuals. They divided the Peninsula into huge ranchos, as large as the 35,000-acre Rancho de las Pulgas. (East of the Skyline ridge in the area covered by this guide were the Ranchos Guadalupe, BuriBuri, Feliz, Raimundo de las Pulgas, Martinez, Corte de Madera, Purissima de Concepción, and San Antonio. To the west were the Ranchos San Pedro, Corral de Tierra, Miramontes, Cañada Verde y Arroyo de la Purisima, San Gregorio, Pescadero, Butano, and Punta del Año Nuevo.)
The brief flowering of these Mexican ranchos ended in 1848 when the American flag was raised over California. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, intended to protect the titles of Mexican land grants, failed to do so. Hordes of Americans from the east, eager for land after the discovery of gold, poured into northern California. The great ranchos were soon divided and sold or even usurped by squatters.
On the San Mateo Coastside, American settlers took over the lands from the Mexican rancheros by fair means or foul. By 1853, Andrew Johnston, having come by wagon over the mountains from San Mateo, had settled in a large house (still standing) near present-day Half Moon Bay. In 1855 a toll road was built on this mountain alignment, making it easier to send farm produce to the Bayside towns. Other settlers moved north from Santa Cruz—the Moore family established a homestead in Pescadero and the Steele brothers started a dairy near Punta Año Nuevo. Butter and cheese, shingles, and tanbark were shipped from a variety of rather precarious wharves and chutes.
Webb Ranch nestled at the base of the Portola Valley foothills
Eventually tourists discovered the Coastside, and by 1907 the Ocean Shore Railroad was built south from San Francisco, reaching as far as Tunitas Creek. Another railroad worked north from Santa Cruz, but the two never met. The gap between Tunitas and Swanton (present-day Davenport) was crossed by Stanley Steamer. In 1920, storms washed out parts of the Ocean Shore Railroad and it never was reconstructed.
When modern-day roads were built along the alignments of the earlier railroad tracks, the Coastside settlements grew apace, mainly as “bedroom communities” for Bayside workers. Half Moon Bay is the only incorporated city on the Coastside, but the communities of Montara, Moss Beach, El Granada, and Pescadero are expanding as fast as their limited water supplies allow.
Logging
The Spanish had dealt lightly with the forested Peninsula hills. They felled by ax the redwoods cut to build their missions. In fact, they later expressed concern over unrestrained logging by the Anglos. The greatly increased demand for lumber to build Gold Rush San Francisco brought the first major change to the Sierra Morena, particularly to that part known as the Pulgas Redwoods—the forest above present-day Portola Valley and Woodside. The new owners of these lands logged them heavily with whipsaws. They built sawmills powered first by water, then by steam engines. As many as 50 sawmills operated in these forests, turning out lumber to build San Francisco and then rebuild it after its fires. By 1870 the huge trees, some 10 feet or more in diameter, were gone. Hardly a redwood tree remained standing east of the Skyline, but logging continued in the vast forests on the western slopes. Most of the original giant trees were cut by 1900, but redwoods are fast-growing in this climate, and second-growth trees of marketable size still are being harvested on private lands.
Farming and Ranching
With the redwoods gone in eastern San Mateo County, some of the lower slopes of the mountains were planted with orchards and vineyards. Dairy farms and large estates covered the foothills. During the late 1800s in northern Santa Clara County, ranchers planted vineyards and orchards of plums, apricots, peaches, pears, and cherries on the valley floor and in the lower foothills. This area became one of the most productive fruit-growing areas in the world. The scent of blossoming trees filled the air every spring. Ripening fruits on the trees and trays of apricots, peaches, and prunes drying in the fields made summers colorful in the peaceful orchard country. On western slopes open land became livestock and dairy farms. Later, row crops of artichokes and brussels sprouts were grown in large acreages and greenhouses containing flowers proliferated.
Urbanization and Public Open Space
In eastern San Mateo County, a century of settlement saw the gradual break-up of large estates and the burgeoning of towns. By 1863, tracks for the San Francisco and San Jose Railroad
