Malcolm Margolin's book, The Ohlone Way, has a brief description of the setting in San Francisco, including the vast number of animals that inhabited the land before the European settlers moved in, and the behavior of these animals towards humans. I am reprinting this excerpt from pages 9 and 11 of his book.:
"The environment of the Bay Area has changed drastically in the last 200 years. Some of the birds and animals are no longer to be found here, and many others have vastly diminished in number. Even those that have survived have (surprisingly enough) altered their habits and characters. The animals of today do not behave the same way they did two centuries ago; for when the Europeans first arrived they found, much to their amazement, that the animals of the Bay Area were relatively unafraid of people."
"Foxes, which are now very secretive, were virtually underfoot. Mountain lions and bobcats were prominent and visible. Sea otters, which now spend almost their entire lives in the water, were then readily captured on land. The coyote, according to one visitor, was "so daring and dexterous, that it makes no scruple of entering human habitation in the night, and rarely fails to appropriate whatever happens to suit it."
"Animals seem to have lost their fear and become familiar with man," noted Captain Beechey. As one read the old journals and diaries, one finds the same observation repeated by one visitor after another. Quail, said Beechey, were "so tame that they would often not start from a stone directed at them" Rabbits "can sometimes be caught with the hand," claimed a Spanish ship captain, Geese, according to another visitor, were "so impudent that they can scarcely be frightened away by firing upon them."
"Suddenly everything changed. Into this land of plenty, this land of "inexpressible fertility" as Captain la Perouse called it, arrived the European and the rifle. For a ew years the hunting was easy -- so easy (in the words of Frederick Beechey) "as soon to lessen the desire of pursuit." But the advantages of the gun were short-lived. Within a few generation some birds and animals had been totally exterminated, while others survived by greatly increasing the distance between themselves and people."
"Today we are the heirs of that distance, and we take it entirely for granted that animals are naturally secretive and afraid of our presence. But for the Indians who lived here before us this was simply not the case. Animals and humans inhabited the very same world, and the distance between them was not very great.
"The Ohlones depended upon animals for food and skins. As hunters they had an intense interest in animals and an intimate knowledge of their behavior. A large part of man's life was spent learning the ways of animals.
"But their intimate knowledge of animals did not lead to conquest, nor did their familiarity breed contempt. The Ohlones lived in a world where people were few and animals were many, where the bow and arrow were the height of technology, where a deer who was not approached in the proper manner could easily escape and a bear might conceivably attack -- indeed, they lived in a world where the animal kingdom had not yet fallen under the domination of the human race and where (how difficult it is for us to fully grasp the implications of this!) people did not yet see themselves as the undisputed lords of all creation. The Ohlones, like hunting people everywhere, worshipped animal spirits as gods, imitated animal motions in their dances, sought animal powers in their dreams, and even saw themselves belonging to clans with animals as their ancestors. The powerful, graceful animal life of the Bay Area not only filled their world, but filled their minds as well."
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The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the San Francisco-Monterey Bay Area
The culture of the Indian people who inhabited the Bay Area prior to the arrival of Europeans
Reviews
“A beautiful book, written and illustrated with a genuine sympathy....A serious and compelling re-creation.”
—The Pacific Sun
“Remarkable insight in to the lives of the Ohlone Indians.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Margolin conveys the texture of daily life, birth, marriage, death, war, the arts, and rituals, and he also discusses the brief history of the Ohlones under the Spanish, Mexican, and American regimes...Margolin does not give way to romanticism or political harangues, and the illustrations have a gritty quality that is preferable to the dreamy, pretty pictures that too often accompany texts like this.”
—Choice
About the Author
Malcolm Margolin is executive director of Heyday, an independent nonprofit publisher and unique cultural institution, which he founded in 1974. Margolin is author of several books, including The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the San Francisco–Monterey Bay Area, named by the San Francisco Chronicle as one of the hundred most important books of the twentieth century by a western writer. He has received dozens of prestigious awards among which are the Chairman's Commendation from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fred Cody Award Lifetime Achievement from the San Francisco Bay Area Book Reviewers Association, the Helen Crocker Russell Award for Community Leadership from the San Francisco Foundation, the Carey McWilliams Award for Lifetime Achievement from the California Studies Association, an Oscar Lewis Award for Western History from the Book Club of California, a Hubert Bancroft Award from Friends of the Bancroft Library, a Cultural Freedom Award from the Lannan Foundation, and a Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. He helped found the Bay Nature Institute and the Alliance for California Traditional Artists.
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Earliest European view of the Coast People. Unique among California Indians, the double-bladed paddle was a special innovation of the coast people. With its pointed prow the buoyant balsa could carry four people, swiftly and easily, into inlets and coves, from island to island in the bay. The Spanish invention in this view is the woven, striped blanket, made by the woman neophytes at the mission. This is the earliest view we have of the Coast People, made in 1816 by Louis Choris, a world traveler of acute perception who wrote, “I have never seen one laugh. I have never seen one look one in the face. They look as though they are interested in nothing.” By 1816, this was true.6
Image: Bancroft Library (brk00001587_24a)
It is uncertain when the wandering coast people first appeared on Mission Bay. Burial mounds with artifacts and middens dating back to an estimated 3,500 BC were found on Hunters Point, some near the shore at Candlestick Park.9 The people of these mounds may have been the ancestors of the Costanoans, as the Spanish named the coast people. The Costanoan linguistic group, comprised of eight separate languages spoken by 50 autonomous tribes (each with its own dialect), has been traced to 500 A.D. At the time the Spanish arrived the coast people had fished the waters of Mission Bay for 1,275 years. They numbered 10,000, all in the same linguistic group, of which 1,400 are thought to have spoken Ramaytush—the language spoken by the group most closely associated with Mission Bay.10
The Coast People, Half Revealed
We do not know the name they called themselves. “Costanoan” has been the useful descriptive category for the people who belonged to this large linguistic group and lived on San Francisco Peninsula as far south as Monterey on the ocean side. Indians living in the Bay Area today reject “Costanoan” because it is Spanish; they prefer “Ohlone,” meaning “the abalone people,” which is closer to their own conception of their ancestors’ identity
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