The Native Land

The USGS Menlo campus is spread on a natural landscape with an interesting and colorful history of colonization and conquest (and some unscrupulous land deals). The area is underlain by Quaternary alluvium of Pleistocene and Holocene age. The soils and climate were productive toward establishing a landscape of verdant open spaces enriched by tracts of forest trees (oak, willow, bay), manzanita, coyote brush and ceanothus. This area was populated by the Ohlone Indians (the name is derived from a settlement on the sea coast between Davenport and Half Moon Bay) who arrived about 5000 years ago and who survived on a diet of fish, mussels, nuts, berries, and abundant game animals (including some large Tule Elk, Pronghom Antelope, and Blacktail Deer). They lived in village dwellings built with tule reeds, tree bark, and dirt. The Spanish called the aboriginal natives "costanos" (coast dwellers), hence the term "Costanoans" which often appears in anthropology and linguistic books. Some of the hunter/gatherer groups were so stable and entrenched as to develop their own peculiar dialects which would be incomprehensible to other tribes. According to shell mound evidence unearthed by Stanford anthropologist Bert Gerow and others, a small Ohlone "tribelet" called the Puichan lived along the creek (Arroyo San Francisquito) which borders present day Palo Alto and Menlo Park. (A band of trees which range from Allied Arts through USGS and Saint Patrick's Seminary suggest a former channel of the creek may have meandered through here in prehistoric times). Father Vincente Santa Maria (an early missionary in the San Jose area) said the natives were typically dressed in deer skins and skirts of tule reeds. They adorned themselves with shells and feathers, and daubed their skin with pigment (from a south bay cave lined with cinnabar... later to become the Almaden quicksilver mine). Several tribes (numbering about 50 to 200 persons in each) were linked by trade and marriage, but the groups basically stayed apart within established territorial realms. Obsidian was obtained trough trade with tribes far to the north, and the Ohlone exported abalone and purple olive snail shells far inland. They minded their own and avoided quarrel, often resolving problems by consensus and negotiation. Within about 75 years of the white man's arrival here, however, the peaceable Ohlone civilization was destroyed. The last pure-blood Ohlone (a medicine woman called Doctora Ascension Solorna in Spanish and/or Hoo Mon Twash in Ohlone) died at San Juan Bautista in 1930 at the age of 83.

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