SU0012813 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home Browse Search

I �i F 15 I as house floors, bedrock mortars, portable milling implements, ' flaked stone tools, pottery or baked clay balls, and other archaeological remains perhaps pertaining to Yokuts or Miwok occupation of the area might be found during surface inspection of the proposed project area. Regional Historic Context The first Europeans in California were the Spanish. Their expeditions to the interior of California in the years 1776 to 1849 have been reviewed by Cook (1943 , 1960, 1962) and Cutter (1950) . Most of their expeditions to the interior were of a punitive nature, undertaken to recapture Native American converts who had fled from the coastal missions (Heizer and Almquist 1971; McGruder 1950) . Cook's discussions of the Spanish expeditions to interior California are the best available accounts of the troubled times during the late exploratory and early mission periods in central California. Historic exploration of the Central Valley and the Delta region began in the 1830s. Colonel J. Warner, a member of the Ewing-Young trapping expedition that passed through the Central Valley in 1832-33 (Gilbert 1879: 11}' , mentions observing Indian villages on the San Joaquin River "from the base of the mountains } down to, and some distance below, the great slough. " Gilbert (1879: 12) quotes Colonel Warner as follows: . .many of those villages contained from fifty to one hundred dwellings, all of which were built with poles, and thatched with rushes. . .on the Tuolumne, Stanislaus and Calaveras rivers, there were Indian villages above the mouths, as also at, or near, their junction with the San Joaquin. . .on our return, late in the summer of 1833, we found the valleys depopulated. From the head of the Sacramento, to the great bend and slough of the San Joaquin, we did not see more than six or eight live Indians; while large numbers of their skulls and dead bodies were to be seen under almost every shade tree, near water, where the uninhabited and deserted villages had been converted into graveyards; and, on the San Joaquin river, in the immediate neighborhood of the larger class of villages, which, the i preceding year, were the abodes of a large number of those Indians, we found not only many graves, but the vestiges of a funeral pyre. ` The first permanent non-native settlement in the vicinity of Stockton was French Camp, occupied in 1832 by Hudson's Bay Company hunters, who trapped fur-bearing animals on the San