Chapter Two:
The Native Americans and the Land
WHEN SIGNIFICANT NUMBERS of Europeans first entered
the interior of California in the middle nineteenth century, they were
immediately impressed with the land they found. Every where they looked
they sensed potential. They found people too, sometimes lots of them,
but the Europeans were not nearly so impressed with them. In a way the
separation of the two was odd, for the land and the people were
inextricably bound together.
Just when people first came to live in the southern
Sierra is not entirely clear. Archaeologists are now confident that
human beings have lived in California for at least 10,000 years, and
some evidence suggests much earlier occupation of some parts of the
southern California desert. In the Great Central Valley, sites 3,000 to
4,000 years old have been excavated, and it now seems apparent that
central California, including portions of the Sierra, has been occupied
by humans for at least 6,000 or 7,000 years. [1]
In the Sequoia/Kings Canyon region, the record is
much more vague, with much of the area archaeologically unexplored even
today. Most of the limited archaeological work within the parks areas,
moreover, occurred several decades ago. For our purposes the most useful
work was done at several sites along the main stem of the Kaweah River.
Three of these sites were explored in the late 1950s during construction
of Terminous Dam on the Kaweah River below Sequoia National Park. At
Hospital Rock, six miles upstream from the park boundary on the same
river, additional work was done in 1960 on a large village site. During
the same year limited excavation was carried out at a site in Kings
Canyon less than a mile from Cedar Grove. [2]
Taken alone, these sites give only limited
information. None demonstrates occupation of great antiquity, although
deposits of cultural material at Hospital Rock were up to six feet deep.
Remaining physical evidence suggests the basic directions of subsistence
and culture, but little more. Only when the excavations are placed in
the context of historic anthropological research does the haze of the
past begin to recede.
|
© Photo by Lawrence Ormsby
|
|