SETTING THE SCENE: THE VALLEY'S FIRST PEOPLE.

Attracted by the good soil, sun, water, abundant game, fish, wild oats, berries, acorns, and other amenities, indigenous people who were part of the great Asian migration over the Bering land bridge began to settle in Sonoma Valley some twelve thousand years ago. Eventually they numbered some five thousand people in a number of tribes: Miwoks from the coast, Wintuns, Wapo and Miyakmahs in the north, near the Mayacamas Range; Pomos in the lower valley; Koskiwok near the upper San Francisco Bay; and Patwins in the southeast corner. They lived in long, multi-family grass- and tule-thatched huts with communal cooking areas. Life focused on gathering and preparing food, and tribal celebrations, religious and otherwise. The tribes traded among themselves, cleared land by burning to expose game more easily -- an early example of forest management -- and soaked in the valley's many hot springs.

Into this paradise in the early 19th century came Spanish explorers and missionaries, looking for land and converts, and desiring to set up a bulwark against the Russians advancing down the coast from the north. The process of settlement was accelerated when Mexico gained its independence and established a mission, San Francisco Solano de Sonoma, in 1823. The mission provided food, clothing, and religious instruction, trained church "neophytes" in European crafts, and had them work in agriculture and construction. Within six years the Mission fathers had baptized some 650 tribes people and were training another 760.

The Mission regime was harsh. A minor rebellion in 1826 caused its founder, Fr. Jose Altamira, to leave the valley, and showed that the indigenous population was not fully supportive of his program. When Mexico became independent, it secularized the Mission; but the advancing European and American cultures, with their attendant diseases, overwhelmed the indigenous people. Within fifty years, they had vanished as a society, many of them dead of smallpox and measles, the rest sent north to reservations or absorbed into the new Sonoma. A memorial outside the restored Mission bears the names of the tribes people who died at this Mission.

CONTINUE

Photos courtesy Sonoma Valley Historical Society