Before the city had its name

Begin with a map of San Francisco and temporarily remove the street grid. Keep the hills, the ocean to the west, the Bay to the east and the narrow passage of the Golden Gate to the north. Now imagine asking where water, shelter, food and routes of movement could be found. The map begins to organize itself around different features.

This is an exercise in historical attention, not an invitation to invent a scene from an Indigenous person's life. Long before the institutions called San Francisco existed, people inhabited and understood this peninsula. A history that begins only with the arrival of European expeditions mistakes the beginning of one archive for the beginning of a place's human life.

The first chapter establishes who lived here, how different kinds of evidence help us understand that life, and why present-day Indigenous people belong within the city's history. It also introduces the course's guiding question: how did successive groups change the terms on which people could inhabit, use and claim this land?

Names describe relationships at different scales

The Association of Ramaytush Ohlone identifies the Yelamu as the original people of the area now largely encompassed by San Francisco County, an independent tribe within the Ramaytush peoples of the peninsula. “Ohlone” is a broader term; it should not turn distinct communities into a single interchangeable group. The association's account also distinguishes historical Yelamu identity from the Ramaytush lineages that survive today. Association of Ramaytush Ohlone: Original Peoples.

These distinctions matter because a modern city boundary, a language relationship and a political community are different things. A useful map can show approximate territories without implying that every person within a broad cultural region belonged to one government or shared every practice.

Across the Golden Gate, Coast Miwok histories become central. Across the wider Bay and farther south, other Ohlone communities have their own histories. The water connected communities, but connection did not erase difference. Learning a few accurate distinctions is more valuable than memorizing a list of names while continuing to speak of one undifferentiated population.

Use present-day organizations' own accounts carefully and attribute specific claims. Acknowledging Indigenous presence should increase precision rather than excuse vagueness. The aim is to understand actual peoples, histories and relationships, not to use a ceremonial name before returning to a narrative in which they disappear.

A peninsula made of connected habitats

The northern peninsula offered several environments close together: open coast, sheltered Bay shore, dunes, freshwater sources, grasslands and scrub. Those differences affected where useful plants and animals could be found and when particular places were valuable.

National Park Service accounts describe seasonal movement among village sites, including places represented today by the Presidio and the Mission area. The Crissy Field interpretation identifies Petlenuc, Chutchui and other Yelamu sites on a map of the peninsula around the time Spanish colonization began. The map makes habitation visible as a network rather than a single settlement waiting to become a city. NPS: Home of the Yelamu.

Seasonal movement should not be confused with aimless wandering. Returning to places when resources are available depends on knowledge of the place, the season and the work required. A route can be stable and meaningful even when it does not resemble a modern permanent address.

The landscape also contained risks, effort and changing conditions. Describing a rich environment does not establish that life was effortless or that every year supplied the same abundance. A responsible reconstruction explains how people used knowledge and social organization to live within an environment, rather than treating nature as a pantry that required no work.

The Bay was a route as well as an edge

For someone accustomed to roads and bridges, the Bay can appear chiefly as an obstacle between destinations. Indigenous maritime history changes that perspective. Tule watercraft allowed people to travel and obtain resources in bayshore and estuarine environments. Materials from wetlands became part of the technology through which those environments could be used. NPS: First Peoples.

A boat is therefore evidence of several connected capacities: knowing a suitable plant, obtaining and preparing it, constructing a buoyant form and understanding the water in which it will operate. Calling the material simple does not make the knowledge simple. Technologies should be assessed in relation to the task and environment they serve.

The same reasoning applies to baskets and shelters. Plant materials can carry food, hold possessions and form structures. Their usefulness depends on selection and skilled preparation. A history organized only around durable stone buildings would overlook much of this work because many organic materials survive poorly in the archaeological record.

We should not infer exact journeys or personal experiences from the existence of a boat type alone. The important point here is the regional orientation: shorelines were places of movement and work, and the Bay belonged within human geography long before ferries, cargo ships and bridges transformed it again.

What a shell deposit can tell us

At Crissy Field, archaeological evidence includes remains of shellfish, fish, birds and mammals associated with earlier occupation. The NPS interpretation explains how artifacts, deposits and dating methods help reconstruct use of the site. It also records that the marsh restoration design was changed to preserve a discovered cultural site in consultation with Ohlone participants. NPS: Heritage of a Bayshore Culture.

A deposit is evidence because its contents, position and relation to other material can answer questions. Shells may help identify resources used. A worked stone object can indicate manufacture or use. Layers can show a sequence. None of these observations automatically supplies the whole social meaning of the place.

For example, finding several kinds of animal remains does not by itself tell us how often each was eaten or whether every animal was obtained nearby. Material can be transported, reused or deposited through different processes. An interpretation becomes stronger when several kinds of evidence support the same account and alternative explanations are examined.

This is also why removing an object from its context can destroy information even when the object remains intact. Its relationship to other materials may be part of what makes it historically intelligible. In this course, observation and existing interpretation are sufficient; learning does not require collecting artifacts or disturbing a site.

People also shaped the landscape

NPS historical accounts describe periodic burning by Ohlone and Coast Miwok peoples to encourage useful plants and forage for animals. This complicates a familiar contrast between untouched nature and a landscape altered only after European arrival. Human practices were already part of regional ecological history. NPS: Ohlones and Coast Miwoks.

The claim should remain specific. Different communities and places had different practices, and a general account does not establish the exact treatment of every hillside. Nor does it imply that any modern fire anywhere reproduces an Indigenous practice. Purpose, timing, conditions and knowledge matter.

The historical significance is that land use need not take the form of buildings, plowed fields or surveyed property lines to be active and organized. A colonial observer looking only for familiar forms of agriculture could fail to recognize the work through which a landscape was maintained.

That failure of recognition can have consequences. If a place is described as unused because its use does not fit the observer's categories, later occupation can be narrated as improvement without acknowledging displacement. The course will repeatedly ask how descriptions of land support claims about who should control it.

Colonial records preserve information through an unequal encounter

Mission baptism registers record names, family relationships and dates that historians use to reconstruct parts of Indigenous history. They also record incorporation into an institution that sought to transform religious practice, labor and community life. The existence of a record is not evidence that the circumstances producing it were freely chosen or harmless.

The Spanish establishment of Mission Dolores and the Presidio in 1776 began a new institutional order on the peninsula. Disease, coercive labor and disrupted living conditions caused catastrophic harm to Indigenous communities. Historian Jonathan Cordero's account, published by the NPS, connects missionization with demographic destruction and the later dispersal associated with secularization. Cordero: Impact of Spanish Colonization.

We will examine those institutions more closely in the next chapter. For now, notice the evidential problem: a source can be indispensable and deeply shaped by the power of the institution that created it. Reading it critically means asking what it was designed to record, what it omitted and how its categories changed the people it described.

It would be equally mistaken to discard every colonial record because of that history or to treat it as a transparent voice of the people entered within it. The work lies in comparison: records, archaeology, community histories and other evidence can illuminate different parts of an experience none preserves completely.

Survival belongs to the present tense

Accounts of devastating population loss can slip into a story in which Indigenous people exist only in the past. Contemporary Ramaytush and other Ohlone people challenge that disappearance through cultural work, historical research and efforts concerning ancestral land. The Association of Ramaytush Ohlone describes return to land as part of cultural and political renewal. Association of Ramaytush Ohlone: Our Vision.

This present activity does not erase the scale of historical loss. It shows why loss and survival must be held together rather than arranged as mutually exclusive conclusions. A lineage, practice or community can survive profound disruption without making the disruption less serious.

The Crissy Field restoration offers a concrete example of history entering a modern decision. Preserving archaeological evidence was not simply a matter of recovering objects for a display. It affected how a restored landscape would be designed and how cultural significance would be recognized alongside ecological goals.

That connection will recur throughout the course. Historical knowledge changes what a present place is understood to contain and whom a decision should involve. A park, building or street is never only the physical object visible at one moment; it also belongs to relationships and histories whose consequences remain active.

A different starting point for the city's history

We can now look again at the map. The future city occupies an inhabited peninsula with named communities, routes, technologies and practices. The Bay is a working environment. Material traces and living accounts provide evidence, while the limits of the surviving record require care.

This starting point changes the meaning of the next chapter. The arrival of a mission and a military garrison is not the creation of human history from emptiness. It is the establishment of new institutions that reorganize an existing world. To understand San Francisco, we need to examine how that reorganization worked, what it enabled and what it destroyed.

Application

A guide says, “San Francisco's history began when the Spanish discovered the Bay.” Rewrite the claim so that it identifies the event accurately without making earlier inhabitants disappear. Then explain what an archaeological deposit and a mission register can each contribute to an account of the peninsula.

An explained answer: The Spanish expedition's encounter with the Bay belongs to the history of European exploration and colonization, not the beginning of local human history. A deposit can reveal material practices and occupation through context and analysis. A mission register can preserve names and relationships while reflecting the institution's categories and unequal power. Neither source alone provides a complete account of a community's life.

Map exercise: Find the peninsula, Golden Gate, Bay shore and Pacific shore on a map. Identify how a change of shoreline or the disappearance of a freshwater source could alter your reading of an earlier settlement. Separate what the modern map shows from what would require historical evidence.