Archaeology, Indian memories, and plodding through mission records flesh out lives of the original Californians. Archaeology, Indian memories, and plodding through mission records flesh out lives of the original Californians. (May 14, 2001)

By Marion Softky

Almanac Staff Writer

"It was paradise."

Thus Irene Zwierlein of Woodside describes the rich environment inhabited by her American Indian forebears. Now she's crusading to gain public knowledge and recognition for them.

For close to 8,000 years, Mrs. Zwierlein's ancestors subsisted on the abundant resources of coastal California. They hunted elk, deer and rabbits; caught fish in the creeks and dug shellfish from the Bay; gathered acorns, seeds and hazelnuts; and trapped the birds that often darkened the skies. "The Bay Area was paradise. There were otters swimming in the creeks," she repeats.

Almost half Indian, Mrs. Zwierlein is tribal chair for the Amah/Mutsun Tribe of Ohlone/Costanoan Indians. She is fiercely active in trying to get federal recognition for the tribe, which is centered in Gilroy. She also works to preserve Indian artifacts and bodies from bulldozers and backhoes in construction sites all over the Bay Area.

In Woodside, Mrs. Zwierlein is a member of the Historic Resources Committee. She looks forward to setting up an exhibit of artifacts dug up in Woodside in the new Community House that will open in Town Center, possibly next spring.

Mrs. Zwierlein is also one of a growing group of people who are changing public perceptions of those who shared the land before the successive onslaughts of Spanish, gold-hungry Americans, and modern technology.

As a result, local Indians no longer fade into the distant past, homogenized and rendered anonymous by the Spanish mission system. Led in part by the Indians themselves, new research has given them names and faces. Individual lives have been traced, mainly through meticulous Spanish records of baptisms, marriages and deaths. Scholars _ historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, ethnographers and linguists _ have learned far more than anyone dreamed possible 40 years ago.

"The biggest thing I've seen is the Indians' change of attitude to themselves," says non-Indian Harold Zwierlein, former Woodside town councilman. "Now they're proud to be called Indian."

On Stanford lands campus archaeologist Laura Jones digs, teaches, and researches the life of the people who occupied the Midpeninsula in the millennia before Don Gaspar de Portola first discovered San Francisco Bay in 1769.

These were not primitive people living an idyllic life in a romantic setting, Dr. Jones says. "They were as complex as we are. They solved the same kind of problems we face, but with very different tools," she explains. "They related to the environment in very different ways, and they were extremely successful."

Meanwhile, since 1976 Sylvia Vane of Menlo Park has been publishing scholarly books about Indian life in California. Her Ballena Press (named for "whale" in Spanish) has more than 30 titles, including four that focus on the Indians of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Her most unusual book may be "Inigo of Rancho Posolmi," which tells the story of a specific Indian, Lope Inigo, who bridged three cultures. He was born into a native tribe in 1781, served the Santa Clara Mission from 1789 to 1839, then acquired a land grant to the rancho that covers the present Moffett Field. There he raised crops and livestock through the Gold Rush era. He died in 1864 at the age of 83.
A simpler life

Laura Jones picks up a handful of dirt specked with white from the grassy field on Stanford's Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve and sifts it through her fingers.

Notice the dirt is dark, she tells an attentive tour group from the Stanford Linear Accelerator next door. Notice the white specks; they are shells from native oysters. And, she says triumphantly, "Oysters can't walk."

This, therefore, is the site of an old village that has never been excavated. "It's perfect. It's never been plowed or farmed," she says enthusiastically. "We're trying to bank enough archaeological sites for future investigation."

Yet without sinking a spade, Dr. Jones already knows that some 60 Neolithic hunter-gatherers lived here about 700 to 1,200 years ago. Their village probably had two rows of small tule huts with a larger sweat house and a dance house nearby. Houses were small and used primarily for storage and shelter, Dr. Jones says. Most community activities _ cooking, cleaning, tool-making _ took place outdoors.

Nearby, Bear Creek furnished water, fish, and reeds and rushes for baskets and fish traps. "For Indians, the creek was a magnet, an organizing force," says Dr. Jones.

There was also division of labor, Dr. Jones notes. Men would hunt abundant game or trap fish or make tools. Women gathered plants, carried water in waterproof baskets, wove baskets, ground seeds, bulbs, acorns and even meat in mortars _ "a sort-of Indian Cuisinart."

They cooked in baskets using rocks heated by the fire because they had no pots. "Men made tools; women sharpened them," she adds.

When the Spanish first began settling and setting up missions in the 1770s, the region between San Francisco and Monterey held between 45 and 60 independent groups of Indians speaking five to six languages, Dr. Jones says. "Every Indian in every village was multilingual."

Dr. Jones tries to explain the confusion of names used to describe Bay Area Indians. Costanoan and Ohlone both come through the Spaniards. Costanoan means coastal; Ohlone derives from the name of a tribelet near Pescadero. The local tribe around the San Francisquito Creek watershed was actually called Puichon.

Descendants of that local tribe call themselves Muwekma Ohlone, Dr. Jones continues. They are well organized and have traced the genealogy of each member back to Indians in the missions.

Continuing the tour, Dr. Jones leads a women's science group from SLAC down the creek past several more living sites. While the Ohlone didn't plant crops, they set fires to encourage new growth, and tended the plants that grew naturally, says Dr. Jones, whose own research centers on the economy and ecology of the prehistoric Ohlones. "How did they feed their families? How did they trade with neighbors?" she asks.

The Indians ate a great variety of foods, Dr. Jones says. Studies of food remains in mortars show they used dozens of foods, from seeds to rabbits. In one oven, researchers found 65 different foods. "They loved hazelnuts," she adds. "They tenderized meat."

Dr. Jones believes that, at least in later years, about 500 local Indians lived in settled villages. Maybe 200 or more lived in the largest village near where the creek empties into the Bay. Another hundred or so may have lived in permanent villages near where the Stanford Shopping Center now is, where Stanford has an 11-acre archaeological preserve between the creek and the new Stanford West apartments Also, there was always a village at Jasper Ridge.

People also moved seasonally as they followed salmon or elk or hazelnuts, Dr. Jones says, and every so often they would move an entire village. "After a while, tule houses got a little nasty. They would abandon them and move a couple of hundred yards," she says. "At any given time only one village was active on Jasper Ridge."

By and large, these Indians were fairly peaceful; they would defend their territory but seldom attacked. "There were not a lot of weapons, not a lot of injuries," Dr. Jones says. "We never found a body with arrowheads."

"The people here were not warriors," adds Mrs. Zwierlein. "Their way of keeping peace was to marry women out of the villages."

The Ohlones lived in a world where animals and birds, even rocks, had spirits. "The landscape is animated by personality," Dr. Jones says.

Some of these beliefs are reflected in taboos. Indians wouldn't eat frogs, coyotes, mountain lions or owls, Dr. Jones notes.

"Owls mean death," adds Mrs. Zwierlein. "Some people even believe that now," she says, recalling an aunt who would say someone was going to die every time she heard an owl call.

Mrs. Zwierlein notes some of the other powers associated with animals. Hummingbirds were brains; the eagle was strength; and the coyote was prankster.

Dr. Jones points to Rattlesnake Rock, where strange rock formations stand out of Jasper Ridge above SLAC. This was a sacred place, she surmises, because there are tiny mortar holes in the rocks that were suitable only for grinding medicines and pigments _ which are used in rituals. "You can see Mt. Diablo, which is the center of the Earth for the Ohlones," she says. "It's an Ohlone power spot."

Dr. Jones has great respect for the Ohlone people, who represent a level of society that all cultures have gone through. "This is an important kind of human organization," she concludes. "It's not backward or primitive; it's extremely effective _ and low-impact."
Inigo: a life

With the Spanish missions came the disintegration of the indigenous culture.

At first, the natives must have been impressed by the power, pomp and ritual of the invaders. They began to bring their children, and later themselves to be baptized, perhaps not realizing that once baptized, that child belonged to the mission.

For the Spanish, of course, the Indians were heathen souls to be converted, and free labor to build the missions and work the land. As European diseases killed nearby, convenient Indians, the Spanish went farther and farther away to enlist new souls and free labor.

The grim process is described in a title from Ballena Press, "A Time of Little Choice: The Disintegration of Tribal Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area 1769-1810," by Randall Milliken.

Dr. Jones states bluntly, "The missions enslaved the Indians. They were captured and forced to work; they were whipped and starved if they didn't."

The mission fathers were, however, meticulous in recording baptisms, marriages and deaths, so scholars can now determine the structure of lives, if not their content.

The book, "Inigo of Rancho Posolmi," recounts one such life, which spanned 83 years and two huge transitions _ from native to Spanish, and from Spanish to American. While the book gives facts about Lope Inigo and the cultures he survived _even thrived in _ his personal life can only be inferred.

Lope Inigo was born in 1781 in a native village just a few miles from the new Mission Santa Clara, founded just four years before. As he was learning tribal ways, the mission was introducing new technologies. Agriculture and livestock produced abundance that must have seemed miraculous to local people who subsisted by hunting and gathering.

The 8-year-old boy _ his native name is not known _ was baptized Lope Inigo (#1501) on December 26, 1789, along with five other children from the area. Two sisters were baptized the same year, and his parents, five years later.

Inigo spent most of the next 50 years in the mission. He was apparently cooperative, and rose to be an alcalde, a leader among the mission Indians. He and his wife, Viviana, had 11 children; three survived. Viviana died in 1828; she was 46.

By 1839 Inigo had "obtained his liberty" from Mission Santa Clara and was squatting on a portion of what was later to become his land grant at what is now Moffett Field.

The next 25 years were spent in trying to obtain and defend his land grant. Of the 3,042 acres he applied for, 1,696 acres were eventually confirmed by the U.S. government.

With another family, Inigo built some houses, raised livestock and field crops. As the Gold Rush brought fortune hunters and adventurers, he tried to fend off squatters.

In a tantalizing glimpse of his personal life, a newspaper story by Mrs. Fremont Older tells of a duel with an old friend, Marcello, over Marcello's fourth wife. By the end of the fight, Inigo lost an ear and had a swelling on his head that showed up in his pictures.

Inigo died, old and respected, on February 28, 1864 _ just a month after the railroad, which could travel 40 miles an hour, arrived in Mountain View and San Jose.
For more information

Information on Stanford courses and archaeology studies can be obtained by writing Campus Archaeologist Laura Jones, Archaeology Program, Building 60, Stanford, CA 94305; or e-mailing her at ljones@leland.stanford.edu.

For information on handling archaeological remains, particularly in Woodside, or researching Indian archives, call Irene Zwierlein at 851-7747.

Ballena Press has published four titles on Bay Area Ohlones: "Inigo of Rancho Posolmi" by Laurence H. Shoup and Randall T. Milliken, 1999; "The Ohlone: Past and Present" by Lowell John Bean, 1994; "A Time of Little Choice" by Randall Milliken, 1995; and "The Costanoan/Ohlone Indians of the San Francisco and Monterey Bay Area: A Research Guide" by Lauren S. Teixeira.

Ballena Press Publisher Services can be reached at P.O. Box 2510, Novato, CA 94948; or contact 415-883-3530 (phone), or 415-883-4280 (fax).