What was California like Before Fire Suppression? Part One
The first in a series of ten
Examine the pictures below. One was taken in 1901, the other in 2020. What do you notice? Tell me in the comments.
California is burning right now, and everyone is talking about the Dixie and Caldor Fires, which has been burning for over a month in California. Over a decade ago (oh gosh, over fifteen years ago), I was on a fire in California called the McNally Fire. We did one 21 day roll, went home, and then came back and worked another fourteen days. It was hell, it was beautiful, and it was tedious. We all got sick on the second roll, and August neared September. The mornings were cold and soaked in dew.
I am sending my love to all the firefighters and personnel out there, on all the fires. Many are paid much less than they deserve to be. Many wildland firefighters are designated as forest technicians rather than full firefighters and work with few benefits. They deserve more.
This is a ten-part series on the western United States before fire suppression.
What do you think of when you picture California forests and brushlands? What does your mind conjure? Is it the scrubby chaparral of Southwest California or the pockets of gargantuan Redwoods along its northern coast? Or maybe you picture the overcrowded pine forests of Tahoe, or the expansive and barren Salton Sea, or the overcrowded forests of the Klamath Valley. No matter what you are picturing, you’re picturing land that has been altered by colonialism, by the Europeans that arrived first from the south (the Spanish) and then overland, drawn by the prospect of land, freedom, and gold.
It may be difficult to fathom, but the volatile and terrible fires of today are a direct result of the ignorance of my own (and perhaps your own) ancestors. Mine came to Oregon on the Oregon Trail. They were Christians. They brought European farming techniques from Germany and Ireland, techniques that had never been applied to the land of the western United States. Like the Spanish, they neglected to see the Indigenous Americans with whom they interacted as fully human, nor were they curious as to why the land they had found was so Edenic, so, as many poets and writers said, pristine, untouched. Wild (uninhabited, uncultivated, or inhospitable).
The land was not wild, though, and neither were the Indigenous people they came into contact with. In California it’s estimated that there were 300,000 Indigenous Californians before the arrival of the Spanish, with as many as 135 distinctive dialects. These tribes were fantastically diverse and, for the most part, coexisted peacefully, separated by the topography of California and adapted to the specific ecosystems in which they resided.
In the Northwest there were (and still are) the Yurok, Hupa, Karuk, Wiyot, and Tolowa (amongst many others). Back then, they lived primarily in rainforest habitat, though now this area sees a dearth of volatile wildfires every summer (which wasn’t typical for them before fire suppression). Many tribes relied on dugout canoes for navigating the wetlands, and practiced a lineage-based leadership system with complicated rules of land ownership.
In the Northeast there were (and still are) Atsugewi, Modoc, and Achumawi tribes, which spanned two distinct ecological types— the salmon and acorn rich western region and high desert grasslands eastern plateau. There, tribes hunted game and harvested tubers.
“Take care of nature and it will take care of you.” —Willard Rhoades, Pit River
Central California is one of the most diverse ecosystems in the United States, and its abundance and diversity of Indigenous people reflects that. From the Esselen, Interior Miwok, Coast Miwok, Yokut, Wappo, Yana, Wintun, and Maidu, these tribes are diverse and had differing relationships with the land. The Pomo created (and create) sophisticated baskets, which require very detailed and complex agricultural practices (including fire). (Note that the Washoe are the original inhabitants of Tahoe, where the Caldor fire is burning towards right now).
The Southern California Indigenous people were the first to come into contact with colonists. In 1542, Juan Cabrillo, upon seeing smoke from his ship off the coast of Southern California, happened upon the Tongva people, though he didn’t dock his ship, only noted it in his journals. The Tongva, which he promptly renamed “Gabrielino”, were burning chaparral. Cabrillo noted that the area’s dense population.
Though the Europeans at this time passed by ship and didn’t attempt to port in California, it was the beginning of a vast introduction of invasive species to the west. Birds spread them from ship to land. Over the next few hundred years, thousands of invasive species would be introduced to the western United States, which, like the rest of the U.S., had long thrived under the care of Indigenous Americans.
Nearly a hundred and fifty years after Cabrillo saw the Tongva, the Spanish began colonizing Southern California. Their giant missions were largely built by forced Indigenous labor, and Indigenous peoples were treated as expendable. They were enslaved, separated from their cultures, raped, and killed both by sickness and at the hands of their colonizers.
The one commonality that bound nearly all Indigenous Californians before the arrival of Europeans was their use of fire. The Tongva, living on land that is now occupied by Los Angeles, regularly burned their chaparral, promoting healthy regeneration. Many of the plant components of chaparral, like so many species throughout the west, are fire dependent. Their seeds germinate in high heat, and their root burls naturally regrow new shrubs after fires.
“For many tribes of California, chaparral plant communities were a rich source of food, medicines, and materials for baskets, ceremonial items, clothing, living structures, tools, and other items of technology. Exploiting these resources over long periods of time, the Indigenous Californians who lived in and near chaparral zones learned through observation, trial-and-error experimentation, and accidental discovery that many of the chaparral-based resources they found could be sustained by judicious harvest methods and enhanced, in quality or quantity, by certain kinds of manipulation…These management techniques were all important, but by far the most consequential was the use of fire. Done properly, burning areas of chaparral could yield multiple and long-lasting beneficial effects by creating diverse landscape mosaics of chaparral and herbaceous communities. Tribes discovered that if you burned the chaparral at the right time of the year and at the right frequency, you could simultaneously open up the habitat for ease of movement and hunting, increase its ability to support deer and small mammals, increase the productivity of the plants used for food and medicine, encourage shrubs to produce shoots ideal for basketry, and reduct the vulnerability of villages to out-of-control, lighting-ignited summer wildfires.” — M. Kat Anderson and Jon E. Keeley
I’m not sure what the Tongva people called Chaparral— its name is Spanish, named for its similarities to chaparro, a Spanish scrub oak ecosystem. The Spanish invented chaps so they could ride their horses through the thick brush. Their horses and their cattle were as destructive to the ecosystems they invaded as they were to Indigenous Californians. Hooves trampled delicate soil, pummeling it until it was so tightly packed that it couldn’t absorb water when it rained, and no longer sustained plant life.
Chaparral had adapted to coexist with Indigenous Californians— their relationship was one of symbiosis. They provided for each other. With the arrival of the Spanish, who only took advantage of that relationship when they were in dire straits (and often saved by Indigenous Californians), interrupted this, and the environmental cost has been severe.
What is Southern California in its current state? Freeways and concrete and pockets of dense brush that burns violently, threatening homes and businesses and sometimes decimating them. I remember stomping around in the Angeles, Mojave, San Bernardino and Los Padres forests and deserts, filled with wretched poison oak. Sometimes my crew and I would happen upon what felt like treasured ground, an untouched spot covered in golden leaf litter, sunlight filtering down through the gnarled branches of oak trees or chaparral, the dust raised by our boots tinged yellow.
But for the most part, when we fought fires in So.Cal (I worked on Del Rosa Hotshots, out of San Bernardino), all our saws worked and all the tools swamped, which meant that we cut holes in the dense brush with the noses of our saws until there was enough room to scrape a line in the dirt, and we shoved the brush into holes in the brush, which sounds impossible, but that’s what we did. I remember constantly being poked with whitethorn and sometimes grabbing chest-fulls of poison oak, knowing I wouldn’t be able to change my clothes for maybe two weeks.
The Southern California where I fought fire wasn’t the Southern California of the 1697, when the Spanish first arrived. That Southern California consisted of lush, diverse mosaics of chaparral composed of many diverse species, along with coastal scrub and grasslands, thrived in microclimates created by the dense topographical features of Southern California as well as the purposeful burning of Indigenous Californians. Fog crept into valleys and sun shone on northern slopes of mountains and hills, while southern slopes stayed green.
Mosaics are key to a healthy ecosystem, along with heterogeneity. Many Southern California tribes encouraged a diverse landscape through interval burning, which means burning certain landscapes at certain times. Burning was (and is) sacred, and a familial and community act.
“The white man sure ruined this country,” said James Rust, a Southern Miwok elder. “It’s turned back into wilderness.”1
In Southern California (and most of California) this burning was executed consistently and carefully. Fires were most often small, and burning was a tribal event. Villages were preemptively protected from fire by tribes, with land cleared and burned regularly to prevent consumption by naturally (usually lighting) caused fires. This periodic burning created the perfect environment for wildflowers, many of which, in fire ecology, are dubbed “fire followers.” Many naturalists arriving in California noted the presence of flowers throughout the state, and were awed by them, but few connected the presence of flowers and the near-constant burning executed by Indigenous Californians.
As a whole, Southern California was much less forested upon the arrival of Europeans than it is now. I grew up prioritizing trees and thinking that forests were the main driver of a healthy planet, but after studying land use and care pre-European arrival in the United States, I have been convinced otherwise. The Southern California of the past, before settlement by Europeans, was mostly native grasslands. Primarily the mountains were treed, and fires were set often in the pines in order to flush out game and encourage the growth of specific plants. Trees were larger and more sparse.
This absence of abundant trees likely resulted in heartier water sources, because trees consume an excessive amount of water. Meadows and grasslands support ponds and streams. This was California before any dams were built, when rivers and streams were free-flowing and allowed to follow their natural paths. In addition, grasslands provide a better carbon sink than treed forests. Forests, when they burn severely, release stored carbon into the atmosphere. Grasslands release much less, because the majority of their stored carbon resides underground.
Juan Crespi, a Franciscan exploring California in the 1700’s, noted that many Southern California regions, specifically near the coast, were treeless and “short of firewood,” but was “good land covered with grass and well supplied with water but without trees.”2
This could very well be an answer to one of the questions being pondered about “forest maintenance” and “clearing forests,” as well as a counterpoint to the idea that planting more trees is the solution to climate change.
This will be continued next week (for paid subscribers only), as I move into Central and Northern California. By becoming a paid subscriber you support my work and gain access to all parts of this series.
If you have resources, thoughts, or corrections, please reply and I will respond. Also, please share this with others if you’ve found it useful, and if you use any of this newsletter for your own work, please cite me.
m. Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild. University of California Press, 2005.
Stewart, Omer C., Forgotten Fires, University of Oklahoma Press
Super response. Will check out your concerns. Thanks.
Shared this in my newsletter Eulipion Outpost at jeanvengua.substack.com Really interesting and much needed.