The Presence of the Past
Moving northward from the inlets, and from the lagoons and the estuaries of the bay, a gentle mountain range had long ago risen itself to rest along the western edge of the savanna. Occasional stands of valley oak were grouped haphazardly like small herds of grazing animals across the valley floor towards the hills in the east. This was the watershed of what later came to be known as Sonoma Valley; yet long before man was here, life was here. The broad blue skies, the lush deep green forests of redwood and Douglas fir along the flanks of the low rolling mountain range, and the grand golden stretch of wild grasses that bent with the wind in waves across the broad floor of the valley toward the distant eastern hills astonished those first Europeans when they at last arrived in our valley, almost two hundred years ago.
Father Altimira had been sent by the Church to establish yet one more mission in the great chain of missions being strung northward along the Camino Real toward the menacing Russian presence at Fort Ross. When he entered the valley Altimira felt he had come to Eden, and wrote passionately, eagerly, in his journals about the great wealth of flora and fauna that he saw, the large herds of trusting native animals, and the great stands of noble trees waiting to be put to use.
The little mission was established in 1823, and land was cleared and prepared for crops to be planted and harvested. For ten years the pueblo of Sonoma grew steadily at the foot of the Mayacamas range, at the edge of the plain, several miles upstream from the marshlands of the bay. In time the heroics of discovery and establishment began to give way to the changing politics of a burgeoning pioneer society. No longer supported by a distant Moscow, the Russians were leaving California; and in 1834 young General Mariano Vallejo was sent from the Presidio to oversee the closing of the missions, and the settling of the Valley by adventurers from far across the mountains and plains to the east.
Stories have been told about the origin of the name Sonoma. General Vallejo popularized the legend that, in the Suisun language of the people that lived nearby, the name describes the way the moon appears to rise as many as seven times over the jagged peaks of the Mayacamas Mountains to the east, as one travels along. It was probably from this legend that the place became known eventually, with the help of Jack London, as the Valley of the Moon. Like a mischievous offspring, Vallejo's son Platon told a different Suisun meaning of the word “sonoma”: that it meant “big nose”, and referred to a local chief who was born with that remarkably distinguishing feature.
But the Suisuns were only neighbors to the east of the Miwok; and before the Miwok came into this valley some three thousand years ago, the Wappo had already been here some 10,000 years. In the language of the Wappo “sonoma” was a generic term for any village; the last fluent speaker of Wappo had said that it referred to the valley as an “abandoned camping place”. Indeed, much of what has been here has now long gone on. Ninety percent of the native people died of smallpox by 1820; the remainder were attached to the mission. The last elk in the valley was killed in 1850, and in 1852 the last grizzlies died— a mother and her cub. By 1865 the last pronghorn antelope was gone.
Soon after the mountainside was deeded to him by Lazero Peña on December 4th in 1839 General Vallejo built a lumbermill, with a waterwheel that was powered by an overshot flume at the confluence of Asbury and Sonoma Creeks, six miles up the valley from town. By the end of the century, the entire mountain range was fairly completely harvested, although stands of second-growth redwood can still be found in places.
A deed for the mill and the surrounding acreage from Vallejo to Joshua Chauvet is dated June 1, 1861, although it seems Chauvet had arrived in the valley as early as 1853. Some say he took possession of the mill in 1856; perhaps the transfer was not entered legally until 1861. I have read that Chauvet had first arrived in San Francisco in 1850 by ship from Le Havre, and quickly went to the goldfields of Mokelumne Hill, where he briefly operated a bakery. He wandered around a bit after that, carrying with him— wherever he went— the precious millstones he had brought with him from France. When he took over the lumbermill he sent for his father, François, who had remained behind in France, and began the work of converting his lumbermill into a gristmill. The stones he had brought with him may still be seen standing outside the mill.
There is a very early photograph of the mill, and though it looks quite different and the surrounding landscape seems confusingly changed, it is the same building, at a far different time. The landscape of the world has been changed by the gradual erosion of time since that photograph was taken. As I start putting the fragments of history together, a picture of how Jack London Village came to be what it is today is just beginning to take shape. In future issues of The Tower I will set down the stories that I find contained in the buildings there— an accumulation of stories that give the place, for me, its meaning.
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This article previously appeared in The Tower Summer 2004.