The Los Gatos, Monte Sereno and Saratoga communities are made up of people who trace their backgrounds to all four corners of the globe, many of whom work in the high-tech, fast-paced economy of Silicon Valley. The residents call this corner of the Valley on the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains their home and choose to do so because it is a place where the beauty of California is still alive and well.

Sometimes when hiking under the redwoods or along a creekbed, local residents might spy an unusually shaped stone that perhaps looks like a tool--or maybe they will see an arrowhead lying in the dirt, or an old charm stone in the brush alongside a dusty trail.

Back before the freeways, the suburban homes and the modern skyline of San Jose, the Valley was a much different place. A people with a lifestyle much different than our own lived and thrived here.

Before the orchards that longtime Valley residents remember from their youth, back before California became a state, and further back in time before the chain of Spanish missions stretched the length of the coast, there were people who lived here for thousands of years in what today we call Los Gatos, Saratoga and Monte Sereno.

Those people were the Ohlone, members of a Native American nation who spoke eight different languages and lived in villages spread across the Bay Area and down to the Carmel Valley. The artifacts the Ohlone have left behind often turn up whenever a construction project gets under way, or when a keen-eyed hiker spots something interesting in the dirt or by the rocks in a creek.

Ohlone artifacts are physical reminders of a people who lived in Silicon Valley when herds of elk roamed the Valley floor and thousand-pound grizzlies feasted on salmon in the creeks--when waterfowl were so numerous their flocks blackened the sky.

Archaeological finds

Bill Wulf was born in San Jose in 1939. The Southern Pacific Railroad went by his childhood home, sparking his interest in trains. He studied the history of the railroads, which led to learning the history of the local area.

"History has been a lifelong hobby," he said.

Wulf moved to Los Gatos in 1948. "Everything was beautiful then," he said. "The town was quiet."

In the late 1960s, Wulf was walking along Blossom Hill Road in Los Gatos and stopped to examine some stones at a construction site. "I saw this one rock that looked sort of suspicious," he said. "It turned out to be a pestle. It's an elongated egg-shaped rock 7 1/2 inches long and 3 inches wide."

Pestles were used by the Ohlone to pound acorns, seeds and nuts on large stone mortars. "It's a gray color," he said. "At the bottom, it's burned as if it had been in a fire. It has an intrinsic value to me. It's part of our local history."

The Saratoga History Museum has a collection of mortars and pestles found by Saratogans over the years. Arrowheads and mysterious charm stones are also on display.

About 30 years ago, Saratogan Frank Dutro discovered many of the objects in the museum's display of Ohlone artifacts. "When Frank was a teenager, he was picking up artifacts in the big vacant lot behind his house," April Halberstadt, the curator of the museum, said. "An archaeologist just went nuts when he saw what Frank had."

Archaeologists conducted a dig at a construction site in Saratoga and found evidence that large numbers of Ohlone, perhaps numbering in the thousands, lived in the area before the Spanish arrived.

"They had areas where they would gather and work on things," Halberstadt said. She said that most of the Ohlone artifacts on display at the Saratoga History Museum were probably from an Ohlone work site. "They find that in our area they built fairly substantial structures."

Pat Dunning taught anthropology at San José State University and today volunteers at the History Museum of Los Gatos. She said that Ohlone mortars and pestles are commonly found in the area, but also abalone pendants, shell beads and charm stones. The charm stones are round with one pointed end and are small enough to be held in one hand. "Nobody is quite sure what they were used for but everyone calls them charm stones," she said.

Early history

Theories on where Native Americans came from are many. The most commonly accepted theory is that the first Native Americans migrated across the Bering Strait from Siberia during the last Ice Age more than 10,000 years ago. With much of the earth's water locked up in glacial ice, sea levels were lower and Asia was connected to Alaska by a land bridge.

Those first people crossed the land bridge following herds of Ice Age megafauna. They entered a continent populated by mammoth, mastodon, the Ice Age camel, bison and the giant sloth. Carnivorous short-faced bears, double the size of today's grizzlies, and saber-tooth cats, with teeth as long as steak knives, hunted the giant herbivores of the era.

Archaeological evidence suggests those first people quickly spread across the continent and down through South America to Tierra del Fuego. Shortly after the arrival of humans, most of the megafauna in the Americas had gone extinct.

In the Bay Area, some archaeological sites have been radiocarbon-dated to more than 9,000 years ago.

It is estimated that the Ohlone people moved into the local area around 2,000 years before the Spanish established settlements here. The Spanish called the people they found the Costeño, or the coastal people. The Americans called them the Costanoans. Today, the descendants of the area's native population have chosen to call themselves the Ohlone--a word of uncertain origin.

Pre-Spanish

Before the arrival of the Spanish, the Bay Area was much different than it is today. Redwoods and Douglas firs that covered the Santa Cruz Mountains grew down to the Valley floor. Native grasses remained a verdant green even in the heat of summer. The creeks teemed with trout and salmon. Wetland areas were much more extensive and were populated by millions of waterfowl.

The Valley was home to a much more diverse population of wildlife, including herds of elk, antelope and deer. Mountain lions and grizzly bears were top predators. Black bears, badgers and bobcats also prowled the forests and grasslands.

The Santa Clara Valley was a rich ecosystem that enabled the Ohlone to live in villages as hunters and gatherers without a need for agriculture. Hunting, fishing, acorns, nuts and a variety of grasses and plant life supplied them with plenty to eat.

"The Santa Clara Valley was like the Garden of Eden," Wulf said.

"It was a fantastic place with oak trees and lush grasses they collected to eat," Dunning said. "They fished. They hunted. They gathered plant food. Descriptions by Europeans very soon after the missions were established described skies teeming with birds and the area full of game. Agriculture was never established because it took less energy to gather acorns, fish, and hunt game than it would to raise crops. It wasn't that they didn't know how to do it; it just wasn't cost efficient."

Alan Leventhal, the information laboratory technician for the social sciences department at San José State University and an anthropologist and archaeologist, is an expert on the Ohlone, and an advocate for the Muwekma Ohlone that lived in San Francisco, Fremont and San Jose. He said there was one crop the Ohlone grew--tobacco. They grew it in plots near their villages.

"They didn't despoil the land," Wulf said. "They did burn the forest every two or three years. It made it easier to travel and gather nuts from the trees."

"They were range managers," Leventhal said. "This was a great fishing society." He said enormous runs of salmon and trout were fished in the Los Gatos Creek and the Guadalupe River. "Because they were year-round streams, they had fish year round."

Estimates of the total population of the Ohlone people before the arrival of the Spanish vary from about 7,000 to 10,000 people. They lived in dispersed villages spread across the region.

"Each of these villages had a nobility that we call elites," Leventhal said. "The village elites would marry elites from other groups. The purpose of that was for military and economic alliances. These tribes have been described by anthropologists as ranked chiefdoms with a stratified social hierarchy."

The Ohlone traveled and traded with each other, but the different tribes spoke up to eight different languages. "They were divided by languages," Wulf said. "A native person in San Jose couldn't talk to someone in Santa Cruz because the language wasn't the same."

"Independent tribal groups spoke [several closely] related languages," Leventhal said. "They were related languages but not necessarily related cultures."

Because of its creek and the pass through the Santa Cruz Mountains where Highway 17 is today, the Los Gatos area was a particularly desirable area for the Ohlone. It was on a transportation route to the ocean and was an excellent location for fishing.

The Ohlone produced artwork and intricate basketry. They kept black bears as pets and cultivated their plots of tobacco. They traded, fished and hunted. Shaman, called grizzly bear doctors, invoked the fear of the grizzly as they acted as police officers in the villages.

"They avoided grizzlies and wouldn't talk of them for fear that grizzlies would visit them," Leventhal said.

They thrived in the area for centuries until the arrival of a foreign invader that drastically changed their way of life and the land itself.

The Spanish

During the second half of the 18th century, the Spanish began moving up from Mexico into California. They came first on military expeditions as explorers.

"You were either distinguished guests invited to the village to be feasted, or you were the enemy," Leventhal said. "Enemies were predefined, meaning these are people we know have hurt our people." Leventhal explained that the Ohlone first greeted the Spanish by welcoming them as powerful and distinguished guests.

The Spanish named the people of the area the Costeños, which means coastal people, and is pronounced Costanoan in English. Costanoan is used today primarily as a linguistic term that describes the Ohlone language family.

Soon after the arrival of the explorers, Spanish padres began moving into the area. The padres began setting up missions throughout Ohlone territory.

The Spanish brought new technology. Their iron tools, new foods, horses, livestock and a new religion were impressive to the Ohlone. Hardy grasses from the Old World replaced the indigenous plant life. Hunters on horseback armed with guns quickly decimated populations of game.

A rapid change in the ecology and the introduction of agriculture caused the collapse of the Ohlone hunter and gatherer economy.

The Spanish also brought Old World diseases. Outbreaks of disease were particularly devastating to the Ohlone population.

"In the area of Los Gatos and Saratoga, there were two groups that came under the influence of Mission Santa Clara and also Mission Santa Cruz," Leventhal said. "The one toward the Los Gatos region was called Somontac. They would probably have had multiple villages in the area. The people over by Saratoga, which would have been up in the foothills, were called Partacsi. The name may have been of the chief. They went into both missions in Santa Clara and Santa Cruz."

"The missions were pretty thorough in pulling people out of the local area and into the missions," Dunning said. "My feeling is that most of the people who lived in Saratoga and Los Gatos were gone by 1800. There were probably small pockets of people but the villages were basically abandoned."

Starvation caused by the collapse of the ecology and their economies, warfare and a multitude of diseases left the Ohlone population a shadow of what it had been before the arrival of the Spanish.

The Spanish baptized the Ohlone and gave them Spanish names. The Ohlone intermarried with the Spanish, with Mexicans and with other Indian tribes. With their population diminished and their way of life ended, tracing the history and heritage of the Ohlone is today a difficult task often involving the painstaking examination of old mission records.

When the mission lands were secularized and were given out to settlers as large land holdings, called ranchos, the Ohlone left the missions but were unable to go back to their old way of life. Many became ranch hands and farm workers.

By the time U.S. settlers began arriving from the East in great numbers in 1848 at the start of the Gold Rush, very few Ohlone were left. Discrimination by the new arrivals made few Ohlone admit to their heritage.

By the start of the 20th century, it became commonly accepted that the Ohlone as a people had gone extinct.

The present

The Ohlone did not go extinct. They remained in the Bay Area as they always have. Many joined the military, serving in America's conflicts from World War I and World War II up to the present day.

Although not officially recognized by the federal government, the different Ohlone tribes are preserving their heritage and remain active in educating the public and protecting their archaeological sites.

Some groups have elected tribal councils to represent them. Some are seeking federal recognition, which would give them tax breaks and land rights.

Jakki Kehl, who lives in Patterson, traces her heritage to the Mutsun Ohlone through baptismal records at the Mission San Juan Bautista.

What does it mean to her to be of Ohlone heritage in this day and age?

"It means great responsibility," she said. Kehl spends much of her time working to protect Ohlone items found at construction sites. She volunteers with archaeologists to monitor development in an attempt to protect the villages and burial sites of her ancestors.

"We can't stop it," she said of development. "We don't have the legal grounds to stop it. A lot of times we can make arrangements to minimize the destruction. Just because we are not federally recognized does not mean that they can plow through our burial sites and villages."

Federal government recognition has been unsuccessful for the Ohlone for a variety of reasons. The government is reluctant to legitimize land claims. People claiming Ohlone heritage have difficulty establishing the continuity that other tribes have with the past because of the disruptions during the mission era.

But the Ohlone community remains alive and is building, Kehl said. "There's a fairly active community out there," she said. "We weren't one tribe before and we're still not one tribe.

"When you look at the Ohlone, you have to look at them as a nation. There are still several tribes within that nation. Originally, there were over 75 known villages within our territory that spoke about eight languages. "We have people relearning the languages. We've learned some of the old songs. People are learning to dance again. People are learning the old arts.

"There are quite a few people who are Ohlone. When they were baptized at the missions, they were given Spanish names and then claimed Spanish heritage." Kehl said the traditions and heritage of the Ohlone would continue to survive.

The Ohlone have left their mark on this area. Their bones and artifacts are part of the earth here, their history is forever connected to the region, and for many residents of the Bay Area who may not even know it, the history of the Ohlone runs in their blood. "The Indians married into the Spanish. They married other cultures, too," Kehl said. "I think a lot of people are Ohlone and don't even realize it."