Napa: The Transformation of an American Town, Revised Edition

By Lauren Coodley, Paula Amen Schmitt and Carol Kammen

With roots set deep in California history, Napa's story reaches back to the Bear Flag Rebellion and earlier, to the first contact between Spanish explorers and the Wappo Indians. Through the founding of Spanish missions and the grants of ranchos by the Mexican government, Napa flourished under the various cultures that helped it become one of the west coast's most dynamic cities. As it bloomed into one of the most recognizable names on the American landscape, Napa's residents confronted issues of war and peace, of open space and sprawl.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: Sep 12, 2007
• ISBN: 9781439630655

Lauren Coodley

Historian Lauren Coodley is the author of numerous articles and books about Napa Valley and California heritage. Coodley holds an MA in History from Sonoma State University and has taught courses on regional and national history at Napa Valley College, where she was awarded the McPherson Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2003.

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memories.

INTRODUCTION

Every new generation must rewrite history in its own way; every new historian, not content with giving new answers to old questions, must revise the questions themselves—since historical thought is a river into which none can step twice.

—R. G. Collingwood

In the late nineteenth century, the land where indigenous people had camped by the river and gathered acorns under the oaks for ten thousand years was transformed. European settlers developed cattle ranches and wheat fields, which later became fruit orchards and dairies. These farm lands surrounded Napa into much of the twentieth century, even as factories were established along the banks of its river. Throughout the twentieth century, Napa remained a rural small-town, relatively inaccessible and largely ignored by outsiders.

As this book was written, the city of Napa was in the midst of a profound transformation, in which much of its visible history was fast disappearing. Napa had been discovered and the town that had once been little more than a pass-through point on the route to the wineries of the valley became a premier tourist destination. In a very brief time, Napa lost its notoriety as home to the mental hospital, and became inseparable from an image of luxury and easy living. Housing prices shot up, as the downtown was revitalized and vestiges of blue collar life were removed.

While the town has changed, many longtime Napans remain, and for them, the past is a living, breathing shadow. For every Pear Tree development that goes up, they remember the row of pear trees that was there before. As busy intersections replace open fields, they remember childhood games in the grass. As their children leave town in search of affordable homes, they remember a time when few people left town and fewer newcomers came.

Although Napa is unique in some important ways, it has participated in many of the struggles that define American life. In the nineteenth century, Napans planted orchards and established industries so that men and women could earn a living away from the farms. In the twentieth century, Napa was a blue collar community in which men and women found union jobs at local factories or at the nearby naval base. During the Sixties, like others around the country, young people participated in the anti-war movement and feminist activism.

This historical record is still largely hidden in yearbooks, family photo albums, and boxes of yellowing newsletters. It is this story that the new field of social history tries to tell. The stories we sought were not those of the rich and powerful, but of those heroic individuals who tried to save farmlands, raise wages, and create and maintain family businesses. We tried to capture what ordinary Napans experienced throughout the last century, what they did for entertainment, and how they felt about this town. We wanted to record the memories of the past as the town transformed into something new.

And yet, not all has changed, and the Napa of old continues on along the streets where tourists rarely walk. It is there in the old-fashioned family businesses still trying to survive. It is there in gatherings in backyards bursting with the fruit trees that still love the climate here. In this Napa, people drink beer and play softball, they bowl and buy tamales, they wait in line at Buttercream Bakery, and they remember and try to pass on to their children, and to inquiring historians, what life was like here in the almost vanished past.

1. THE WATER-GOING-OUT-PLACE PEOPLE 20,000 B.C.–1768 A.D.

Dying,

I will go down in peace,

But when I sink,

I will take something with me.

—Pomo chant

Between five million and two million years ago, eruptions from volcanic zones near Mt. St. Helena created a bowl-shaped depression with fine-grain clays and sand deposited by the river. For over 20,000 years, the valley floor was covered with oak woodland, providing homes for deer, antelope, tule elk, black bear and grizzly bear, mountain lion, and quail, while the Napa River held freshwater eel, trout, steelhead salmon, ducks, and otters, and the skies were full of the peregrine falcon, the California condor, yellow billed cuckoo, and the California clapper rail.

The valley floor was also home to vernal pools, small seasonal wetlands formed when winter rains fill a depression in impermeable ground. The vernal pools allowed fairy shrimp and other freshwater crustaceans to hatch, salamanders and spade-foot toads to mate, and migrant waterfowl to feed. Vegetation was thicker beside the river, which flooded regularly. Native grasses turned a grayish-green in the summer, and the hills and mountains were covered with forests of redwood, Ponderosa pine, and Douglas fir.

Anthropologists believe the indigenous people came to California in waves beginning more than 10,000 years ago and, once here, developed an intricate knowledge of the plants and animals they considered kin. And so it was in the area now known as Napa. Three separate groups that spoke similar languages lived in the foothills and valleys of what is now called the Mayacama Mountains. The Mishewal lived in Alexander Valley and Lake County; the Mutistul lived in eastern Sonoma County; and the third group, the Mey’ankmah, resided in the southern tidal areas of Napa, known to them as The Water-Going-Out-Place. Other language groups, such as the Patwin and the Suisun, lived nearby in present-day Solano County.

The Mey’ankmah lived in small villages near the river, but above the flood plains. They built smaller campsites near springs, near game trails, or in oak groves. Their domed huts clustered around a sweathouse, with about 40 huts in the largest compounds. They framed the huts with a circle of posts and filled the spaces between with sticks and tules. Each family had its own fire pit and smoke hole, and floor areas were covered with pillows of dry grass and ferns.

They ate mostly acorns from the oak trees. To add to their food stores, the entire tribe walked the hundred mile round trip once a year to the Sonoma coast, where they gathered abalone, clams, crabs, mussels, dry seaweed, and salt. In the spring and summer they walked up to Clear Lake, where they caught and dried fish and carried them home. The paths of these indigenous people were the origins of today’s Highway 29, Silverado Trail, and Monticello Road.

Upon returning home they worked the clamshells into flat, round beads and drilled their centers. These beads were scarce and were of great value in trading with inland peoples for bone-awls, baskets, dice, or arrows. The Mey’ankmah also traded the beads for tule mats from the Pomo in Lake County, or for sinew-backed bows from Colusa tribes. They were extremely fortunate to have access to obsidian—from the Pliocene eruptions at Glass Mountain in the northern part of the valley—which they fashioned into spears and arrowheads.

Tribal land was owned in common and the male chief ruled by consent. However, individuals owned their own tools and jewelry, and the chief participated in preparing food, weaving blankets, and making fishnets. Men visited sweathouses twice daily to purify themselves, smoke, and tell stories. The women worked alongside the men to build these sweathouses, which had dirt roofs and one door facing south. Each sweathouse contained a circular fire pit and a flat cottonwood round used as a foot drum.

Women were separated from the tribe during menstruation and childbirth, and men were not allowed to hunt, fish, gamble, dance, or eat meat or fat during their wives’ menstruation. Instead they rested and gathered acorns. However women did most of the food gathering and men did most of the hunting, although women trapped rabbits and pigeons in wicker traps. Hunting was a team effort. When men hunted deer one of them wore a deer’s head, luring one of the animals within range of their weapons.

The deer provided meat and marrow for food, skins for clothing, and brains for cleaning and curing hides. From the bones came needles and awls, and from the antlers they molded tools for chipping obsidian. Sinew became bowstrings. Hooves became dance rattles, and knucklebones became game pieces for gambling.

Games, dancing, and music flowed through the lives of the Mey’ankmah, as important as hunting and gathering. Dance leaders were also the tribal doctors. Adults played music on bone flutes and elderberry wood whistles, and kept rhythm with deer hoof rattles. Children played with spinning tops of acorns, and used sticks, stones, pebbles, and clay pellets to create dolls.

Because the plant world was sacred and central to their life, the Mey’ankmah developed many methods of plant cultivation and care. They pruned, weeded, and aerated the soil and were careful to take only as many plants as they needed. For example, when they gathered seeds for pinole, they would cast a few handfuls back to the ground to assure a yield the following season. As they gathered bulbs and tubers, they aerated the soil with their digging sticks, creating a medium to yield large bulbs the next year. They coppiced (pruned) shrubs almost to the ground, stimulating regrowth of the long, straight, slender branches needed for tool and basket making. Periodically they burned the landscape to control underbrush and stimulate acorn and bulb growth.

Each plant had multiple uses. The ghost pine, which the Mey’ankmah called Nayo, gave them nuts, which they cracked and ate raw or roasted. They also wove Nayo roots into large twine baskets and fueled their fires with ghost pinecones and chewed its pitch as gum. The hazelnut tree, called Miti sohol, also provided nuts, and they made baby baskets and animal traps from hazelnut shoots, and digging sticks from the wood. The madrone tree, called Napayoko, gave berries, which they ate fresh or tossed in a basket of hot coals. The cooked berries were stored away for the winter.

Black oak, called Khothis, was central to the life of the Mey’ankmah. They had at least six specific names for acorns. Men and women gathered acorns in huge quantities, worked together to harvest them, and stored them in specially built caches. Women alone dried, shelled, ground, and leeched the acorns in preparation for cooking. They pounded shelled acorns in a stone mortar made of igneous rock such as basalt, stored them beside a creek to remove the bitter tannin, and then made mush, soup, and bread.

The Mey’ankmah used willow shoots, called Chupe Pote, for baby baskets and acorn baskets and the foundations of coiled baskets. Willow shoots also became the framework for shelters, while they used its bark much as we use aspirin today. The angelica flower, called Ciwhel, was also used for healing. They inhaled the fumes of the burning root to treat colds, drank the root tea to reduce fevers, and applied root scrapings to painful areas of the body. They wore sections of the root to protect against misfortune, rubbed the ground root on their arms for luck, and smoked the root scrapings.

They called the California bay tree Cuse, and boiled its leaves to treat rheumatism, swept leaf-filled branches over the body as a germicidal, and placed them above doorways to keep sickness away. The leaves of the manzanita, called Mota Cano, treated diarrhea and stomach trouble, and its wood made double-pointed fish hooks, harpoon heads, and bull-roarers, flat pieces of wood spun at the end of a long string. The women ground manzanita nuts into flour and formed cakes.

The flowers from the blue elderberry, called Kate, were used to treat children’s fevers and the branches were made into whistles, dance rattles, and the staves for women’s dice games. The Mey’ankmah even gathered poison oak leaves and used them in cooking to spice up dishes and as a dye for coloring baskets. They put fresh poison oak leaves on rattlesnake bites, and fed their children bits of the leaves to immunize them.

Baskets were central to the social lives as well as the practical lives of the Mey’ankmah, and were often offered as gifts. Scholar Clifford Trafzer describes these baskets as alive with spirit, beauty and motion . . . at once the past and the present, woven into the fabric of California Indian being.Women used the stems and twigs of redbud, called Phopiel, for making watertight baskets. They peeled and split them to create reddish-brown patterns and adorned their baskets with feathers, clamshell, and beads. They strung beads on the stalks of the Pacific rush for their final shaping and polishing.

Mey’ankmah families ate together twice each day, in the morning and at sundown. They would not eat skunks, snakes, lizards, or frogs. There was a taboo against eating coyotes, who were considered sacred. As Malcolm Margolin writes: Coyote tales, told only during the winter when food was limited and people gathered together in smoky lodges, present him as the incomprehensible, the divine, the holy fool. They did eat turtle meat and eggs. The Mey’ankmah devised ways to flavor their food, mixing a little red clay into their acorn dough along with bay leaves, which protected the acorns from rodents.

The Mey’ankmah gave poetic names to the lunar months, such as Clover moon, Acorn moon, and Moon of Falling Leaves. They recognized constellations and knew six directions: east, west, north, south, up, and down. Their primary colors were red, blue, yellow, and pink, and their numerical system was based on fives, using their fingers and toes. They practiced the Kuksu religion, which shared a common cosmology and ritual with indigenous peoples throughout central California.

The Mey’ankmah version of this cosmology said that the original world in which the Old Ones (gods) had dwelled in peace and harmony had been destroyed by ice, fire, and flood, and when the water subsided, Coyote and his grandson Chicken Hawk found the dry tip of Mount St. Helena. There, Coyote made the Mey’ankmah from feathers. Then, Chicken Hawk and Coyote went to Moon for the gifts of speech, movement, laughter, and eating. Moon also sent down acorn mush and pinole.

The Mey’ankmah prayed before any major undertaking. Owls and hawks were powerful spirits, and in their sacred Kuksu dances they wore feathered cloaks and headdresses of these birds. A tribe held a