The Miwok and the Oak Woodland World
Near Groveland, California
Before the gold rush, the Sierra Nevada foothills around what is now Groveland were the territory of the Miwok people, a loose confederation of related groups who had lived in the oak woodlands and river canyons of central California for thousands of years. The Southern Sierra Miwok occupied the Tuolumne River drainage, gathering acorns from the black oaks and valley oaks that dominated the foothills, fishing the rivers for salmon and steelhead, and trading with the Yokuts people of the San Joaquin Valley and the Paiute people on the eastern side of the Sierra. Their world changed with devastating speed after eighteen forty-eight.
The gold rush brought hundreds of thousands of people into California in roughly three years, and many of them passed directly through Miwok territory on their way to the diggings. The diseases that accompanied the settlers killed an estimated seventy-five percent of the indigenous population of California's gold country within a decade of contact. Military expeditions from nearby mining communities in eighteen fifty and eighteen fifty-one drove surviving Miwok people off their lands and onto reservation land in the San Joaquin Valley, far from the oak forests that sustained their economy and their way of life.
The Me-Wuk Tribal Council of Tuolumne maintains a tribal rancheria near the town of Tuolumne today and works to preserve Miwok language and cultural practices. The acorn harvests continue. The salmon runs that once fed the rivers are largely gone.
