The People the City Was Built On

The cemetery beside the oldest building in San Francisco holds an estimated eleven thousand people, roughly six thousand of them indigenous, and almost none of them have names on their stones. They are Ohlone, Pomo, Miwok, Patwin, Wappo, the people gathered into Mission San Francisco de Asis by the Spanish colonial project that founded this city in the summer of seventeen seventy-six. The seventeen ninety-one adobe church to your left is the oldest intact structure in San Francisco. The ground beside it is an unmarked mass burial, and the city built on top of it has never put up a monument to say so.

The Yelamu were the specific tribelet of the Ramaytush Ohlone people whose villages occupied this peninsula for at least ten thousand years before the Spanish arrived. Their settlements ran from the bay shore to the ocean-facing dunes, from what is now the Civic Center south through the Mission district to the coastal bluffs. The land that became San Francisco was not empty. It was home.

The mission system did not simply convert the Yelamu. It relocated them from their coastal and bay-shore villages to the compound here, conscripted their labor to build these walls, and exposed them to epidemic diseases against which they had no immunity. The seventeen ninety-one adobe church was built by Ohlone hands, under Ohlone labor. The workers who built it had no legal right to leave.

The mission was founded on June twenty-ninth, seventeen seventy-six, the same week the Continental Congress on the other coast was debating independence. The Yelamu were not consulted on either development.

More people from more nations were gathered at this mission as the years passed: Pomo from the north bay, Miwok from the hills, Wappo and Patwin from the delta. They built the structures, tended the livestock, worked the fields. They died in numbers that collapsed their communities within fifty years of first contact. The cemetery you are looking at holds the physical evidence of that collapse. Less than a dozen markers name anyone buried there.

The city was named for Francis of Assisi, the medieval saint of voluntary poverty. The people who built it were not volunteers.