The River People of the Laquisimas

Ten thousand years before a railroad delegation arrived to name what they found here, people were living along this river.

The waterway you can reach from Modesto's parks was called the Laquisimas by the Yokuts people who built their villages along its banks. Settlers would later rename it the Tuolumne. The word Tuolumne itself traces back to an earlier indigenous term, possibly the Yokutsan word Tawalimnu, referring either to a cluster of stone dwellings or to stands of native oak. Linguists have not reached a final consensus on the etymology, but the root is clearly not Spanish or English.

The Northern Valley Yokuts were a semi-sedentary people who organized their lives around the river and the valley wetlands. Their villages stood on low mounds near the water's edge, positioned to stay above the spring floods that swept down from the Sierra Nevada each year. They built oval-framed structures covered in tule reed mats. They managed the tule marshes by burning on seasonal cycles, promoting new growth for waterfowl and allowing fishing weirs to operate efficiently. The valley in which Modesto now stands was not wilderness. It was a working landscape that had been managed for generations.

Then, early in the nineteenth century, the Spanish mission system began drawing Northern Valley Yokuts populations into its orbit. Many were brought to the coastal missions, where the combination of European disease and the mission's labor regime produced mortality rates that were catastrophic. In the spring of eighteen thirty-three, malaria arrived in the San Joaquin Valley. Canadian beaver trappers from the Hudson's Bay Company are the probable vector. More than twenty thousand Native Californians died from that outbreak alone, among them large numbers of Yokuts people along the Tuolumne.

The river is still here. The mound sites are still here, beneath the farmland and the subdivisions. The Yokuts people are still here. The full account of what happened to them between the first Spanish arrival and the American takeover is not, even now, completely documented. That gap in the record belongs to the history of the valley as much as anything else that happened here.