The Salinan People of the Salinas River
Near Paso Robles, California
Long before the oaks gave this town its name, this land belonged to the Salinan people. For thousands of years, they lived along the Salinas River and across these rolling hills, hunting, fishing, and gathering acorns from the same oak trees that shade Paso Robles today. The Salinan homeland stretched through the Salinas Valley, from south of Mission Soledad down toward San Luis Obispo.
Archaeologists believe some village sites in this region were occupied for more than one hundred generations, roughly three thousand years. At their peak, perhaps three thousand Salinan people lived across the Central Coast, organized in small independent groups with little centralized government. Their world changed forever when Spanish missionaries arrived in seventeen seventy-one and drew the Salinans into Mission San Antonio, and later Mission San Miguel.
Disease and forced labor devastated their population. By the United States Census of nineteen thirty, officials declared the Salinan people extinct. But that was wrong.
Their descendants survived, and today the Salinan Tribe is working to gain federal recognition from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. When you pass beneath an old valley oak here, remember whose hands first gathered its acorns.
