The Southern Pomo and the Santa Rosa Plain

The flat land you are crossing has a name that predates every city, every road, and every vineyard by thousands of years. The Southern Pomo called this valley home, and their villages stretched across the Santa Rosa Plain from the lower Russian River through Dry Creek Valley and south toward what is now Cotati. Their settlements ranged from small hamlets of perhaps fifty people to larger centers of more than five hundred, each with its own identity, its own leadership, and its own relationship to the land.

Anthropologists estimate the pre-contact Pomo population across all the Pomo-speaking groups at somewhere between eight thousand and twenty-one thousand people, with the Southern and Northern groups each accounting for roughly thirty percent of the total. The Santa Rosa Plain was productive country. The creeks ran clear and cold, the marshes held waterfowl, the oaks gave acorns, and the grasslands supported deer. The Southern Pomo developed an elaborate material culture, and their basket-weaving reached a level of technical refinement that is still studied and celebrated.

The Spanish arrived late to this part of California. The Franciscan missions had been operating for decades to the south before they extended their reach this far. Between eighteen twenty-one and eighteen twenty-eight, Spanish missionaries from Mission San Rafael, across the bay, began drawing Southern Pomo people southward, sometimes through persuasion, sometimes through force. Scholars of California mission history use the word "enslaved" for what happened to many of those removed from the Santa Rosa Plain to work in mission fields and workshops. By the time American settlement began in earnest in the eighteen forties and fifties, the communities that had organized this valley for millennia had been scattered, decimated by disease, and deprived of their land.

By nineteen hundred, the combined Pomo population had fallen by more than ninety percent. That collapse is not a side story to the history of Santa Rosa. It is the first chapter of it.

Today the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, a federally recognized tribe of Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo descendants, maintain a presence in Sonoma County and continue to assert cultural continuity with this land.