The Village on the Mound

Before the first warehouse went up, before the first schooner rounded the bend of the San Joaquin, before anyone thought to call this place anything at all, the people here built their homes on high ground.

The Yatchicumne were a branch of the Northern Valley Yokuts, and they understood the delta in ways that took newcomers a long time to appreciate. This land floods. It has always flooded. The tule marshes that spread in every direction from the confluence of the sloughs were not obstacles, they were the economy. Tule reeds made baskets, boats, and walls. The sloughs produced fish and waterfowl in quantities that early European accounts struggled to describe without sounding like exaggeration. The Yatchicumne set fishing weirs in the channels, burned the marshes on seasonal cycles to promote new growth, and built their villages on the low mounds that rose a few feet above the flood plain, enough to stay dry in most years.

One of those mound villages was called Pasasimas. It stood on what is now the center of downtown Stockton. The mound that held it gave the settlement its best feature: a slightly elevated position overlooking the slough where the deep channel passed close to shore. That same geographic fact, a navigable waterway running alongside elevated ground, would later recommend the site to Charles Weber when he was looking for a place to build a river port.

The Yatchicumne did not choose their home arbitrarily. Every advantage that made Stockton valuable as a city was first recognized by people who had been reading this landscape for centuries.