From SFWiki

San Francisco Before The Goldrush

I have not been able to find any Native American descriptions of San Francisco's ecology before the arrival of the Europeans, so to start this page I will reference some Spanish accounts. All the accounts I can find describe the San Francisco peninsula as being a veritible paradise, with plenty of timber for building, firewood, good pasturage, and plenty of fresh running water, This is a different picture than that painted by the naturalists, ecologists, biologists, geologists, enviromentalists, conservationists, and horticulturalists that I have talked to.These persons almost all insist that San Francisco wa 49 square miles of sand dunes when the Gold Rush era began. This account by Father Font of the Anza expedition describes a vista that could be anywhere on the coast. It also seems to describe trees growing on what we now refer to as the Marin Headlands. http://anza.uoregon.edu/Action.lasso?-database=fontex&-layout=standard&-op=eq&Date=3/28/1776&-response=format/fontexpg2fmt.html&-maxRecords=1000&-noresultserror=anzaweb/sorry.html&-search

What kind of trees? I assert that redwoods and douglas-fir, as well as cedar, oak, maple, bay laurel, buckeye, toyon, madrone, and all the other species that are presently growing a couple miles South and North and East of here. I claim that those huge redwoods in Stern Grove and Memorial Grove in G.G, Park were not planted, but are remnants. Ditto the mega redwood burl at Mountain Lake. San Francisco Gold Rush Chronology June 22, 1850 "500-pound grizzly bear was caught today near the Mission Dolores." http://sfmuseum.org/hist/chron2.html Where was this youngster living? Mom weighs around 700 lbs, and Pops could be 1200. Where did this happy family live, Glen Canyon? Forest Hill? McLaren Ridge? Must have been plenty of good eatin' around here in those days to support grizzly bears! Inquiring minds want to know!

It is important to remember that the Europeans who settled these shores were not conservationists. It is also important to realize that the Spanish had been here almost 100 years before the "49ers" and they used up plenty of natural resources, introduced alien species, and let their domestic animals alter the ecology. It's pretty amazing the City was still wild enough to support grizzlies as late a 1850. What must it have looked like in 1750?

There is plenty of vestigal evidence of San Francisco's natural history that could all be assembled into a computer- generated animation that would be pretty accurate. For example, if we were to take the aforementiond grizzly and calculate how many calories it reqiuired to reach 500 lbs. and where the things it ate lived and what those places looked like, we would have a quite different picture of the City's past. Simularly, we could take the redwood burl at Mountain Lake and the really old redwoods in Stern Grove or Golden Gate Park and deduce that if no one planted these trees, then they must have been here already. Ditto for the redwoods in Glen Canyon and the 100-year old California Buckeye on Portreo Hill.

When I was a child, there were still wild trout in most of the streams in most of the hills on the San Francisco Peninsula, as well as the East Bay. Lobos Creek flows from Mountain Lake to the Pacific Ocean. Is it possible this watershed supported a steelhead and salmon run? How about Mission and Islais and Colma Creeks? Of course they did. And If Colma Creeks headwaters are on Mount San Bruno, what did it have to look like? Inquiring minds want to know!

Another way to approach the problem would be todetermine how much water fell on Peninsula annually, both rainfall and fog-drip, and calculate where it ran off, and determine what those areas had to look like. A gazillion acre-feet of water had to flow off of Twin Peaks (Mt. San Miquel) alone, and there are 49 major hills in this 48 square-mile city. Lots of water, lots of watersheds, lots of plants and animals.