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Backbone to California - Getting to know the Sierra

The Sierra Nevada is a gigantic, craggy block of igneous rock that in primordial times convulsed, heaved and rose sharply in the east, tilting the slab to the west toward California's great Central Valley, which may have been an inland sea at the time.

After many millennia the slab became segmented laterally by the force of runoff waters and glaciers that gouged great gorges and valleys into the surface of the rock. The gorges were further deepened by rushing watercourses that flowed into the valley, filling it with sediment until only the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers remained to drain the basin into the Delta and ultimately to the Pacific Ocean through the San Francisco and San Pablo bays.

In the east, the peaks inched up year after year until more than half a dozen rose to over 14,000 feet, the tallest being Mt. Whitney at 14,494 feet. Hundreds more rose to over 10,000 and 12,000 feet. The eastern escarpment of the range created an impassable barrier that remained unpenetrated by white men until the 19th century.

In time, the great range grew a wide variety of flora and fauna. Conifers dominated tree cover. Yellow Pine, Sugar Pine, Tamrac Pine and Foxtail Pine grew throughout the mountains. In the lower foothills, Digger Pine proliferated, and up at the timberline grew Whitebark Pine. Douglas Fir, Mountain Hemlock, Incense Cedar grew on the slopes, which were also marked by stands of Juniper and groves of golden Aspen. Maples, birches and oaks also grew in abundance, mostly in the lowlands.

Then came the animals. Throughout the Sierran forests roamed the great grizzly bear, long since gone, and the black bear, who remains, though in much smaller numbers. With the bears prowled the great cats: puma, cougar, bobcat, and lynx. At night the savage wolverine came out to hunt squirrels, rabbits and other delectable prey. Mule deer and mountain sheep roamed the mountains; and though there were no wolves, the hills and valleys were full of wily coyotes and shy gray foxes. Beavers made dams in the streams, and porcupines, marmots, martens, skunks, and raccoons came to drink the clear mountain water.

Overhead flew hawks and eagles, falcons and owls, and finches, robins, woodpeckers and jays. The streams filled with Rainbow and Cutthroat trout and salmon. When the white man finally came, he found the mountains and foothills of the Sierra Nevada the most teeming and dramatic stretch of wilderness in North America.

Sierra Nevada in Spanish means "snowy mountains." The range was named in the late 18th century by a Franciscan monk, Fray Pedro Font. As he gazed at the pallid peaks in the east from the top of Mt. Diablo, he uttered the immortal phrase, "une gran sierra nevada." The mountains are well named. Snow covers many peaks and high valleys most of the year, and some high peaks are never without a covering of snow. "Snow upon snow; rock upon rock," is how the Indians described the crest of the Sierra Nevada.

Before the coming of the white man, the Sierra Nevada was home to Yokut, Maidu, and Miwok Indians, who lived on the lower western slopes, and the Washo and Mono Indians, who lived on the eastern side of the mountains. There was some commerce between tribes on the western slopes and those on the eastern side, which resulted in occasional crossings of Sierra peaks by Indians.

Generally, however, the Indians went into the mountains only on a seasonal basis. The Maidu, for example, moved high into the foothills and mountains every summer to harvest acorns, their staple food supply. But they seldom crossed over the summit. When the weather turned cold, they returned to the warm valley below.

The Sierra Nevada is located entirely in California. The range begins south of Lassen Peak in the north and runs in a southerly direction about 400 miles along the east side of the Central Valley to Tejon Pass in the Tehachapi Mountains. The width of the mountain range varies from 40 to 80 miles. Thousands of streams and hundreds of lakes decorate the piney slopes and verdant valleys. The jewels of the Sierra Nevada are Lake Tahoe in the north and the Yosemite Valley in the south central portion of the mountains. They rival the Niagra Falls and the Grand Canyon for spectacular natural beauty.

The Sierra Nevada is also the only home of the Sequoia gigantea, the giant redwoods the Indians and early pioneers called "Big Trees." As trees, the sequoias are rivaled only by the coastal redwoods along the north and central coasts of California.

Today, even after 150 years of exploration and development, there are only a handful of passes in the Sierra Nevada that allow for east-west traffic in and out of California -- and most of them are still closed in the winter. Even as paved highways, passage through some of them is still arduous and scary. To the '49ers and the early pioneers before them they were daunting in the extreme.

The Sierra Nevada was part of the Spanish province of Alta (upper) California. To the Spanish, however, the range was "tierra incognita." The Spanish had little enough interest in Alta California generally, much less the imposing mountain range to the east. They didn't even think of settling Alta California until late in the 18th century, and then they only established a handful of presidios and pueblos mostly along the coast as a hedge against threatened incursions by Russian, English, and French fur traders and trappers. The only Spanish expedition into the Sierra Nevada worth noting was led by Gabriel Moraga in 1808, who traveled 12 miles up the American River into the western Sierra Nevada foothills. But Moraga was looking for runaway Indian slaves who had fled Mission San Jose, where he was stationed. His only legacy was to give the American River its first name, "Las Llagas," in honor of the passion of Christ.

When the Mexicans assumed control of Alta California, the official policy of disinterest continued uninterrupted. It wasn't until 1827, when Jedediah Smith and his party of mountain men trapped along the American River, that the Mexicans became concerned about activity in the Sierra Nevada. Even then their efforts to discourage it were misguided and futile. Governor Juan Alvarado gave John Sutter a huge land grant to set up his Nuevo Helvecia settlement at the confluence of the Sacramento and American rivers on Sutter's promise to stimulate an large immigration of Swiss and German farmers into the area.

The strategy was to fill up the valley with farms and ranches to discourage trapping and settlement by Yankee fur traders and pioneers. They didn't want another Texas. Instead, the generous Sutter opened his fort to one and all, and even before the gold rush the adobe palisade became a mighty magnet for hundreds of wagons that struggled over the Sierra Nevada into the Sacramento Valley.

The history of the '49ers and the mass migration into California that followed them is the story of the development of wagon roads through and over the Sierra Nevada, down the western foothills, and into the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys. It is a story full of tales of daring and courageous men who sought out and forged their way through narrow mountain passes during fierce winter weather conditions to get from one side of the Sierra Nevada to the other. Names like Jedediah Smith, Joseph Walker, Joseph Chiles, Peter Lassen, James Beckwourth, John Bidwell, Kit Carson, and John Charles Fremont proliferate through the history, and the landscape gleams with places like Fandango Pass, Walker Pass, Carson Pass, Donner Pass, Johnson's Cut-Off, Echo Summit, Ebbetts Pass, Sonora Pass, Tioga Pass, and the Truckee River, just to name a few such illustrious landmarks. Then too there is the story of the Donner Party, at one time the most lurid but also the most uplifting episode in the history of western migration.

Unlike other parts of frontier America, there were few Indian and animal trails to follow that led to passes through the mountains. Those few that existed were covered with snow during eight and nine months of the year. The early explores were on their own, and most of the passages were forged during winter weather conditions, which made travel inestimably worse than it would have been during clear, dry summer weather.

After the fur traders and the explorers, came the settlers with their wagon trains. Earlier migrants had to abandon their wagons in order to make a crossing of the Sierra Nevada, but those that followed blazed trails and created roads that enabled the pioneers to move their ox-drawn wagons over Sierra crests. Then came the prospectors in countless droves swarming up the eastern flanks of the Sierra Nevada and through the narrow mountain pass their predecessors had carved out for them.

California became a state in 1850, scarcely two years after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildago by which the United States acquired legal title to the land. This was possible only because of the massive migration of prospectors and settlers who moved over the Sierra Nevada and into California the year before.

It would be 20 years after the '49ers arrived before a transcontinental railroad carried migrants to California in relative safety. For those 20 years, and for a decade before them, pioneers and prospectors passed through openings in the crest of the Sierra Nevada experiencing every possible circumstance, good and bad, that can befall human travelers. December 24, 1998 Richard Hughey