Natives on SF Bay 1816

Description:
Lithograph of Native Americans navigate San Francisco Bay in a tule rush canoe, San Francisco, California.

Date of Document:
1816

Document Author:
Louis Choris

Geographic Location:
San Francisco Bay

Context:
For more than 2,500 years before the Spanish missionaries arrived in the Bay Area in the 1770s, dozens of small, politically independent native tribelets inhabited the region. Each tribal territory, which covered about ten square miles and generally corresponded to natural drainages, was home to between 200 and 400 persons dispersed among small villages. Of these Bay Area tribelets, 40 or so belonged to the Ohlone language group (which encompassed many dialects) whose region extended from Monterey Bay to the Carquinez Straits. Exact tribelet boundaries might never be known; however, based on analyses of mission records, anthropologist Randall Milliken (author of A Time of Little Choice) has identified the Temescal Creek watershed as the probable southern boundary of an Ohlone tribelet known as the Huchiun whose ancestral lands extended north to present-day Richmond.Louis Choris (1795-1828), a German-Russian artist, visited the Pacific and the west coast of North America in 1816 as the official artist on the Ruric expedition, under the command of Lieutenant Otto von Kotzebue, whose mission was to explore a northwest passage. Choris was known for his realistic representations of his subject matter.