It might surprise you, but San Francisco is as old as America itself. Picture it: Summer, 1776. On the East Coast, slaveholders Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson are writing a Declaration of Independence, whose thesis statement is that all men are created equal. Meanwhile, Spanish missionaries are holding mass for Native peoples unaware their Indigenous generosity is being manipulated for conquest in the West. Soldiers marked the site earlier that Spring, a depression in a windswept spit on a foggy peninsula. There they congregate in a rudimentary chapel of tule reeds until forced Indigenous labor replaces it with a semi-permanent house of worship. Mission San Francisco de Asís is a sixth cog in the well-oiled machine driving many California Natives to, sometimes over, the edge of extinction. In their place, waves of immigrants will win and weather booms and busts that would shape and define San Francisco.
A beginning for some, the end for many
Spanish missions functioned as death camps for a majority of Natives imprisoned there. Shown: A dangling bell at Mission San José de Tumacácori, Arizona. Creative commons.
The Yelamu Ohlone stewarded the land and waters around what is now San Francisco for millennia. California’s oldest human remains, aside from Cher, are those of a man interred 7,500 years ago beneath the Transbay Center. But the arrival of the Spanish signaled the beginning of the end. The earliest permanent settlements here were military and religious installations of the Presidio Real and Mission San Francisco de Asís. While the Spanish founded the settlements, the local Ohlone and Miwok people, captured converts termed neophytes, actually built them.
Mission San Francisco de Asís pictured in 1856. Disease and cruelties had all but entirely wiped out the Bay Area’s Indigenous population. The Yelamu Ohlone were likely exterminated by this point. Creative commons.
By feeding local Indigenous people to the mission meat grinder, Spanish authorities gained full control of the peninsula. They started granting land in the early 19th century, primarily to retired military officers, as incentives for settling New Spain. Homes and storefronts sprang up near the Presidio and mission, and by the waterfront. Spanish scouts had dubbed the northeast quadrant of the peninsula el paraje de Yerba Buena; place of the good herb. Yerba buena, a relative of mint, grew abundantly among the shifting dunes that once dominated the Financial District. Naturally, the name extended to the sheltered cove behind those dunes, and eventually, a nearby island.
The Presidio military installation grew concurrently with Mission San Francisco. Vessels initially docked at a landing at the base of a cliff inside the Bay, behind Fort Point. Landslide conditions there triggered a probe for more protective coves. The Spanish tried establishing ports at North Point and Fort Mason for a brief spell until they dropped anchor in Yerba Buena Cove. By far the most favorable spot for a port, Yerba Buena Cove also attracted traders looking to offload cargo onto land. Clusters of clapboard homes and industry buildings lined up along a stretch of shore that would eventually become Montgomery Street. Of course, the little port and attached village took on the Yerba Buena name.
Before San Francisco, there was Yerba Buena
An illustration of the US takeover at Yerba Buena, soon to be San Francisco. That straight strip of beach near the center is now Montgomery Street. Creative commons.
Mexico assumed control of California in 1821 following the Mexican War of Independence. The Mexican government would not maintain the Mission system for long, permanently ending it in 1833 with the Secularization Act. Surviving Native converts were turned out into a hostile world, their homes, families, clans, sometimes entire lineages and tribes, all gone. Fluent speakers of California’s richly diverse Indigenous linguistic group had dwindled to double, even single digits. Worse, the genocide of California tribes over land, water, and gold, was far from over.
“By 1825, most local Indians had come into the mission. The Indian population at Mission Dolores peaked that year at 1,252, of whom only 90 were Ohlone speakers, and only 18 of those Yelamu. Most of the rest had died — of measles, tuberculosis, syphilis and other diseases brought by the Europeans. By 1847, 13 years after the missions were secularized under Mexican rule, only 34 Indians were found on the entire San Francisco Peninsula.”
Some people say San Francisco is more akin to a small town, but prior to the Gold Rush, it really was. For nearly half of the 19th century, Yerba Buena held between 25–50 permanent residents. Hundreds, even thousands more lived in the Mission and its unofficial pueblo. Yerba Buena was not a military nor Jesuit installation, but the closest port of call. The village itself was what we’d consider corporate housing, as it comprised almost entirely Hudson’s Bay Company merchants and their families. The Mexican–American War was brewing when Hudson’s Bay withdrew from Yerba Buena in 1846. By then, the peninsula’s Native population could fit in a single classroom.
American takeover and the change to San Francisco
Barely six months after Hudson’s Bay Company exited Yerba Buena, an expanding United States assumed control of Alta California. USS Portsmouth, a battleship, had already anchored in Yerba Buena Cove, where troops waited on standby amid the Bear Flag Revolt. Allegedly, they captured the small port town and nearby presidio without resistance. Subsequent to capture, Yerba Buena rechristened its central plaza Portsmouth Square after the fortuitous battleship. The 8-Bayshore bus rolls right through it as it crawls through downtown traffic. The United States took control of the town July 9, 1846. Authorities dubbed Lieutenant Washington Allon Bartlett alcalde of Yerba Buena that August. Since many locales bore the title Yerba Buena, Bartlett officially changed the name to San Francisco in 1847. The coincidence of California’s annexation and the discovery of gold within two years was 99.9% pure dumb luck.
The rapid growth of San Francisco came at the exhausting cost of its endemic resources. Otter pelts, old-growth redwood trees, bay oysters, Chinook salmon and more, all hunted or harvested out of existence. Indigenous Californians could voice the existential dread of their genocide, but the missions that imprisoned them suppressed their first languages. If anything or anyone lived, it’s a miracle. Colonization has harmed California more than any earthquake, drought, or wildfire, starving the land by removing their stewards.
I would never rain on anybody’s parade. But I would rather celebrate the resilience of the Ohlone and Miwok tribes, whose descendants carry their stories. They are real, present people who still speak their Native tongues, passed down in secret by surviving “Mission Indians.” Yet the federal government continues to dismiss the Ohlone despite valid ancestry and several campaigns. It’s a battle for recognition that gets easier the more people abandon views prescribed by genocidal systems that died out long ago while their targets live on. Why throw a parade for a brutal legacy of extermination while peaceful, more significant achievements go unsung?
SEO grabbers about the binary birthdays of the United States and Mission Dolores tried netting readers without providing context. It matters to me as an Indigenous person (Potawatomi) and Native American literature professor that you know what you’re missing. This agreed-upon date quietly credits the mission system with the arrival of civilization in the Bay Area and ignores the civilized societies that thrived here for millennia. To negate their presence, which endures today, continues the ethnic cleansing initiated by Spanish missionaries, even if “just” linguistically. So many small violences we inflict on one another come disguised as words.
