Fish Culture

The fish in Monterey Bay brought diversity to the land as well. Rumsen Indians had a fishing village for centuries at what is now Custom House Plaza. Portuguese whalers arrived in the 1850s, about the time Chinese fishermen landed at Point Lobos. Fresh fish markets were limited until the railroad arrived in 1874, then Italian fishermen moved to Monterey with larger boats to catch fish for San Francisco buyers, according to Tim Thomas, historian at the Monterey Maritime and History Museum. With growing competition, discriminatory laws were passed to limit Chinese fishing, so the “Chinatown” then in Pacific Grove turned to squid that nobody else wanted. Japanese divers arrived in 1895, settled on Cannery Row and started harvesting the abalone no one else valued. Monterey started focusing on sardines soon after that and Sicilian fishermen with large purse seiners moved in to catch tons of them for the 41 Cannery Row processing plants that were booming into the 1940s. Japanese fishermen dominated salmon fishing by then and owned 80% of the businesses on Fisherman’s Wharf until World War II erupted and they were forced to move to inland camps.

Photo: Monterey Wharf and waterfront. Ca. 1907. Credit: Monterey Public Library, California History Room

First Farms in Carmel Valley

The agricultural roots of Carmel Valley are frequently traced to Spanish priests who, in the 1770s, planted crops and orchards to feed the new settlements at the missions. But the European presence actually ended the original farming that had been going on in the valley for nearly 4,000 years. Rumsen Indian families had learned centuries earlier to harvest seeds in the meadows, till and plant them with “digging sticks” and turn wildlands into gardens. They also learned how to detoxify the acorns in the woods and mill them into edible flour. It took 13 acres of hard seeds and hundreds of pounds of acorns to support each family, according to Mark Hyklema, an archeologist with the California Department of Parks and Recreation. The Rumsen, one of the 50 or so tribes generally called Ohlone, also burned their gardens periodically to control poison oak, clear the land and release new seeds. But after the Spanish arrived and started building settlements, they forbid the Ohlone fires and ended 40 centuries of Indian farming in Carmel Valley.

(Mortar hole for acorns apparently used by Rumsen Indians found in Garland Park courtesy of tsallam)