The Ohlone of the Bay: The First People of San Francisco
By Marcus A. Calderon
Length5h 8m
About this audiobook
A young woman built her canoe herself, with her aunt's help: tule reeds cut from the marsh, dried in the sun and bound with milkweed cord, light enough to carry across a mudflat and strong enough to cross two miles of open bay if the wind held off. One summer morning she paddles it into the fog toward an island where relatives live, people her family has kept away from since a quarrel over a fishing ground three winters ago. A fever with a rash has reached the island, and half the village is dead or dying. She is bringing dried mussels, tule rope and a bundle of yarrow.
Her people were the Ohlone. They knew the bay long before anyone named it for Saint Francis, and every mudflat, channel and sea-lion rock in it had a name of its own. Spanish soldiers first saw the bay in 1769. The missions that followed, Dolores among them, drew the Ohlone into a regime of labor, hunger and disease, and after the missions came the Mexican ranchos and the American seizure of California.
A long silence followed. In 1925 the University of California's leading anthropologist wrote the Ohlone off as extinct for all practical purposes, and the great shell mounds along the shore were leveled for factories and, later, shopping centers. The families who knew better kept going. Much of the old shoreline lies under freeways and parking lots now, but Ohlone languages that were written off with their last speakers are being spoken again.
Audiobook details
GenreHistory
Length5 hrs 8 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateSep 19, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Chapter 1: The Fog at Dawn
2Chapter 2: The First Strangers
3Chapter 3: The Mission on the Marsh
4Chapter 4: Mission Dolores
5Chapter 5: The Mission San Jose
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6Chapter 6: The Ranchos
7Chapter 7: The American Takeover
8Chapter 8: The Shell Mound Builders
9Chapter 9: The Long Silence
10Chapter 10: Red Power
11Chapter 11: The Land Remembers
12Chapter 12: The Bay Today
13About the Author
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