If asked what California was called before Europeans “discovered” it, a 16th century Indian might well have said, “Ours!” Prior to any Euro-Americans, there were indigenous people living in present day California for an estimated 10 to 15,000 years. By the 16th century, they comprised about 300,000 people, speaking more than 60 languages (Fagan,.4). Although the early explorers and missionaries recorded some of their encounters with the indigenous people of California, their observations were generally buried in dusty volumes thumbed by historians centuries later. Only since the second half of the 19th century did the “new” Californians begin to learn about the indigenous people they called Indians. The earliest studies were simple word lists as a process of communication and trade began. Later would follow more systematic information on tribes—a somewhat simplistic designation for people, generally preliterate, who appear to share the same language, kinship, and culture.

Among the so-called “north coastal tribes,” the Pomo, the Coast Yuki, and the Coast Miwok are the ones most likely to have walked within MRC forests, although there was always an interconnectedness between indigenous human populations and their neighbors for food, ornaments, and tools. While the footprints of the indigenous people have disappeared, some of their trails, as well as village sites with scattered points and pottery shards, still remain on the forest floor. Such evidence is scarcely visible, though, except to the trained eye. In Before California, Brian Fagan writes of how difficult it is for even the “experts” to interpret this past.

The ancient people of northern California left a small “ecological footprint.” An ecological footprint is a measure of sustainability, gauging the amount of productive land and water that a population needs to meet its demands and absorb its waste. As one might expect, the United States is currently the Big Foot among the nations of the earth. This is not to say that the indigenous people did not actively alter their environment at all. Indigenous people developed a system of vegetation management that extended throughout most of the Holocene, a name given to the last 11,000 years of earth history—the time since the last “ice age.” Research suggests that Native Americans burned forests and scrub to expedite travel; increase the availability of plants for food, medicine, and basket making; improve the browsing conditions for deer; and keep prairies and meadows open for hunting. By the time the first Euro-Americans came to northern California, the land, while thickly forested, had already seen thousands of years of burning, tilling, sowing, harvesting, and hunting. The ruggedness of the terrain, the relatively small populations of the Native Americans, and the simplicity of their dwellings may have restricted significant ecological impacts in northern California, although this is still open to debate.

Only in northwest California did the ancient people build very large redwood canoes and these came on the scene fairly late—in the last 500 years (Fagan, 219). Because of the huge size of the redwood logs, the paddlers stood upright, their feet steadied by chiseled bumps in the bottom of the canoe. In 1872, an amateur anthropologist, Stephen Powers, recorded details about one of these dugouts—”a thing of beauty”—on Humboldt Bay (Fagan, 219). The canoe was 42 feet long, almost 8 1/2 feet wide, and could carry 24 people. According to Brian Fagan, the dugouts were the result of readily available straight-grained redwood trunks: