10/28/2019
By Michael Raffety
As of Oct. 22, the Caples Fire is 73 percent contained at 3,434 acres. It began as a controlled burn meant to clean out the fuel-loaded understory and slash piles from thinning the forest out. This area hadn’t experienced a fire in 100 years, according to Eldorado Forest Supervisor Laurence Crabtree.
The controlled burn had an auspicious beginning 10 days before the winds kicked up to 25 mph. Snow was on the ground. Volunteers from the Native Plant Society scraped away the pinecones and forest floor duff from around the base of big pine trees. This work left the big trees unscathed by the fire – controlled or otherwise.
The plan was to largely fireproof the forest at the head of the Caples Creek watershed.
When the winds changed it to an uncontrolled burn the Forest Service brought in Cal Fire to help bring it under control.
This is not unique to the Eldorado National Forest. I participated in a field trip organized by the Nevada Irrigation District. It began with one of its major reservoirs where logging had thinned out the area around the lake. It ended with the Sierra National Forest supervisor talking about forest thinning and controlled burning.
Forests in California have been described as a mosaic. Before the coming of the Forest Service different areas of the forest were thinned by lightning, by sheepherders starting a fire as they left for the winter to create more grazing area. The Indians would start fires as they left the mountains for the winter to make it easier to hunt.
California had over 500 separate tribal groups, most of whom hunted and fished — mainly with nets and traps, except for the coastal tribes who could harpoon fish.
“Far from living in a ‘wilderness,’ native Californians continually tended and cultivated the land through controlled burnings, weeding, pruning, tilling, irrigation and selective replanting,” according to “A World Transformed, Firsthand Accounts of California Before the Gold Rush.”
“’When the Western Mono lit hillsides on fire to encourage the growth of young redbud shoots for basketry, they simulated lightning fires. When the Washoe pruned willow, they mimicked the natural pruning caused by river flooding,’ note anthropologists M. Kat Anderson and co-authors.”
The coming of the Spanish and their missionaries to California wrought some immediate changes to the landscape. Native grasses were replaced by Mediterranean grasses and “hearty weeds.”
These new grasses supported thousands of cattle, horses and mules roaming free. With a shortage of gun powder the Spanish became adept at lassoing a bull whenever they needed meat. By the time of Mexican independence from Spain the rancheros grazed a million head of cattle for the hide and tallow trade with clipper ships from New England.
Measles alone killed one-third of the Bay Area missions’ neophytes between 1806 and 1810. Before the arrival of the Spanish the Indian population of California is estimated to be 300,000. By 1848 disease had reduced that population to 100,000.
In the San Francisco Bay Area Indians had burned the grasses each year. One visitor traveling down the Peninsula on horseback described a park-like setting as the green grass replaced the burned area each spring. The missionaries stopped the burning and the mission livestock overgrazed the land.
The Spanish did not hunt or fish. They just ate beef and vegetables. The missions grew wine.
Their lack of interest in hunting, especially with limited gunpowder supplies, meant that thousands of elk swam across the Carquinez Strait, deer in abundance roamed freely with little fear. Grizzly bears were found throughout the state and along the coastal mountains.
It was a different state and a different time.
Michael Raffety is retired editor of the Mountain Democrat and a resident of the Placerville area.
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