History of California Grasslands

As lead-in to long descriptions of Central Valley flower fields by:

English guy (name?) - Across lower Sacramento Valley

John Muir - Across middle of valley from East Bay

Th J. Mayfield - Across lower San Joaquin at Pacheco

and others?

and also something re: peripheral/Coast Range valleys including:

Bear Valley

Santa Rosa Valley

Livermore Valley

Salinas Valley?

Carrizo Plain

Santa Clara Valley?

All as opposed to the great coastal plain of Southern California and the narrower, intermittent ones of Northern and Central California.

Several decades ago a story about the history of the California grasslands began to be circulated. Although it was based apparently on little more than speculation, it did seem to support the biases current at the time and, for want of an alternative or even a challenge, this story was repeated so relentlessly in classrooms and in print that it came to be accepted as gospel—another of those clothes-less emperors that so thickly populate western history. The story is still widely taken for granted in many quarters, nor would it matter all that much, except for the fact that gigo-wise, untold numbers of bad decisions have been made because of it and real damage inflicted where too much damage had already been done and more could least be afforded.

The story goes like this: when the Europeans arrived here, the California grasslands looked like a sort of pointillist sea of perennial bunchgrasses growing in spaced clumps, with room for small flowering plants in the gaps. Then, with the introduction of domestic livestock, especially cattle, the whole system broke down as wholesale overgrazing wiped out the bunchgrasses and other native plants, which were then replaced by weedy annual grasses whose seed had be unwittingly imported from Europe along with the animals, which simultaneously spread the weeds and grazed away the natives wherever they went, i.e. pretty much all of the lowland California grasslands.

Kernels of truth combined with dangerous fallacies. Story (unintended?) puts most of the blame on the first wave (Spanish) of colonization.

The real story, both of the original condition of the California grasslands and of their continuing and near-complete degradation, is far more complex: [brief description of main components of former, then of latter, then? the documentation regarding the flower fields].