Earth Song: A Prologue to History

CHRONICLES OF CALIFORNIA

CALIFORNIA PICTORIAL: A History in Contemporary Pictures, 1786 to 1859,

with Descriptive Notes on Pictures and Artists by Jeanne Van Nostrand

and Edith M. Coulter

GOLD IS THE CORNERSTONE by John Walton Caughey

LAND IN CALIFORNIA: The Story of the Mission Lands, Ranchos, Squatters,

Mining Claims, Railroad Grants, Land Scrip, Homesteads by W, W. Robinson

A SELF-GOVERNING DOMINION: California, 1849-1860 by William Henry Ellison

A LITERARY HISTORY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA by Eranklin Walker

THE CALIFORNIA PROGRESSIVES by George E. Mowry

EARTH SONG: A Prologue to History by Charles L, Camp

THE CHRONICLES OF CALIFORNIA comprise a series in which qualified scholars write on well-defined segments of the state’s history. Some books follow a particular theme through the whole span from earliest times to the present. Others develop subjects that are chronologically more compact, such as the story of the discovery of gold and the Gold Rush. Conjointly the volumes touch on practically all phases of California’s experience.

This series, under the general editorship of Herbert E. Bolton and John W. Caughey, was launched by the University of California as an enduring commemoration of the state’s centennial.

EARTH SONG

A Prologue to History

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles

1952

CHARLES L. CAMP

EARTH SONG

A Prologue to History

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, BERKELEY AND LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, LONDON, ENGLAND

COPYRIGHT, 1952, BY THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. DESIGNED BY JOHN B. GOETZ

To

WILLIAM KING GREGORY

in deep appreciation

PREFACE

In this outline of the history of land and life in California, details have been sacrificed. Some topics mentioned briefly are more fully discussed in the works listed at the end of the volume. To serve as a key to these references, parenthetic numbers have been inserted in the text.

Suggestions and advice have been generously given by William H. Alexander, David R. Brower, Perry Byerly, Jessie M. Camp, Harvey Fergusson, August Fruge, Edward W. Gifford, Robert F. Heizer, Dorothy H. Huggins, Robert M. Kleinpell, Alinda MacLeod, Phil Ray, George R. Stewart, R. A. Stirton, Samuel P. Welles, Howel Williams, Jennie E. Woolley, and many others. Their kindness is gratefully acknowledged.

The plates and the unnumbered figures were drawn by William Gordon Huff, the maps and numbered figures by Owen J. Poe, except those otherwise credited.

Museum of Paleontology

University of California

June 13, 1951

Contents 1

Contents 1

PRELUDE

INTRODUCTION

RECORD THE ROCKS

EARTH STORY

ENIGMA

ROCKS OF LAND AND SEA

TALE OF THE SEA ROCKS

LIFE IN EARLY SEAS

LIFE REACHES LAND

SONG OF SALAMANDERS

AGE OF COAL

SONG OF REPTILES

AGE OF REPTILES

TRANSFORMATION

AGE OF MAMMALS

DEEP FREEZE

COMING OF THE ICE

PLEISTOCENE PARADE

IMMIGRANTS AND FIRST FAMILIES

BLACK DEATH

Pleistocene cemetery

SONG OF MAN

RISE OF MAN

EPISODE OF FOLSOM MAN glade. As echoes die, the monster charges forth on swaying limbs, ears flaring out, trunk held aloft, and curved tusks gleaming white. Huge bodies, pressed together in a mass of heaving heads and tusks and tossing trunks, crowd up behind to see who dares intrude upon the feeding ground. It is a bumbling band of piglike forms that stumble as they run, and, terrified, knock down their fellows as they tear away—unwitting culprits they, the peccaries. So with majestic tread on ponderous feet, soughing and sucking in the mud, the mammoths amble to the riverbank to drink and cool their bodies in the swamp.

BEFORE THE MAYFLOWER

RED MEN OF THE SOUTHWEST

INVASION

CALIFORNIA ON THE CHANGING EARTH

CALIFORNIA’S CHANGING LIFE

DESTINY

CHARTS

GLOSSARY

RFERENCES

INDEX

PRELUDE

California! Land thrice-born, cradled between the desert and the sea, hear the Earth Song! Song of the pulsing rocks—born of the heated earth, born from beneath the sea, and born in storms and floods upon the land.

Hear the Earth Song, O California! Song of the waves, swept from their ancient shores to give you birth. Song of the land delivered from the troughs of the sea by the labor of the trembling earth. Song of the mountains, rising in majesty above your sunlit strand, in green and tawny dress and ermine robes of snow.

Child of the rocks and waves, this song is sung for you.

INTRODUCTION

Earth’s living garment, constantly renewed, changes in style through the ages. The tattered remnants of the past cover the earth with a frayed, patched pattern that recalls the styles of long ago. The rocks, like cemetery headstones, date these fashions that have come and gone through five hundred million years of earth history. Countless extinct forms of life, preserved as rock-bound fossils, bear witness to these changes in earth life. Fossils were embedded when the rocks were formed, layer upon layer, the younger lying above the older. The sequence of life is thus manifested in the sequence of the rocks.

Fossils testify to the works of creation. Their procession in the rocks represents the drama of history, unfolding the past ages of life, scene by scene: the long Age of Invertebrates and Simple Plants; the Age of Primitive Fishes, Amphibians, and Coal; the Age of Reptiles, Pines, and Cycads; and then the Age of Mammals with its backdrop of flowering plants.

The scene now being played is the first in a new act—the Age of Man. The play is not finished; the suspense is supreme, for we cannot look behind the dark curtain to see what new actors may be waiting to take the stage.

Each act of the life story with its inventions and achievements prepares the way for the next. New forms find new ways to live, adding their structures to the inventions of the past and using the old in new combinations to perform new functions. New forms of life expand over what has gone before, and build upon the past. The long history of early life merges into ours and helps us to comprehend our own.

Life, as we know it, is tied to the changing surface of the earth, on which it evidently arose, and where it continues to develop in profusion. The history of life in California, though only a small part of the greater picture, elucidates much that has happened elsewhere, for the procession of life, emerging from all lands and seas, has traversed and retraversed our land.

Most of the ancient life of California has vanished. Some forms now extinct here have survived elsewhere, and a few no longer living in other places have found refuge here—such relicts as the giant sequoia, the condor, and the night lizard of the desert.

California’s life is changing, shuffling to keep in step with the everchanging parade of living things, and adjusting itself to the varied and changing landscapes and climates. Her rejuvenated Sierra separates the eastern wastes from the central valley. Isolated coves lie tucked away in her Coast Ranges. The westerly winds break across these ranges and drop their moisture. A gamut of microclimates lies between the desert and the sea, on mountain slopes in zones marked by differences in temperature, and along the cool, north coast blanketed with summer fog.

Living things, adjusting their lives to these changing features, have been modified in subtle ways, in habits and in form. The redwood forests with their tan oaks, laurels, five-fingered ferns, and their coastal fringe of cypresses and bishop pines, extended down and up the coast when the fog belt presumably moved southward and then regressed to the north. Desert lizards, jumping rats, and tree yuccas invaded the interior valleys in hot, dry periods of the past and were left stranded there in small colonies along the western side of the San Joaquin. Mountain salamanders and lizards found their way southward along the ranges in cool periods and are now isolated on the southern highlands.

Gophers and fishes live at oases far out on the desert. In former wet periods their ranges were connected. Now, through separation and isolation, the populations have become diverse, and new species are evolving from the old. Song sparrows of the marshes have followed the advance and retreat of the marsh plants around the sinking shores of San Francisco Bay, until today they exist in isolated colonies. And the birds have developed different songs and plumage in each of these small habitats.

Thus, the life of the land—from Indians to fishes, insects, and plants—reflects the diversity of California’s topography and climate. This has attracted naturalists who have studied the influence of the isolation of small populations on the origin of species (21, 59).1 Finally, students of heredity have investigated the fundamental nature of the changes involved in the formation of new features and have tried to understand how hereditary changes become perpetuated in living populations.

California, fresh from the hand of nature, and only recently encroached upon by civilized man, is a natural laboratory where active geological processes and changing life can be seen and studied to interpret the earth story. Fossils help to tell this story, and a few anecdotes will show how they have been discovered and what they signify.

x

At McArthur, Shasta County, California, a boy of thirteen was tending his father’s sheep. He reached for a pebble to stimulate the lazy ones. To his surprise, that pebble proved to be a petrified bone, stuck fast in the gravel. He called his father, and between them they dug out a hollow horn core three feet long and twenty-two inches round the base. The question arose: What kind of animal had such a horn? Some called it a cow critter; but the horn was too big for a cow, or even for a long-horned steer. The University was notified, and an expert came to investigate. He unearthed the skull to which the horn belonged—a fossil skull of the extinct Bison latifrons (pl. 11), one of the largest and finest of its kind (64).

At the south base of Mount Diablo, a grading crew was widening the road at the entrance to the State Park. They uncovered an elephant tusk, ten feet long and a foot in diameter, buried under a layer of fossil soil eight feet down. Near this great seven-hundred-pound tusk lay the lower jaw and a bone from the three-foot hump of a big bison. And, strangely enough, the lower jaw of the Diablo bison fitted the skull from Shasta County two hundred miles away. The hump bone showed that this big bison had a great hump over his forequarters, like the smaller American bison living today. A gifted sculptor restored the huge bison head, which now rests in the Museum of Paleontology at the University of California, Berkeley (pls. 10, 11).

The long-horned bison and the mammoth elephant inhabited California during the Ice Age when the mammals of the northern world reached their climax in size and diversity.

x

One hundred and fifty-nine years ago a Spanish botanist, Jose Longinos Martinez, traveled from Mexico City through Lower California to the little Spanish pueblo of Los Angeles (60). He found that the roofs of the adobe houses were covered with asphalt. Eight miles west of the village he visited some black pools where liquid asphalt bubbled from the ground. Dead birds and beasts lay in the pools, caught like flies on sticky paper. There were bones, too, of animals mired years before—animals long extinct and not previously known to have lived in California. There were elephants and masto- donts, giant saber-toothed cats and lion jaguars, ground sloths, tapirs, wolves, horses, camels, and bison (pl. 13). These tar-pit bison were not so huge as latifrons from Shasta, and they had longer horns than those that live today.

Bison of various kinds have lived in America only during the last three hundred thousand years or so. Their remains are numerous in old river channels on the plains of Nebraska; the big-horned ones are said to be the most ancient. In the course of time the horns have become shorter, and the modern, living bison has the shortest horns of all. Many kinds of bison were thus evolved.

Fossils of the animals that were buried first are in the deeper sediments and are the oldest. From the nature of organic remains and their positions in the rocks the ancient history of life can be deciphered and dated.

Allan Bennison, a high school boy, used to spend his week ends searching for fossils in the desolate hills along the west side of the San Joaquin Valley near Gustine. In the rocks he found sea shells and a few large bones, the remains of a fossil duck-billed dinosaur—the first dinosaur to be discovered in California. A few miles from the dinosaur, Allan also found the skull of a sea lizard, or mosasaur (12b). Soon afterward, geologists from Fresno State College discovered the skeleton of a seagoing reptilian monster, the remains of a swimming, fish-catching plesiosaur (67), a creature with paddles instead of legs, a neck fifteen feet long, and a small head (pl. 5). Because its jaws were weak, the plesiosaur swallowed stones to help grind up the food in its belly. A hatful of smooth pebbles were found where its stomach had lain.

All these creatures—the dinosaur, the mosasaur, and the plesiosaur—have been extinct for about seventy million years. Nothing even faintly resembling them exists today. They lived long before the time of the tar pits and the deposition of the Shasta gravels where the big bison was found. And the fossils show that in the remote past, a hundred times as long ago as the Shasta bison, a very different world of life existed.

But even seventy million years is a short time in comparison with the whole extent of geologic history. Some fossils are ten times that old, and the most ancient rocks are at least thirty times as old as the remains of the California dinosaurs.

x

One hot summer day, two geologists and a student came down the dirt road through Cajon Pass from the Mojave Desert. They were thirsty and stopped under the sycamores by the stream where it runs through some ledges of ancient, upended rock squeezed between Old Baldy in the San Gabriel Range and San Bernardino Mountain. These ledges looked promising, and the visitors began cracking them with their hammers. Inside were some small black flecks. A magnifying glass showed these flecks to be the hard skins of creatures resembling pill bugs. They were trilobites, extinct relatives of the shrimps and crabs. These crawlers had lived nearly five hundred million years ago in seas that covered much