Last week I took my two grandsons (ages 5 & 7) to the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History, which they loved. On the wall was this lovely painting depicting what life was like for California Indians before the Europeans arrived. If you are ever in Santa Cruz I highly recommend visiting this unique little museum, which is at 1305 East Cliff Dr.
“Ohlone people were hunters and gatherers who followed this seasonal cycles of the natural world around them — the salmon runs, the maturing of acorns, the ripening of berries and bulbs, the migrations of waterfowl. The abundance of food in this region created a relatively stable society. Some village sites were occupied continuously for thousands of years.”
About Lloyd Kahn
Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the
Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include
Shelter,
Shelter II (1978),
Home Work (2004),
Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008),
Tiny Homes (2012), and
Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:
For the later period, after Spanish established missions, during US trading by sailing ships, read Two Years Before the Mast by Henry Dana.
Under the Spanish, Santa Cruz area became a huge open cattle ranch, and Americans set up camp to clean and tan hides which were sailed around the Horn to Boston/NY. The description of the Hawaiians at the camps are among the best ever exposition of the differences between Yankees and Hawaiians.