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Shake Hands With a Miner

3/15/2016

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“California is full of crazy people.”

This is a statement which we hear quite frequently, and one which we
generally know it to be true. It’s a statement everyone has heard more
than once, and is usually followed by; 1) “They ought to build more
mental institutions.” Or; 2) “The whole state should be designated an
insane asylum and a fence put up around it!”

In fact, these very same things were being said one hundred and
sixty-five years ago, in 1851, and there were felt to be so many
mentally ill people in this state, primarily due to the influx of
crazed miners, that the California state legislature decided that they
had to do something about it – and quickly. That’s a pretty impressive
crisis, as California had been a state for only a few months - since
September of 1850 - and was scarcely three years into the Gold Rush.
But all those crazy prospectors were coming to California and
apparently bringing several forms of mental illness with them.
Insanity, the doctors warned, was not only running rampant throughout
the newest state in the Union but was actually getting worse every day
because the hospitals were not equipped to deal with it. And the
miners just kept on coming.

So the state legislature, after a brief but vocal consideration,
decided to go with Option Number One above and build more mental
institutions. Or rather, to build the state’s first official mental
institution and fill it with the multitude of crazy miners of which
the doctors had warned. Public support for the new legislation was
strong, and Captain Charles Weber of Stockton even donated one hundred
acres of his own land for the project. This was thought to be an ideal
location as Stockton was close to the gold fields and could act as
something of a buffer, keeping the lunatics out of San Francisco. So
the legislation was passed, the governor signed it, the money was
spent, and the Insane Asylum of the State of California proudly opened
its doors to tenants. Over the next ten years over two thousand people
deemed to be mentally ill would pass through those doors, and more
than half of those were confined for treatment in excess of six
months. Over the next century tens of thousands of individuals
designated by doctors to be mentally aberrant would come to call it
home.

But how, you ask yourself, just how were those thousands of people
deemed to be mentally ill? Certainly there were quite a few somewhat
disorderly people in the state – miners were young, boisterous,
energetic men, and it was common for them to act loud and obnoxious.
So just where were medical doctors going to draw the line? Without
such bastions of the psychiatric profession such as Freud and Jung to
rely upon for guidance, who was going to set the guidelines? Well,
here the doctors of California might be considered to have been ahead
of their time, because they composed a Top Ten List; a list of acts or
symptoms which would qualify you for residency in the State’s newest
hotel. They didn’t actually call it a Top Ten List, but it was what
they decided upon to use for a guideline. And what was actually on
that list might make you more than a little frightened.

So, counting down to Number One, at the bottom of the list there was:

10) Fright.

If reading this list makes you feel a little scared of medical care in
the 1850’s, then that legitimate fear would have qualified you for a
visit to the brand new Insane Asylum of the State of California.
Fright was not considered to be a sane response to a situation, and
the longer that response lasted, the more insane you were. Never mind
the fact that there were plenty of things in California of which to be
frightened, such as frequently collapsing mine shafts, frequent
shootings, frequent stage robberies, frequent altercations with Native
Californians, frequent earthquakes, frequent deaths by accident, and
wild predators everywhere – Get Over It! If you felt a little nervous
about such things and happened to impart that fear to a doctor, then
that Esteemed Man of Medicine might well pack you off to the insane
asylum so that you could calm down - because being locked up in an
asylum always makes you feel better, right?

Next was:

9) Epilepsy.

No, they weren’t kidding. Epilepsy can cause seizures, and those
seizures usually happen somewhat randomly. There are some common
things which can trigger those seizures, but those were not
necessarily recognized as such back in the 1850’s. So when a seizure
occurred and the individual collapsed to the ground the common
symptoms in evidence could be twitching, kicking, moaning, effusive
drooling, grinding of teeth, losing control of one’s bladder, and eyes
rolling back into the head. If an individual happened to display those
symptoms back in the 1600’s they probably would have been thought to
be either a witch or possessed by a devil. But the more enlightened
medical community of the 1850’s saw it for what the medical community
was certain it really was – mental illness. So, if while working in
the perpetual darkness of a mine you behaved normally but once the
bright light of day triggered a seizure then you were to be viewed
with suspicion, and preferably confined.

Yet at least instead of being executed you were merely locked up for
your own good. Thank god for progress.

Speaking of god, the next most popular cause of insanity was:

8) Religious and Spiritualistic Excitement.

Have you ever heard of Speaking in Tongues, been to a séance, or
thought you heard a voice when no one else was near? These would have
gotten you locked up in 1850’s California. As would have communicating
with any kind of spirit. In this guideline the doctors apparently
sought to walk a fine line. They did not disavow the validity of
believing in god yet felt that actually hearing god’s voice was just a
bit over the line, kind of on the level of having conversations with
your dead Aunt Flo. Native dances where the participants seemed to
enter a trance, altered states of consciousness, and just about any
foreign religion at all qualified under this quideline.

So by all means talk to Aunt Flo when her spirit comes to visit; just
don’t do so out loud.

7) Disappointment in Love.

In California of the early 1850’s the proportion of men to women was
greater than ten to one. Brothels were often infrequent and most women
usually only took up residence in the larger cities. Trapped in the
mines or working the sluices with only hundreds of other males for
companionship meant that a man would often go for months without even
seeing a woman, only dreaming of her. When a miner finally got enough
gold to go to town a woman would be one of the first three things he
would want (the others being whiskey and gambling). And when that
lonely miner did finally lay his eyes on a real woman he would
inevitably be enamored. Going back to the mines he would then think of
her for the next several months until he again got to town and would
spend those long days in the mines feeling even more lonely than ever.
Disappointment in Love was part of the definition of being a gold
miner in California. It came with the territory. But the doctors
decided that unrequited love was a mental illness in the Golden State,
unable to fathom that perhaps there were valid reasons why tens of
thousands of men who spent their days digging in the dirt and their
nights drinking and gambling were unable to form lasting relationships
with women who had yet to arrive on this edge of the continent.

Another symptom common to the gold miner was:

6) Loss of Property.

Most of the men who came to California in the Gold Rush brought little
to nothing with them, nor did most leave much property behind in their
former homes. That’s because they didn’t have any property. That was
why most of them came here – to get some gold so they could acquire
some property. Few actually managed to do that because most of the
flakes and the nuggets that made it into their leather pouches never
got saved for any length of time. It instead got spent on the three
forms of entertainment mentioned above. But many miners were
consistent losers at poker and faro – the two most common games of
chance in California. Instead of just accepting the fact that they
were bad gamblers they would instead get depressed and go on a
drinking binge. That demonstrated Weak Character. So by all means, Mr.
Miner, gamble and lose your stake. But don’t let others see that it
got you down, because that shows mental deficiency.

And then you’re just going to be taking up space in the Insane Asylum,
space really need by those who have:

5) A Physical Disability.

It would seem that the population of miners in California in the
1850’s was not really all that pleasing to the eye, apparently
resembling something out of a Mary Shelley novel with physical
deformities parading through the unpaved lanes like failed scientific
experiments. Men with missing legs, arms, and fingers; men with
crushed and useless limbs that trailed along behind them; men with
less than the usual allotment of two eyes, two ears, a nose, and other
various yet important appendages. Apparently such physical deformity
was a common side effect of working in the mines and was rampant in
California, making many men despondent over their Frankenstein-like
appearance and inability to attract the ladies (which would then have
led to Unrequited Love and left them with a whole different set of
problems). Unable to just Take It Like A Man, many such men turned to
drink or begging, or both. This was a red flag for mental illness.
Mining companies weren’t about to pay for rehabilitation – a policy
shared by the logging companies and railroads in later years. And
since doctors couldn’t cure them they instead watched for signs that
might indicate they were becoming social parasites so they could be
locked up.

It was enough to make a man pee in his pants – which, coincidently,
was the next symptom of insanity:

4) Incontinence.

Have you ever laughed so hard that maybe you lost just a bit of muscle
control? Off to the Insane Asylum with you! Yes, peeing and pooping in
your pants were definite signs of mental illness, although the
connection was a bit tenuous. Apparently a loss of control over such
basic bodily functions indicated a loss of mental control as well.
After all, if you were just sitting around the campfire having a plate
of beans with your fellow miners and suddenly those fine fellows saw
(or smelled) a puddle forming beneath your seat, you could hardly
blame them if they either quickly excused themselves and walked away
or politely coughed and said something like, “Uh, had a check-up
lately, Jim Bob?” Once Jim Bob explained his predicament to the doctor
then it was off to the asylum with him.  And if he happened to have
been experiencing a religious fervor while losing control, then he was
really up the creek.

This brings us (finally) to the Top Three Reasons for Being Declared
Insane in California in the 1850’s, and with baited breath we can only
hope that they manage to meet the high standards set by all of those
previous guidelines.

Don’t worry – they will.

3) Inappropriate Sexual Activity with Others.

Prostitution was legal in California yet demonized by the religious
profession and frowned upon by the medical profession. It was Evil,
and only insane men do evil things. There were millions of men in
California who were thousands of miles from home and these men were
mostly in their twenties; the prime of life, just bursting with energy
and enthusiasm. And frustration. By comparison there were only a
handful of women available to those men. A miner’s chances of getting
married were substantially less than that of his simultaneously
undergoing a spiritual fervor and peeing in his pants while getting
hit by a meteor. Yet if a miner did seek to ease his frustration in
the company of a woman he’d never before met and would never see
again, it still did not seem like the actions of a reasonable and sane
man to the doctors, and seeking erotic activity without the sanctity
of matrimony was deemed the third most common cause of insanity in
California.

It was enough to drive a man to drink. So it's not surprising that the
second most common symptom of insanity was:

2)Alcoholism.

At last! This is the only one on the Top Ten list of symptoms which
had some basis in reality, as alcohol could form a mental as well as a
physical addiction. But the docs didn’t limit their definition to
those who were falling-down drunk in the streets. No, this criteria
included also those who might display any sign of intemperance, which
included ingesting spirits at an inappropriate time, in an
inappropriate place, or in inappropriate company, as any of which
could be deemed aberrant behavior.

But life in California in those days was hard. Men worked hard, and
they wanted to play hard. Yet it was now official that gambling could
cause mental illness; drinking could tip you over the mental cliff;
sex with others outside of marriage could make you insane. What else
was left?

What’s that – you think you’ve thought of something?

Well, you’re wrong. What you just thought of is Number One on the list.

1 )  Erotic Activity With Yourself

If the boys in the mines thought Number Three (above) was bad, hearing
about this one just about caused them to explode. Literally.

Did you have a hard day in the mine, Big Fella? Well, get used to it;
it’s gonna get even harder. Because seeking any type of relief from
that stress might just land you in the Looney Bin. You already knew
that you couldn’t gamble with the boys or pray too loudly with the
pastor. You can’t talk to your dead relatives. You can’t feel fear
over just how damn hard life is. You can’t seek relief with women, and
now you can’t even seek relief with yourself with that one lonely
activity made so famous by Onan in the bible, because that has been
deemed to be - by far - the Number One Major Cause of Insanity in
California. If you go off into the woods with a woman, then you’ll go
to hell. If you go off into the woods alone – to do the Miner’s
Handshake, as one popular euphemism puts it - then you could go to the
insane asylum. Life just wasn’t fair.

One has to wonder – did these doctors really take themselves
seriously? The answer would be – Yes, indeed they did. They took
themselves just as seriously as doctors do today; they were quite as
certain that they were always making the right diagnoses just as are
modern doctors. Which makes one also wonder – what kind of list will
be made about modern doctors a hundred years from today?

Since miners were the group which was specifically targeted by the
doctors they had to adapt, and do so rapidly. The moral to all of
this, as was quickly learned by any intelligent miner, was to do
exactly as you wanted to do as long as you stayed high in the Sierra
Nevada Mountains and stayed away from doctors.

There were, of course, some people who did seem to be genuinely insane
by any standard – not counting the individuals who drafted the above
criteria, of course. If someone was violent or totally irrational then
they were usually locked up in the basement of the insane asylum where
they couldn’t hurt anyone.

Nothing like having a few dozen screamers in the dungeon to lend a
little atmosphere to the place.

One Last Insane Postscript:

In April of 1856 the Superintendent of the Insane Asylum, a man by the
name of Doctor Samuel Langdon, got into a bit of an argument with one
of his fellow care givers, Doctor William Ryer. Unable to resolve the
dispute with a quiet discussion of the issues - as would have, say,
any sane professional doctor might have done - Doctor Langdon instead
lost control and challenged Ryer to a duel. In the exchange of gunfire
which followed Doctor Langdon lost both the argument and the duel,
taking a bullet in the knee. He was quickly and quietly retired from
office and away from the embarrassing public spotlight which shone
upon him. However, since he had not been observed to gamble, drink,
drool, have a conversation with god, become incontinent, or engage in
erotic behavior while alone or with invisible entities, he was not
deemed quite crazy enough to be locked up in his own institution, and
no doubt went on to offer his friendly professional services to many
others while in private practice in the ensuing years.

Yet rumor had it that he always remained somewhat reluctant to shake
hands with a miner from the mountains.
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The Mystery of the Calaveras Skull

3/1/2016

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When one thinks of the eminent Josiah Whitney, that noble and esteemed
scientist of the eighteen hundreds, it is fairly safe to assume that
the mental image of Cave Men dressed in animal skins wielding clubs
and hunting giant extinct mammals would probably not spring to your
mind as a part of your vision of that great man. Yet you probably
didn’t know that this now forgotten link between Whitney’s World of
Geology and that Primitive World of Cave Men does indeed  exist, which
just goes to show how little you know about history.

If one were to ask anyone in contemporary California what the name
Josiah Whitney means to them, they would probably answer with
something regarding the mountain peak which bears his name - Mount
Whitney – the highest point in the continental United States which is
now surrounded by Sequoia National Park. And they would be correct.
But if one were to have asked this question to a Californian of a
century and a half ago the answer would probably also have included
something about the Geological Survey which Whitney headed; the one
which mapped and named much of the Sierra Nevada Mountain range during
the mid to late eighteen hundreds.

Yet the odds are that almost no one, be it in 1866 or in 2016, would
respond by telling you a story about Whitney in which Early Man
inhabited California tens of millions of years ago; that humans at
that time shared this Golden State with giant and long extinct
creatures; and that, based on his geological research and recognized
historical expertise, Josiah Whitney was a leading proponent of this
controversial view of North American History. And yet he was just
that, and – according to him - he had the evidence to prove it.

If, at this point in the story, your mind is leaping back to the no
doubt historically accurate vision of Raquel Welch in the movie One
Million Years B.C., then you have at last made the leap to the link
which I inferred, and one which would have been a most valid leap from
Whitney’s point of view. However, poor Josiah Whitney did not have the
benefit of the Hollywood Imagination Machine to help him conjure
images of primitive men and women in California. What he did have was
somewhat less attractive yet nevertheless even more intriguing – he
had the skull of an early hominid creature found deep in a mine shaft
in the Sierra Nevada Mountains; a skull found in geological strata so
old that it proved that its human-like owner had walked this land with
the long extinct creatures millions of years ago. So Whitney set out
with determination and gusto on the difficult path of trying to
convince the scientific establishment of this newly discovered fact.
The scientific establishment was not impressed.

The story begins in February of 1866 when a man named Mattison who was
partial owner of a gold mine near Angels uncovered some bones buried
in the mine, in a layer of gravel about 130 feet below the surface.
The bones were lying between volcanic material above them and bedrock
below. Volcanic activity in this area had occurred five to forty
million years ago, and since the skull had most of the volcanic
material on top of it and had lain undisturbed until the time of its
discovery, this indicated that it would have been from the older end
of that age spectrum.

Mattison removed the bones, which he could see formed a skull, and
brought the bones to a friend of his at the Wells, Fargo & Company
office in Angel’s. There they cleaned up the bones and reassembled
them, and they clearly saw that it was a human skull. So the skull was
then sent to a Doctor Jones at the nearby mining camp of Murphy’s, in
the hopes of a determination being made as to its age and manner of
death. Besides being a medical doctor Jones was also a collector of
all things antiquarian and recognized the skull as definitely being of
antiquarian origin. He wrote a letter to the Geological Survey, whose
office was in San Francisco, informing them of the find. And who
happened to be opening the office mail that day? None other than
Josiah Whitney.

After reading the letter describing the find, Whitney immediately set
out to Murphy’s and Angel’s to speak face to face with all of the
individuals involved in the discovery. He was already acquainted with
Doctor Jones and knew him as an individual whose testimony he thought
could be trusted as both accurate and reliable. Whitney then returned
to San Francisco and wrote a paper on the bones, which became known as
the Calaveras Skull, and presented that paper to the California
Academy of Sciences in July of 1866, a mere four months after its
discovery. Unlike today, apparently such dissertations weren’t subject
to months of delay and peer review, yet Whitney was prestigious enough
to have avoided such things anyway. In his paper he firmly stated that
the skull had been unearthed within geological strata from the
Pliocene Era, making its age probably between five and twenty-five
million years old. This paper caused quite a stir, because then as now
current belief held that Native Americans had only been in this area
for a few thousand years – perhaps ten thousand at most. So a lot of
coughing, winking, and elbow-nudging was no doubt going on in that
audience as Whitney’s fellow scientists felt that he had probably
crossed the line which demarked the scientific from the incredulous.

Nevertheless, Whitney stuck to his guns. But Christian church pastors
and the Christian press – both very vocal and influential groups -
immediately jumped on the story and angrily argued that it simply was
not credible. They claimed it was a hoax and, in a thin attempt to
acknowledge Whitney’s scientific prestige, they claimed that the hoax
had been perpetrated upon him as a joke by rowdy mountain miners.
Whitney was, after all, a man of considerable scientific achievement,
and there was a much stronger chance of discrediting the evidence if
they excluded him from the charge of fraud – even if that was what
many of them privately believed. The western writer Bret Harte also
got into the spirit of the controversy and wrote a humorous poem
titled ‘The Pliocene Skull’.

Whitney acknowledged that many were opposed to his views and replied
that the age of the skull was being primarily disparaged by religious
critics, not scientific ones.  In response to this Doctor William
Holmes of the Smithsonian Institution decided that he should
investigate the matter. He made the trip to California and interviewed
everyone he could find who had been involved in the story, some of
whom propounded the idea that the whole thing had just been a joke
that had gotten out of control. On the other hand Mr. Mattison, who
had found the skull, swore that it was genuine, as did Mr. Scribner of
the Wells, Fargo & Company who had assisted in cleaning and
reassembling it. Yet now there came a hint that there was also some
indication that the skull of which Whitney took possession may not
have been the original skull found in the mine shaft; that there may
have been a switch which took place either at the Wells, Fargo station
or at Doctor Jones’ office. Doctor Jones was a collector of such
artifacts, and some assumed that when he’d received the original older
skull from Mattison he had surreptitiously replaced it with another,
keeping the original for his private collection. Yet there was never
any direct evidence that this had actually happened. After countless
interviews of conflicting testimonies, Doctor Holmes of the
Smithsonian gave up and returned to Washington, unable to reach a
definite conclusion about the origin or age of the skull.

The Calaveras Skull (or one of the Calaveras Skulls, if a switch had
indeed taken place) then got shipped to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and
there at the Peabody Museum Doctor Holmes finally got to examine it.
He concluded that it was in fact the skull of a more modern human and
did not show the evolutionary characteristics of Early Man, and that
it probably wasn’t more than a thousand years in age. This presented a
quandary for the religious protestors: on the one hand Holmes was
supporting their position by saying it wasn’t as old as stated; on the
other hand he was basing that decision on supposed evolutionary
characteristics which were in direct opposition to the basic beliefs
of Christianity. Should the pastors support this statement by Holmes,
or should they decry it instead? No one seemed to know. It was a
‘Damned if we do or damned if we don’t’ situation. In the meantime the
director of the Peabody Museum – Doctor F. Putnam – expressed his view
that the skull was indeed the Real Deal, and that it presented proof –
albeit controversial proof – that humans had existed in California for
millions of years longer than previously believed. So he came out in
direct opposition to Doctor Holmes of the Smithsonian. Also offering
his support to Whitney was Clarence King, a famous geologist in
California scientific circles and destined to become the first
director of the United States Geological Survey; a man whose
professional accomplishments came to be overshadowed by details of his
personal life after his death but who nevertheless had impeccable
scientific credentials. Another heavyweight weighing in on Whitney’s
side was Doctor O. Marsh, a well-known paleontologist who was the
President of the National Academy of Sciences. On both sides of the
issue men (yes - always men, no women) were adamant. The scientists
cloaked their fiery opinions with the pretense of professional
behavior, while those whose opinions were based in religion were just
fiery; often openly contemptuous.

Actually, it was surprising that Whitney got as much support from the
scientific community as he did. Scientists are notoriously
conservative and generally unaccepting of any ideas which challenge
their traditional values. In the instance of humans abiding in
California millions of years ago this same prejudice continues to this
day, with the Accepted Doctrine being that this area had no human
presence until Early Man (and woman) migrated to North America across
the Bering Land Bridge about ten thousand years ago and then spread
south; that Modern Man evolved only in one place – that being the
so-called Cradle of Civilization in Africa - and then expanded from
there to populate the world. This insular attitude is jealously and
tenaciously guarded, and evidence to the contrary demonstrating that
the story of human development is perhaps much more varied and
convoluted is often ridiculed or summarily dismissed. So the
skepticism faced by Whitney was not surprising to him, for the
evolution of humans into creatures with more intelligent minds than
Early Man does not necessarily include that those modern men have also
developed more open minds.

And in support of Whitney’s stand there is other archaeological
evidence contrary to accepted scientific doctrine, one instance of
which was found a bit farther to the north yet still in California. In
a mine shaft in Placer County known as the Missouri Tunnel a human leg
bone was discovered, and studies of samples from the surrounding soil
revealed an age of almost nine million years. In the mining camp of
Cherokee several stone mortars were unearthed in deep mining shafts in
1853, also in levels dating back millions of years. In 1860 and again
in 1869 stone mortars, in conjunction with other human tools, were dug
up near the town of San Andreas – again dating back well before humans
were supposed to be walking those hills.

Another instance of discovery took place about ten years before the
Calaveras Skull was discovered and yet not too far away. In 1856 Dr.
C. Winslow of California submitted a deposition to the Boston Society
of Natural History of an amazing discovery in a mine located near
Table Mountain. He stated that miners digging tunnels beneath Table
Mountain had, at a depth of about two hundred feet below the surface,
unearthed a complete human skeleton. The gravel and volcanic deposits
within which it lay were estimated to be of an age from thirty-three
to fifty-five million years old. From this same mine at Table
Mountain, and at the same level of those human remains, numerous other
bones from Mastodons were also discovered. This later discovery wasn’t
exactly earth-shaking in itself because mastodons were known to have
existed in California until about ten thousand years ago when they
then became extinct, presumably due to over-hunting by humans. Yet
that raised another question – if humans had only arrived here about
ten thousand years ago, then how did they manage to kill off the
entire population of North American Mastodons almost immediately upon
their arrival, and do it with only roughly cut spears? To many this
discrepancy supported the thesis that humans had indeed been here for
far longer than rigid scientific thought would admit, and that they
had evolved systems of hunting, and perhaps even of civilization,
which were far in advance of the accepted views.

Then again in 1868, also beneath Table Mountain, two skull fragments
were discovered at a depth of 180 feet in a horizontal side-shaft
leading off of a deep vertical hole known as the Valentine Shaft,
which angled off steeply into the mountain. It was found amongst
gold-bearing gravel and also in association with mastodon bones. Also
found near the skull was a large stone mortar, an obvious early human
artifact; a tool which supposedly had not been developed in this area
until relatively recent eras of history. Yet the strata in which the
skull fragments and mortar were found dated from ten to fifty million
years ago. From those same mine shafts beneath Table Mountain a jaw
bone was also found in that same strata of ten to fifty million years
of age. Table Mountain appears to have been a popular gathering place
for Early Man and perhaps it is ironic that what today attracts crowds
of humans to Table Mountain is the gambling casino run there by Native
Americans, local descendants of those who once walked that mountain on
those old bones found from millions of years ago.

If you were to do research on the Calaveras Skull today you will find
that most scientific sources would still immediately dismiss it as a
hoax; a gag perpetrated upon an eager and gullible scientist by miners
with a sense of humor as coarse and creative as their homemade
alcoholic brew. And perhaps that might be the case. Critics would
state this opinion now just as they said it when the skull was
discovered; claiming that tests were not accurate, witnesses were
unreliable, bone fragments were carelessly catalogued, or perhaps even
that the original skull disappeared into a private collection almost
as soon as it had been discovered to be replaced by an obvious
pretender. Yet it would seem that there is strong evidence that humans
have indeed thrived in what is now California for many millions of
years; for far longer than the scientific community would acknowledge
to Josiah Whitney a hundred and fifty years ago or that they would
even grudgingly acknowledge today. Ironically those two opposing
forces - those who adhere to a strict interpretation of the bible have
this in common with those who adhere to a narrow interpretation of the
scientific data – they both deny the evidence of the presence of
humans in the Sierra Nevada Mountains dating back into antiquity.

Interestingly, in Spanish the word ‘Calaveras’ means skull, and this
part of California had that prescient name long before Josiah Whitney
stood before the California Academy of Sciences and showed the
scientists there assembled the skull of his ancient friend. Perhaps
there is an older, as yet unknown reason why this area of the Sierra
Nevada Mountains had this name. Perhaps skulls have populated this
part of the mountains for a very, very long time, and they
occasionally rise to the surface to whisper to us a bit of ancient
history. Instead of turning away with deaf ears, perhaps we should
choose to listen to what they have to tell us. A deep mine shaft when
once excavated may contain more than one type of treasure; but a
closed mind which refuses to open to the evidence of the past contains
nothing of value whatsoever.
2 Comments
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    Author

    With a degree in Anthropology and an avid interest in history, Tim Christensen has lived in the Sierra Nevada Mountains for many years. He has no cell phone or television, but manages, when not chopping firewood or shoveling snow, to keep himself entertained with a library of several thousand books. 

    Tim has worked for Sequoia Parks Conservancy since 2010 in the Kings Canyon Visitor Center and also as a naturalist for the Sequoia Field Institute.  COPYRIGHT 2016 T.E. CHRISTENSEN

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