All of the lakes in the chain were shallow, even more shallow than Tolay, hardly 20 feet in its deepest spot, but, like Tolay, all of the lakes contained water year round, until after European contact, when the water table in the region dropped 20 to 30 feet in a relatively short period of time. Standing on the ridges above the lake, you can see the emerald expanse of San Pablo Bay spreading before you, and like a sculpture rising from the water, San Francisco’s Financial District, and then four of the Bay’s major mountains: Mount Saint Helena, Mount Tamalpais, Mount Diablo, and Mount Burdell. You might imagine it the pendant at the end of the chain. Roughly seven miles east of Petaluma, Tolay is the southernmost and largest in a chain of lakes tucked within the Sonoma Mountain range. When American rancher William Bihler dynamited the southern end of Tolay Lake in the early 1870s, draining the rather large but shallow lake of water, what the muddy bottom revealed was thousands upon thousands of charmstones-far more than found in any one locale in North America. Maria Copa, a Coast Miwok born at Nicasio, told ethnographer Isabel Kelly that a charmstone had followed a woman home and that the woman had “to hit it three times” with a stick to kill it. Mabel McKay, the late renowned Pomo basket-maker and medicine woman, witnessed a Lake County Indian doctor pulling a tiny rabbit from a sick woman’s chest using a thumb-size quartz amulet Mabel herself gave a troubled young man a charmstone to keep an evil spirit at bay. Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria Tribal Chairman Greg Sarris speaks at a Tolay Lake tribal gathering. Like other medicine men and women from Central California and beyond, Grandpa Tom, a Coast Miwok, used charmstones when doctoring the sick, for luck in fishing and hunting, and who knows what else-perhaps even causing an earthquake. Grandpa Tom, as he is known in the family-he was my great-great grandfather-reputedly caused the 1906 earthquake in a contest of power with another medicine man. The charmstone, an oblong, smoothly carved rock figure, about an inch and a half in length, was loosed from Tom Smith’s “doctoring kit,” which had been stored in a drawer at UC Berkeley’s Lowie Museum for decades following his death in 1934. Before visiting Tolay Lake, check details with Sonoma County Regional ParksĪ relative told me that when she saw Tom Smith’s charmstone, she was temporarily blinded and felt instantly faint-its power was that overwhelming.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |