Protection and preservation of the heritage resources requires that we know where these resources are located, and understand how they contribute to California’s expansive history. To date a combined total of over 13,400 cultural resources have been recorded on State Park lands, and many more remain to be documented. These precious archeological sites, buildings and structures, historic landscapes and cultural preserves represent a broad spectrum of California’s richly diverse past. They include, but are not limited to: Native American sites that span 10,000 years and reflect the variety of distinct cultural adaptations of prehistoric Californians; Mission Era sites and structures; Chinese, Russian, African American and other ethnic properties; early Californio and American Era resources; mining, ranching and agricultural landscapes; and underwater shipwrecks. All contribute to our understanding of the development of California as we know it today, and all provide us with physical connections to our past.
Nearly every student of western trail history has heard of Johnson’s Ranch. References to it may be seen in pioneer diaries, on maps and in books. Though Sutter’s Fort was, and is, officially known as the western terminus of the Read More …
This thesis is about one of the most infamous emigrant expeditions of all time: the Donner Party. After reading that sentence many people will think of cannibalism and may assume this thesis is about members of Donner Party who resorted Read More …
Archaeologists use material remains to better understand the lives and experiences of people who lived in the past. In the case of the 2004 archaeological investigation at Alder Creek, the location of the Donner Party’s Donner family camp, writing slate Read More …
The Donner Summit Public Utility District (DSPUD) is proposing upgrades and improvements on its wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) and spray irrigation disposal system at Soda Springs, California (Nevada County). Project activities are planned on two separate parcels. The ten-acre site, Read More …
The purpose of this study is to provide an ethnohistoric and ethnographic assessment of selected American Indian communities along the OST. Text from the initial study design is provided in this and the next three sections of this chapter. It Read More …
Earlier this year some of our California OCTA members joined with US Forest Service personnel to survey and retrieve emigrant artifacts on the Lassen Trail.
One of the artifacts on display in the museum at Donner Lake State Park is a freshly polished coin, one of a cache carried in the family wagon of Franklin Ward Graves and his soon-to-become-widowed wife Elizabeth, who only had Read More …
In the latter half of 1988 Roderick Sprague was notified by Betty Lee, then chairman of the Archaeology Committee of the Oregon-California Trails Association, that Paul and Ruby Tschirky, landowners of a possible site of the Bloody Point massacre, were Read More …
Reviews accounts of the Bloody Point Massacre of 1852, in which a band of Modoc Indians attacked a small group of emigrants at Tule Lake in Northern California, and was subsequently routed by a rescue party from Yreka. Speculates on Read More …
The Old Spanish Trail is a historic trade route that connected the northern New Mexico settlements of Santa Fe, New Mexico, with those of southern California. Approximately 700 miles long, the trail ran through areas of high mountains, arid deserts, Read More …