Esselen Erotic

The Esselen are the people of the Big Sur backcountry, a small nation whose territory was some of the steepest ground in California: the Santa Lucia Mountains where they drop into the Pacific south of the Big Sur River, and the oak valleys and creek canyons behind them, reaching inland toward the upper Carmel River and Arroyo Seco. What set them apart from their neighbors was, above all, language. To the north the Rumsen spoke an Ohlone tongue, to the south the Salinan spoke their own, and Esselen matched neither. Linguists file it under the proposed Hokan family, but the link is thin enough that some treat it as an isolate. What survives is a short record of words and phrases taken down by Spanish missionaries, by a French scientific expedition that called at Monterey in 1786, and by later collectors working from the memories of elderly descendants.

Life ran on a seasonal round. Summer meant the coast, with mussels, abalone and other shellfish pried from the rocks. Autumn drew families back into the hills for acorns, the staple food, pounded in bedrock mortars and leached into meal, and the colder months added deer, rabbit and wild seeds. Rough terrain kept communities small and scattered, and estimates of the population before contact run from several hundred to over a thousand. Painted handprints on the walls of backcountry rock shelters are among the few marks of that life still standing.

Spanish colonization reached them early and hit hard. Mission San Carlos Borromeo was founded at Monterey in 1770 and moved to Carmel a year later, and Mission Soledad opened in 1791. Esselen families entered both, some by choice and many under pressure, and disease, forced labor and baptism remade their world within a generation. By the early twentieth century, anthropologists were writing the Esselen off as extinct, among the first California peoples said to have disappeared entirely. Their descendants never accepted that verdict. Mission baptism and marriage registers, which trace lineages through generations of intermarriage with Rumsen, Salinan and Yokuts people, give families a documented line back to Esselen villages.

Today people of Esselen ancestry organize through the Esselen Tribe of Monterey County and the Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen Nation, neither of them federally recognized. In 2020 the Esselen Tribe of Monterey County took title to roughly 1,200 acres of ranchland along the Little Sur River, near Pico Blanco, a pale limestone peak the tribe holds sacred. It was their first land base in about two and a half centuries, and the tribe has spoken of using it for ceremony and cultural education.