Recently recovered FarShores file
POINT REYES NATIONAL SEASHORE - Sometimes on crisp, fogless nights, a full moon suspended low on the Pacific horizon projects a shimmering stripe of light across the waves toward shore. Coastal Miwoks, gazing out from Tomales Point, once believed that yellow luminescence marked a gossamer turnpike to the spirit world.
Sixty miles to the East, Mount St. Helena rises grandly on the horizon. According to the creed of nearby Lake Miwoks, the shadowy souls of the dead dwelt briefly on that peak before gliding overland, above the villages of their coastal cousins, and out along the phosphorescent path.
Lanny Pinola suspects these canons of Miwok cosmology might contain clues to a historic Marin County mystery: Who built the ancient wall of Tomales Point?
Pinola, one of the few Miwok elders still fluent in the language of his people, imagines the wall as a craggy beacon for Lake Miwok spirits soaring toward their new home in the canopy of heaven.
Other experts offer more prosaic explanations for the enigmatic line of stones that bisects Tomales Point about 2 miles north of the historic Pierce Ranch buildings. All agree the wall is very old, and nobody knows who first lugged those heavy stones into place - or why.
"It certainly could be prehistoric, but we don't have anything to document that," said Dewey Livingston, a retired park-service historian. It is not the wall's existence - but its quirks - that lends mystery to its origins.
"What piques a lot of people's interest is that it goes in an awkward direction," said Livingston. The wall cuts across the point - from cliff to cliff - at an eccentric angle, southwest to northeast. "If you think like a European would, or an immigrant coming to lay out farm fields, it's just an odd angle to run a fence," said Livingston.
Most intriguing is that the wall's eastern end aims unerringly toward Mount St. Helena. This curious orientation prompts some, such as Pinola - a park ranger and expert on Miwok traditions - to suspect it may have been constructed by his ancestors for ceremonial purposes. "High mountains are always sacred," Pinola said. And Mount St. Helena was a source of treasured obsidian for the Miwoks, who used the stone for arrowheads, talismans and fishing weights.
Pinola said an amateur investigator claims that significant astrological signs rise behind the mountain - as sighted from the wall - on certain nights. "The old people used to talk about the stars as they line up to certain points and directions, and what they meant in the old days," said Pinola. "Those people are gone now."
Leigh Marymor of the Bay Area Rock Art Research Association, devoted to studying prehistoric sites, said there is "evidence that Native Americans were pretty decent astronomers. We began to find that a lot of petroglyphs and stone structures had astronomical significance." But Marymor hastened to sour the theory: "There's no tradition in the Bay Area where we know from Indian informants that they built walls for any reason."
Sylvia Thalman, of the Novato-based Miwok Archaeological Preserve of Marin, doubts that the wall goes back to Miwok times. "To my knowledge, there's no proof that the Indians had anything to do with construction of this wall," she said.
"I think people create mystical explanations for anything that can't be explained," added Thalman. "There was a lot of cattle ranching out there, and the logical thing is that either the wall was put up just to clear the field of rocks, which is pretty common, or that it was used as a fence."
Carefully arranged stones
Yet a visit to the site - which requires a protracted hike along the chilly, windward side of Tomales Point, past grazing herds of tule elk - reveals that the fabled wall is not, in truth, a wall at all. It is a line of carefully arranged stones, ranging in height from a few inches to about 2 feet. "See?" said Pinola as he showed the wall to visitors. "It looks more like a marker."
Had a genuine wall stood at that site, its remains should be obvious today, according to Roger Kelly, regional archaeologist for the U.S. Park Service. "Usually the evidence of collapse is pretty clear," he said.
Livingstone said the first European settlers on Tomales Point arrived in the 1850s, "and we have (the wall) on a map shortly after that." That map, a U.S. Coast Survey chart, was drawn in 1862. At that time, said Livingstone, the Pierce Ranch - which grew into a massive dairy operation - was only 4 years old and quite small.
Before the arrival of the Pierce clan, Tomales Point contained a dairy ranch run by George Laird, an Irishman. The Irish have a famous predilection for stacking rocks into walls. Thalman speculates the wall could date to the Spanish mission or Mexican land-grant era, roughly encompassing the first half of the 19th century in Marin County.
Shortest route
Although the wall does bisect the Tomales Point peninsula at a curious angle, Rick Dorrance - a historical landscape architect for the park service - says the explanation might be mundane. "It's the shortest route across the point," he said. Dorrance produced a 1942 aerial photograph to illustrate that the wall makes use of two gulches at each end to close the point with the fewest stones possible. "The elk or cattle could not circumvent that gulch," he said.
Even so, constructing the wall was no easy task. Donald Gunn, a park volunteer and author of an informative booklet called "More Light on the Point," has counted more than 400 stones aligned from the Pacific Ocean to Tomales Bay.
Two months ago, Dorrance discovered yet another stone wall of unknown origin running along the boundary of the park and neighboring ranches. He said local ranchers believe it was built by Chinese laborers. "It's 2 or 3 feet high," said Dorrance. "Its history is unknown."
It's possible to peer further into the past in search of the wall-builders. Marymor said the Miwoks, who arrived around 1000 B.C., were preceded by at least 5,000 years by the Hokan - who left calling cards in stone. Not, however, in the form of walls. Instead, the Hokan incised circular and oval designs in bas-relief on rocks throughout the Bay Area.
Even if Miwoks did build the wall, it is not necessarily prehistoric, noted Greg Sarris, a Miwok leader and English professor at UCLA. "I don't know about this wall here," he said. "I don't know if it is pre-contact (with European explorers)." He said claims that Miwoks have no wall-building tradition are wrong. "We used to build rock walls for hunting blinds," said Sarris.
Kelly said no archaeological explorations have been made at the Tomales Point wall - or, for that matter, anywhere on Tomales Point. Not until scientists conduct their own arcane rituals at the site - if even then - will the rocks reveal the secret of their past.
