Zayante, California

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Zayante, California is a ghost town in Santa Cruz County on Zayante Creek with an elevation of 420 feet. Its location is latitude 370531N, longitude 1220233W; decimal degrees: latitude 37.09194, longitude -122.0425.^[1]

[edit] History

The Zayantes, a local tribe of the Ohlone people, originally inhabited the area. Early history of the area recalls the Zayante people finding shelter and game in the plentiful forests. The area provided them with enough acorns, fish from Lompico and Newell Creek, and small game to live a peaceful, easy life. Temascals (saunas), songs, and games were the rule, while fighting and thievery the exception.

In 1769, the Spanish explorer Don Gaspar de Portola discovered the land area which is now known as the City of Santa Cruz. When Portola came upon the river which flows the Santa Cruz Mountains to the sea, he named it San Lorenzo in honor of Saint Lawrence. He called the rolling hills above the river Santa Cruz, which means "holy cross". Twenty-two years later, in 1791, Father Fermin de Lasuen established a mission at Santa Cruz, the twelfth mission to be founded in California.

Over the next 20 years, word spread throughout the Ohlone tribes, including the Zayante Indians, that the Santa Cruz Mission would provide food, shelter, and education, if they came to live at the mission. This was a lucrative offer that was hard to turn down and over time most of the Indians chose to live at the mission. Unfortunately, Western diseases decimated the Indian populace and only small groups remained after 1820. In the 1830s, the Santa Cruz Mission and other California missions were secularized (turned over to the tribes) by Mexico (which had acquired California in 1822), only to seriously decline and, in some cases, fall into ruin.

The very last of the Zayante people was a woman who lived for many years beside Zayante Creek. When she died in 1934, she was buried somewhere among the giant redwoods in Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park. Her grave, like her people, is lost now.

The Spaniards considered all of Santa Cruz County to be their sovereign property and the few remaining Ohlones and Zayantes were not enough to keep them from subdividing the land into ranchos. The Lompico area became part of the Rancho Zayante, which was granted by Mexico in 1834 to Joaquin Buelna and consisted of 2,658 acres just north of Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park.

The next year Buelna let his claim lapse and, in 1836, the American-born settler Isaac Graham, with his friend Henry Neale, acquired Rancho Zayante and the adjoining San Augustine Rancho via Joseph Majors, who had the required Mexican citizenship in order to be granted a Rancho.

In 1841, Majors, Graham, a German named Frederick Hoeger, and a Dane named Peter Lassen, agreed to erect a mill on Zayante Creek near where it enters the San Lorenzo River. This was reputed to be the first power sawmill in California and was used to mill trees from Lompico.

While building the mill (six years before discovery of gold at a saw mill being constructed in Coloma which resulted in the California gold rush), Isaac Graham found a single gold nugget worth $32,000. In comparison, the flake that set off the California gold rush was no larger than one’s little finger nail. In 1855, gold again was discovered along Zayante Creek in what is known today as Henry Cowell State Park. During the summer of that year, miners realized three to ten dollars a day for their efforts and the gold panning fever spread throughout the San Lorenzo Valley and up into Zayante Creek and its tributaries, including Lompico Creek. Much gold still remains in these creeks but is too cost prohibitive to extract.

By the 1850s, Felton became the hub of the logging industry and the coastal redwood trees that blanketed the area became the largest export. Early loggers described the area as dense, nearly impenetrable redwood forests, howling canyons, and frequent encounters with ferocious grizzly bears, the last of which, a silvertip sow, is said to have been killed near Bonny Doon in the late 1880s. They also struggled with a lack of access and suitable transportation for the timber. Eventually the original trusty oxen were replaced by wood burning donkey engines, of which some tracks can still be found today in Lompico. Between 1890 and 1900, the entire area was clear cut and the forest is now in the process of reestablishing itself on the young, steep slopes of marine sedimentary rock common to the California coast.

As with most of the San Lorenzo Valley, once the logging era ended, the old Rancho Zayante was subdivided and sold off to land developers who created the neighborhoods of Olympia, Zayante and Lompico.^[2]

Named for either Zayante Creek^[3] or the Zayante tribe, Zayante was a stop on the narrow gauge railroad that ran from Los Gatos to Santa Cruz from 1880 to 1940, primarily to ship lumber and various fruits grown in the area.^[4] Zayante had its own post office.^[5] The railroad was acquired by the Southern Pacific in the early 1900s, which added weekend excursion trains until the April 18, 1906, earthquake. Damage to rails, tunnels, and bridges was repaired and the railroad continued to operate until March 1940. Later that year, State Route 17 was routed away from Zayante and other stops along the railroad right-of-way.^[6]

Today, the area around Zayante is only sparsely settled.