21 Facts About Esselen people

Esselen are a Native American people belonging to a linguistic group in the hypothetical Hokan language family, who are indigenous to the Santa Lucia Mountains of a region south of the Big Sur River in Big Sur, Monterey County, California.

The Esselen people were required to labor at the three nearby missions, Mission San Carlos, Mission Nuestra Senora de la Soledad, and Mission San Antonio de Padua.

The Esselen people were believed to have been exterminated but some tribal members avoided the mission life and emerged from the forest to work in nearby ranches in the early and late 1800s.

Descendants of the Esselen people are currently scattered, but many still live in the Monterey Peninsula area and nearby regions.

Country of the Ecclemachs [Esselen people] extends above 20 leagues to the [south]eastward of Monterey.

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The Esselen people resided along the upper Carmel and Arroyo Seco River, and along the Big Sur coast from near present-day Hurricane Point to the vicinity of Vicente Creek in the south.

The Esselen people's territory extended inland through the Santa Lucia Mountains as far as the Salinas Valley.

Jean La Perouse reported that, "The country of the Ecclemachs [Esselen people] extends above 20 leagues to the [south-]eastward of Monterey.

Several Esselen people mortars are located in boulders near Clover Basin Camp in Miller Canyon.

Esselen people described how they lived in dome-shaped dwellings covered with bundled mats of tules.

Esselen people told Fages that, as a Christian, he had to observe the sabbath and let his men rest on Sundays.

Esselen people reckoned those qualities — along with the foggy and windy climate, shortage of potable water, high death rate, and language barriers — accounted for the painfully slow progress of mission Carmel.

Under Spanish law, the Esselen people were technically free individuals, but they could be compelled by force to labor without pay.

Esselen people had ongoing conflicts with the neighboring Rumsen tribe over crops and hunting grounds.

Esselen people thought they considered the Indians "too much a child, too much a slave, too little a man.

Esselen people said they were treated like slaves on a plantation.

Esselen people was not only given no assistance in the struggle against foreign diseases, but was prevented from adopting even the most elementary measures to secure his food, clothing, and shelter.

Some anthropologists and linguists assumed that the Esselen people's culture had been virtually extinguished by as early as the 1840s.

However, existing tribe members cite evidence that some Esselen people were able to move beyond the reach of the Spanish soldiers, who rode on horseback, by hiding in the rugged interior of the Santa Lucia Mountains.

Many anthropologists believed that the Costanoan-speaking Esselen people encompassed a geographical area from north of San Francisco to Monterey.

In 2010 the Esselen people Nation petitioned the federal government for recognition as a tribe.