The Saklan are a tribe of the Native American Miwok community, based just south of San Pablo and Suisun Bays, in Contra Costa County, California. Their historical tribal lands ranged from Moraga, to San Leandro Creek, to Lafayette.
History
The Saklan were historically called the Sacalanes, based on historical documentation related to Spanish contact. They are mentioned under that name, and related spellings, in the records for Mission Dolores between 1794 and 1821. They were first called the Saklan, in 1797. In 1816 they were mentioned again, as the Sacalanes, in the reports of the first Kotzebue expedition in 1816. They inhabited the interior valleys of today's East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, with period maps showing permanent and temporary settlements throughout the Lafayette Creek, Las Trampas Creek and San Leandro Creek watersheds and were members of a wide regional trade network. Though mostly semi-arid today as a result of a depleted water table from extensive farming, the region formerly had abundant springs and marshes that supported large villages. The Saklans and other nearby cultures drew upon the great vegetable and animal wealth of the area to sustain themselves throughout the year, and this allowed them to live at much higher population densities than most other places in North America.
Like many other indigenous cultures throughout modern-day California, in autumn the Saklans harvested prodigious amounts of acorns from the large forests of oaks that still blanket much of their ancestral homeland, preferring those of the California Black Oak for their taste but nonetheless using acorns from a variety of oak species. The productive oak groves in the region were tended to by successive generations of Saklans by use of fire and other processes in order to maintain acorn production. The seeds of wildflowers, pine nuts and multiple species of berries and roots were also gathered and processed by the Saklans. The favorable climate and geography of the Bay Area, as well as the constant maintenance of the forests and grasslands by the Saklan and their neighbors allowed for a wealth of animal life to coexist with the dense human population. Formerly antelope, Tule Elk and grizzly bears were present alongside the blacktail deer and mountain lion, which are the existing remnants the region's suite of large mammals. Beavers were present in large numbers throughout the Bay Area and the rest of California, and provided an important ecological service by saving large pools of water behind their dams during the summer dry season, keeping the ecosystem's thirst at bay. All of these animals were hunted by the indigenous peoples of the Bay Area, each with its own ritual and spiritual significance. Villages that sometimes contained dozens of families were almost always located along watercourses, in which the people bathed, drank and fished for salmon and trout migrating upstream from the Pacific. Strategies for catching fish included spears, weirs and stunning the fish using the fruit of the California Buckeye. The Saclans would have had access to a wide variety of trade goods due to their position close to the mouths of the two great rivers of California, the Sacramento River and the San Joaquin River as well as the Pacific Ocean. Trade with other tribes was essential to Saklan life and it is likely that the majority of interactions between them and their neighbors were peaceful, though they were no strangers to armed conflict.
The world the Saklan inhabited was one full of mystery and spiritual meaning. Each band would have known their territory intimately, and cared for it as one would their kin. Every feature: mountains, hills and valleys and all they contained had spiritual significance and an origin. Saklan territory sat on and between two ranges of hills, now known as Las Trampas and the Briones Hills and it is likely that these features along with nearby Mount Diablo held considerable spiritual weight due to the large number of archaeological sites in the two areas, as well as their prominence in the landscape.