Many years ago, while hiking around the summit Mt. Tamalpais, I struck off down a small and precipitous trail descending the steep east face of the mountain. The chaparral on that side is thick and unbroken, blocking most of the view and all of the breeze. It was a hot day and the rugged trail and slippery footing made for hard sweaty going. The trail went straight down the slope without switchbacks and soon turned into little more than an erosion scar three or four feet deep. Partway down the mountain, I came across a large lichen-covered boulder perhaps ten feet high beside the trail. Set into the side of the boulder was a bronze plaque with a moving speech by an American Indian. I was surprised, because the trail was so small and the location of the boulder so remote and difficult of access. I remembered being quite moved by the speech, but it was rather lengthy and I did not take the time to copy it down. I emerged at last on a dirt road above Mill Valley and made my way back to my car.
I have thought of this plaque a few times since and told a few people about it. I’ve had an idea for a long time about writing a piece about some of the little known and out of the way sights in Marin, and I thought the plaque would be a good one for the collection. A few months ago, I decided to go try to find it again and write down the speech this time.
I was fairly sure it was somewhere on the North Knee, a prominent rocky knoll on the northeast face not too far from the top. It makes a distinctive bump in the silhouette of the mountain, visible from scores of miles away. In fact, it forms the breast of the sleeping Indian maiden of legend. I wasn’t sure how far down the plaque had been, so I decided to start at the top. I went to the summit, then bushwhacked down the east face toward the North Knee. It was a tangle of manzanita and coyote brush and very tough going. By the time I finally emerged onto the Verna Dunshee Trail, the paved loop around the summit, I was wishing I’d just walked around the loop. I crossed the loop and started down the steep and slippery single-track toward North Knee, keeping a careful eye out for the boulder with the plaque. I went all the way down the mountain to Indian Fire Road without seeing it. I must have been wrong about it being on the northeast ridge. I was way too tired to try another trail, so I gave up for the day.
Last weekend I tried again. I wondered if the plaque had actually been around on the equally steep southeast side of the mountain. I started at Mountain Home Inn and walked up the steady grade of the old Railroad Grade, the former roadbed of the Crookedest Railroad in the World, from Mill Valley to the summit. Just above the Double Bowknot, I struck the Fern Creek trail and headed steeply up. It was very steep, just long flights of stairs really, and I emerged at the summit visitor center very hot and winded, but without seeing the plaque. I asked the guy at the concession stand about it and he told me it was on the Temelpa Trail, another precipitous single-track that drops down due east from the Verna Dunshee Loop. So I went around the loop, watching closely for any other trails descending to the east. I reached the Temelpa without seeing any. So there were only three possible trails on the whole eastern side, and I’d already walked two of them. I started down, feeling that I was now closing in on my goal.
After an hour of slipping and sliding down the rutted and heavily eroded trail, I came to the conclusion that I must have missed the plaque again. I had remembered it as being quite high on the mountain, not far below the Dunshee. But I’d come down eight hundred or a thousand feet without seeing it. Wondering if I was just mis-remembering the whole thing, I decided I was on the wrong trail again and just wanted to get back to the car. I came to an unmarked fork and took the right fork on the Vic Haun trail because it headed more directly for the car.
Today I tried a third time, determined to find it. I took Basil, my seven-month-old Corgi puppy. We started at Mountain Home again, up the Railroad Grade, and east on the Hoo-Koo-E-Koo Fire Road. A couple of miles further on, we hit the Temelpa Trail again, well below where I had turned off last time. Looking both up and down the trail, all I could see was a deep-cut erosion track through the manzanita, basically a series of knee- and waist-high steps. Still convinced the plaque was higher on the mountain, we went up.
The trail was tough for the leg-challenged Basil, but he struggled up gamely. The trail was a deep vee shape in the rocky soil, four to six feet deep, with a narrow six-inch trough in the bottom. The slope was more than 45 degrees, and the dense manzanita blocked any air movement down there, although we could hear it blowing quite strongly across the top of the chaparral. After an hour of climbing, I was tired and Basil was having a hard time climbing all the steps. His ears were down and I could tell he was tired. After a particularly steep and difficult stretch, there was a small turnout on the left, the first way up out of the trench that we’d seen in a long while. Without my direction, Basil climbed up out of the trail into this small level spot and crawled into the cool shade of a large boulder. When I climbed up beside him, I found the plaque set into the side of the boulder at my eye level. It was not two by three feet, as I had remembered, but only nine by five inches, set deep into a chiseled depression in the rough rock.
We flopped down in the shade and shared a lunch of Cheezits and water from my Camelback. Then I got out a scrap of paper and copied down the text from the plaque:
Behold, my brothers, the spring has come; the earth has received the embraces of the sun and we shall soon see the results of all that love! Every seed is awakened and so has all animal life. It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even our animal neighbors, the same right as ourselves, to inhabit this land. Yet hear me, my people, we have now to deal with another race - small and feeble when our fathers first met them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possessions is a disease with them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break but the poor may not. They take tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich who rule. They claim this mother of ours, the earth, for their own, and fence their neighbors away; they deface her with their buildings and their refuse. That nation is like a spring freshet that overruns its banks and destroys all who are in its path. Sitting Bull, 1877.
By the time I am done copying all this down, I find that Basil is sound asleep in the cool shade. I sit down next to him and simply wait, thinking of Sitting Bull’s words and wishing we had such wise leaders today. When Basil wakes an hour later, we continue upward and within no more than a couple of hundred yards we come upon the unmarked junction where I turned off last week. We follow the turnoff back to the car and home.
Tonight, I looked up Sitting Bull on the web and find the rest of the speech. It was made by Tatanka Yotanka (Sitting Bull) at the Powder River Council in 1877, and concluded with the following warlike words that were not inscribed on the plaque: "They threaten to take [the land] away from us. My brothers, shall we submit, or shall we say to them: ‘First kill me before you take possession of my Fatherland’?"
copyright 2003 by Brian K. Crawford