were probably the Jalquin-Irgen people. A bench in Leona Canyon behind Merritt College acknowledges them and their descendants. These California Native Americans saw themselves inextricably bound to the living world, and were free of such concepts as "land ownership" and "natural resources." What's more, they would have seen a person isolated from community as having as much meaning as a "finger severed from a hand." The first non-native culture to touch this world were the Spanish-Californios whose vast land grant, Peralta, is the name of the creek that meanders under and through the streets on the west side of Redwood Road. When the US took California from the Mexicans in the Mexican–American War in 1848, the Peralta family fought in court to keep their lands, represented by a Yankee lawyer who promised to help them. Meanwhile, more than one hundred men in nine lumber mills logged the giant redwoods above what is now Skyline Boulevard. The majestic redwoods reached so high that they could be seen shipside from the bay. Working by hand, it took two men perched on a board wedged in a notch in the trunk, a whole day of hacking away at one giant to send it crashing to the forest floor. One felled ancient—it had been growing for over a thousand years—measured 33.5 feet in diameter. The loggers then stripped the redwood, prized for its resistance to rot and insects, of its branches, and split it into boards by drilling holes and stuffing them with dynamite. Teams of oxen lugged the lumber down the roads—including a Redwood Road so narrow, that many years later, every Sunday, according to one reminiscence, at least one Model T belonging to a picnicker would spin its wheels off the edge. By 1860, the forest was stripped. In the 1880s, for a few heart-stopping days, Oakland thought it had the beginning of its own gold rush in what is now the Lincoln Square Shopping Center. But the finding proved to be pyrite, or fool's gold. More valuable to the community, however, was the vision of a writer-poet born Cincinnatus Miller, who renamed himself Joaquin—after Joaquin Murieta, the "Mexican Robin Hood," hero to the Californios and the most famous outlaw of the Gold Rush. Joaquin Miller, who affected a John Muir-like beard and boots, not only single-handedly planted on the clear-cut hills 70,000 trees—many of them the unfortunately flammable eucalyptus—but willed to