PREPARATORY NOTES FOR CANTUA CREEK REGION – LISOLI LOCAL GROUP

By Randall Milliken

This western Fresno County region encompasses the boundary of the South Coast Ranges and San Joaquin Valley west of Fresno. It is still a rural area, the only town being tiny Three Rocks. The area ethnogeography is poorly understood. Indirect mission register reconstruction suggests that the people of the area moved to Mission Soledad under the name Chalon and to Mission San Antonio under the name Lisoli. They were probably Chalon Ohlone speakers. As of this writing, we link 32 baptized people to the Cantua Creek group; all are of Lysol rancheria. They include 12 men, 13 women, three boys, and four girls. One of the women baptized at Mission San Antonio in December 1804 was listed from "Lizu’l del otro lado de la cañada Atnel acia el Norte [Lizul beyond Atnel canyon (Priest Valley) toward the north]" (SAN-B 3034).

Environment

The western portion of the region is interior Coast Ranges land (the Big Blue Hills and the southern Ciervo Hills) reaching 4,000 feet in elevation near the Three Sisters rock formation in the southwest. The eastern portion of the region is on the flat alluvial fan that forms the western edge of the San Joaquin Valley, with elevation as low as 330 feet. Surface water in the region is limited to small springs and annual creeks. Arroyo Honda and Cantua Creek, the largest of the annual streams, carry surface water far out onto the plain only during the most intense winter storms. Upland vegetation is predominately blue oak savannah and grey pine-chaparral associations, with occasional canyon live oak and interior live oak stands. Native grasslands once covered the San Joaquin Valley plain.

Early Expedition References

No documented Spanish or Mexican period expeditions entered the Cantua Creek region.

Mission Register References

The center of the Cantua Creek region lies 44 miles north-northwest of Mission San Miguel, 46 miles east of Mission Soledad, and 50 miles northwest of Mission San Antonio. Each of those missions brought in people from dozens of small inner Coast Range rancherias. Most adults from the eastern-most groups were baptized between 1803 and 1810, although many Chalon people were still being baptized as late as 1815. Since direct evidence is lacking for placement of the relevant groups on the landscape, they have been tentatively placed through well-documented mission register analysis techniques (see Recent Ethnographic References section, below.)

1840-1900 Historical References— To Be Developed

Classic Ethnographic References: None of the classic ethnographers obtained specific information about the contact-era people of the Cantua Creek region.

Recent Ethnogeographic References

Gibson 1983. Gibson (1983:180, 233, 234), using time-of-baptism and marriage pattern analyses, placed "Lysol" rancheria (also spelled Lezzol, Lizul, and Lisoli) in the Cantua Creek region. He identified 14 Lysol people baptized at Mission San Antonio and another ten baptized at Soledad. Milliken and Johnson (2005:83), in their hexagon-based spatial evaluation of the mission register evidence for the South Coast Ranges, agreed with Gibson, tentatively placing "Lysol" in their "Los Gatos Creek" hexagon, which included the Cantua Creek vicinity.

Milliken 2006a. Milliken (2006a:23, 33) delineated the Cantua Creek region in the Version 1.0 CDM study. He produced contradictory information regarding the rancheria group of the region. In the text of that study he argued that the Cantua Creek region was occupied by the Chapana (also spelled Chabant) group, baptized at Mission Soledad, and that "Lisoli" were in the adjacent Los Gatos Creek region to the south. But in his mapping, his population density table, and his related CDM Version 1.0 database, Milliken (2006a) assigned Lisoli to Cantua Creek, while placing Chapana farther north in the Silver Creek region. Milliken reiterated this conclusion in a study relating the Bay Area to the South Coast Ranges later that year (2006b:51).