My Sonoma - Does Sonoma mean Valley of the Moon?

My Sonoma Valley of the 1940s and early 50s was a great place in which to be a child. Open fields, fruit orchards and vineyards surrounded the one-mile square town of Sonoma, at the center of which was the eight-acre Plaza, originally laid out by Gen. Marianno G. Vallejo.

While the older kids had jobs picking prunes and other fruit during the summer, those of us under 10, were free to play, ride our bikes and explore the countryside around us, including the old stone quarries in the hills that rise north of the town.

There were few homes built in the Mayacamas Mountains to our north, and our creeks which flowed south into San Francisco bay often led up steep canyons to tall, dark and mysterious  groves of old-growth redwoods that had somehow escaped the axes that felled so many parts of our natural forests to feed the building boom in San Francisco during the gold rush.

There was still a lot of un-farmed, undeveloped, relatively wild land all around us.

There were natural springs and spring-rain fed creeks all over the southeast part of the Valley.  I remember wading through flooded vernal pools in open fields, fascinated by the flocks of wild ducks and geese there.  Salmon and steelhead came up our many little creeks to spawn.  The baby steelhead, hatched in late wintering spring became the rainbow trout for which we fished when trout season opened in later spring.

Blackberries, an aggessive non-native bush, planted by early settlers here, had taken over some of the open fields, making a home and hiding place for large coveys of valley quail and pheasant.

In the summer, our whole family would go on blackberry-picking excursions, the result of which were delicious berry pies later in the evening.  To this day, a fresh-baked berry pie is my favorite dessert.

In my memory, there were places in my hometown in those days that probably looked like the Valley of the Moon that Franciscan Padre Jose Altimira saw when he first made his way north from Yerba Buena (San Francisco) to Sonoma Valley in 1823.

Yerba Buena, a remote outpost of Spanish California, was still a couple of decades away from the gold-rush boom town we know today as San Francisco.

The Franciscan monk and his party had to cross the bay by boat, then on horseback find their way up though the Marin headlands, ford the Petaluma River, slog through the salt marshes, and finally see a wild and verdant valley in which grizzly bears and mountain lions roamed and through which creeks, teeming with fish, wound their way down to the bay.

It is said that the native American residents of the Valley were the one’s who told Altamira that this beautiful place was called Sonoma. They said Sonoma was the word for “many moons,” explaining that because of the mountain range formation on the valley’s eastern rim, the moon would seem to rise again and again over their home.

The accuracy of this translation has been questioned by later historians, but the magical description of Sonoma as the “Valley of the Moon,” was forever engraved for posterity in the novel of the same name by author Jack London, who came here in 1904 ti live and write.  His “Beauty Ranch”  is today a California State Park.

Even in London’s day, Sonoma Valley was a remote part of the Bay Area. 

There was not Golden Gate Bridge. It took a boat trip, followed by stage or horseback ride to get here from San Francisco.

My grand aunt, Celeste Granice Murphy, who was editor of The Sonoma Index-Tribune from 1915 to 1946, published an interesting book “The People of the Pueblo – A Story of Sonoma,” in 1937 that gives a fascinating description of those early days in the 19th Century when Sonoma was an important outpost of the California frontier.