DISCOVERY

Small tribes or family groups of Pomo Indians were clustered from the Noyo River in Fort Bragg to south of Mendocino, including the Warner Lane area.   For shelter the somewhat nomadic Pomo made Wikiups.  Though the Pomo Indians were migratory, they often stayed for extended periods wherever they dwelled. Here they would build elliptical shelters from indigenous materials that were in abundance, such as redwood branches and brushes and mud over a rough frame. 

Early explorers first glimpsed the redwoods with perhaps the Chinese being the first people other than Native Americans to see the coast redwoods. One account has a Chinese merchant named Hee-li being blown out to sea and eventually arriving at a coast wooded with what were apparently redwoods in 217 B.C.  A Chinese explorer named Hui Shan wrote about tall trees with red wood that he had seen while sailing eastward along the Pacific rim in 458 A.D.  The most widely accepted account of the sighting of coast redwoods by Europeans was in the  Gaspar de Portola explorations in 1769 when Father Juan Crespit who accompanied de Portala wrote on October 10: "In this region, there is great abundance of these trees and because none of the expedition recognizes them, they are named red wood (palo colorado) from their color."