On the sunny eastern margin Of the Bay of San Francisco, Grew the village of the Tamals; Fisher folk they were, and gentle, Seeking not for wars of conquest; Fishing in the purple waters From their boats of bark or rawhide; Wading in the limpid shallows Seeking oysters, clams and mussels. In the course of generations Piles of shells of many banquets, With the ashes of their campfires, Formed a mound upon the bay shore. Shell Mound Park, the people call it, And they gather in the shadows Of the ancient oaks for pleasure, Roasting clams as in the old days When the Tamals lived upon it. Gone are now the limpid shallows; Gone the oysters and the mussels, And no more are grassy meadows Dappled with the spreading oak trees; For great factories, grim and sordid, Sprawl in squalid blocks around it, And the smoke of forge and furnace Rise from stacks into the heavens. Paleface men with concave glasses, Learned in lore of printed pages, Dig into the mounds and gather Spear and arrow heads and axes, Broken weapons and utensils Made of flint, or bone, or seashell. To the northward, where great boulders Lie in tumbled piles and masses, And a Thousand Oaks are clustered, And the crags upthrust their fingers Through the meadows of the uplands, Was another Indian village, Ancient stronghold of the Tamals. In the village on the hillside Men were hunters, brave and fearless, Skillful with the bow and arrow, Artful with the snare and deadfall; Hunting deer and elk and bison In the open grassy meadows, Tracking wolf and mountain lion To their lairs among the redwoods; Bearing on their backs the trophies To their camp when night was falling. In the village maids and matrons Dressed the furs and tanned the buckskin, Dried the venison, and traded With the Shell Mound folks for salmon, Mussels, clams and abalones, Ornaments of bone or seashell, Weapons chipped from flint or jasper. From the oaks they gathered acorns, And beneath the fragrant bay trees And the heavy blooming buckeyes, Ground the acorns into flour To be baked upon the hot-stones. To this day the smoke of campfires May be traced in caves, and crannies Where the overhanging cliffsides Gives protection from the rainstorms. If you search among the thickets Of the low widespreading buckeyes You will find their ancient mortars In the bedrock still remaining-- Mortar holes ground deep, and polished By the toil of many women Pounding, grinding with a pestle Fashioned from a stream-worn boulder.