History
The area near the camp has always been sparsely occupied. The land is mostly steep, rocky, semi-arid except for the narrow canyons, and inaccessible, making long-term habitation a challenge. The area was first occupied by the Esselen American Indians who harvested acorns on the nearby mountain slopes. A large boulder with a dozen or more deep mortar bowls worn into it, known as a bedrock mortar, is located in Apple Tree Camp on the southwest slope of Devil's Peak, north of the Pico Blanco Scout Reservation. The holes were hollowed out over many generations by Indians who used it to grind the acorns into flour. Other mortar rocks have also been found within the Boy Scout camp at campsites 3 and 7, and slightly upstream from campsite 12, while a fourth is found on a large rock in the river, originally above the river, between campsites 3 and 4. Much of the native Indian population had been forced into the Spanish mission system by about 1822, when most of the interior villages within the current Los Padres National Forest were uninhabited.
When the Big Sur area became part of Mexico along with the rest of California and gained independence from Spain in 1821, the Boy Scout camp area was on the border of Rancho San Jose y Sur Chiquito land grant to the north and Rancho El Sur to the south.
Other early homesteaders in the Palo Colorado Canyon region included Thomas W. Allen, 1891, Isaac N. Swetnam, 1894, Harry E. Morton, 1896, Samuel L. Trotter, 1901, Abijah C. Robbins, 1901, and Antare P. Lachance, 1904. Swetnam bought the Notley home at the mouth of Palo Colorado Canyon and also constructed a small cabin on the Little Sur River at the site of the future Pico Blanco camp. The original Protestant Chapel was built around the Swetnam cabin in 1955.
In October, 1905 the land that now makes up the Los Padres National Forest, including the South Fork and portions of the upper reaches of the North Fork of the Little Sur River watershed, were withdrawn from public settlement by the United States Land Office, In January 1908, 39 sections of land, totaling 25,000 acres (10,000 ha), were added to the Monterey National Forest by President Theodore Roosevelt in a presidential proclamation. This included five sections of land east and north of the current site of Pico Blanco Scout Reservation.
Read more about this topic: Pico Blanco Scout Reservation
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“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
—Henry Ford (1863–1947)
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—Caresse Crosby (1892–1970)