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including the South Fork and portions of the upper reaches of the North Fork of the Little Sur River watershed, were withdrawn from public settlement by the United States Land Office, In January 1908, 39 sections of land, totaling 25,000 acres (10,000 ha), were added to the Monterey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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“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)