Cuyamaca Ramblings

The region called Cuyamaca can be said to begin where the mountains run down along by the meadow that once held Laguna Que se Seca. To the east, the region possesses no definite boundary, but shades off into a series of mesas that trend, stepwise, toward the Lagunas, while southward it rolls out as far as Pine Valley into chaparral-clad hills.

Here, grow plants so rare as to be found nowhere else in the world. Nor will you find elsewhere in these arid parts such forests of incense cedar, sugar pine, and white fir opening out into alpine meadows.

The name Cuyamaca derives from the Kumeyaay, Aha Kwe'ahmac, Place of Water, for the region owes its special character largely to the local anomaly of a consistently abundant rainfall.

Awareness of the Cuyamaca region with its timbered slopes and lush meadows first trickled into the Euroamerican consciousness in the latter part of the 18th century through the explorations of Don Pedro Fages. It was this same Fages who later, as Spanish governor of California, made the first private land grants and thus laid the basis for the rancho system of Spanish and Mexican California. Cuyamaca Rancho, granted to Augustin Olvera in 1845 by governor Pio Pico, was one of the last land grants in Southern California. You can see how the trail of history crosses itself more than once here, for it was the attack on Pico's own Rancho Jamul which in 1837 precipitated the "Battle of Cuyamaca," very near to where the Stonewall Mine would later stand.

It seems Olvera had hopes of making a profit in Cuyamaca timber, and he sent his agent Cesario Walker to log off the area. The Kumeyaay watched warily as Walker built his adobe house, but made no resistance — not until he began to set up the sawmill. Seeing then what was afoot, "they made a kind of revolution," with the result that Walker was compelled to leave the area immediately and in great haste. Olvera made no further attempt to work his Cuyamaca holdings.

The Kumeyaay, who had made the Cuyamaca region their summer home for several thousand years before the Spanish arrived, wove a rich tapestry of legend around the area, tales often threaded with struggle and violence, like this one about the Battle of the Peaks:

Time was, when the Cuyamaca Mountains numbered four instead of three. They clung together, those long-haired peaks, proud in their luxuriant growth of cedar, fir, and pine, disdaining the lesser mountains, those scrub-covered, short-haired peaks. But strife grew up among them somehow, until one day it erupted in violence.

Huge rocks flew through the air, and whips of fire lashed the sky. The battle lasted for many days, but finally it was over. North Peak and Middle Peak came through unscathed, but Cuyamaca Peak got his neck tweaked, and he's had that crook in it ever since.

The fourth peak, who had tried to withstand the other three, fled away southward, across Pine Valley. You can see him there still, Corte Madere, whom the Kumeyaay called Hilsh Ki'e, battered and ragged looking with his long strands of pine, alone among the short-haired mountains, far from his home.

Who can tell how such quarrels begin? Some said it started when Aha Wi Aha, the beloved Cold Spring, fell in love with the River Sweetwater who planned to carry her away down among the short-haired mountains. And it may well be so, for to this day, as anyone can plainly see, Aha Wi Aha is still running to the Sweetwater, and the river has never yet ceased from carrying her down and away.

Robin Hewitt, 1989