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ABSTRACT: Aboriginal Californians left little evidence of their several thousand years of habitation along San Francisco Bay’s shoreline except for piles of shells (middens) located adjacent to their former villages. Modern man, however, began to effect major change to the Bay within 75 years of his first arrival. This change has been unremitting ever since. With the discovery of gold in the mid-19th century, vast quantities of debris from large-scale hydraulic mining destroyed stream courses and agricultural land and silted the upper reaches of the Bay. Transfer of the tidelands to private ownership promoted land speculation and subsequent large-scale reclamation, diking and filling of the margins. These activities and the addition of large volumes of poorly treated waste waters contributed to the decline, in the late 19th century, of the quality of the Bay environment in general and probably to the decline of large commercial oyster and salmon fisheries in particular. Further increases in agricultural and urban development, during the early 20th century, led to increasing demands for water, and large-scale river diversions were begun. These diversions, together with increased waste-water inflows have led to worsening water quality and to the enactment of water quality control measures.
Today, San Francisco Bay is the focus of continuing studies of the extent to which man can alter an estuarine system without destroying the physical, chemical and biological balances necessary for the survival of that system.
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