(Excerpt from my book, Our Summer In Carmel, available at Amazon.com) I like history. I begin my photo/travel journal with a brief amateur overview of the Monterey Peninsula. Providing some historical context helps to better understand a place today. This short historical discourse is divided into three phases. Prehistory, Spanish/Mexican governance, and lastly the arrival of the Yankee. For thousands of years, anthropologists don't know exactly how long, but well before the first arrival of "modern" man the Spanish, the Monterey area was inhabited by three native tribes. One tribe, The Coastanoan, were named by the Spanish because they resided on the from Carmel to Big Sur and into parts of the Salinas Valley. They were friendly and approachable. The other two tribes, with similar friendly dispositions, were the Esselan, who mainly inhabited the mountains, and
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