It hasn’t been this way for long. Less than 200 years ago what is today Lake Merritt was a slough, the swampy north-pointing appendage (sometimes a finger, sometimes a hand) of San Antonio Creek, part of the tidal channel that would later become the Oakland Inner Harbor, and an integral piece of a 3960 acre watershed situated on a wide alluvial plain. Framed by thousands of acres of surrounding tidal marsh, the slough occupied 500 watery acres at high tide and 375 acres of mudflats when the tide was low. Alder, sycamore, live oaks, and California bays lined the banks of the streams that emptied into it. Herds of deer, elk, and pronghorn antelope grazed the grasslands around it. Foxes, bobcats, coyotes, and mountain lions prowled the hills above it; countless numbers of ducks and geese touched down upon its inlets and channels-the skies were dark with them.

Few humans foraged the slough back then, although in the richly forested Oakland hills, Chochenyo-speaking Ohlone Indians seemed to have settled in a village along the banks of Indian Gulch Creek in an area that became known as Trestle Glenn. The Chochenyo fished the estuary, thanking Duck Hawk, the hero and benefactor who had made the earth a safe place for humans to live, for the food they took from it. By 1810, the Native Americans were gone, relocated to Mission San Jose by the Spaniards who had arrived with foreign presumptions: domination, possession, control. Title to the land passed, for the first time, into human hands.

Human history, unlike its natural counterpart, is written in a fast and spiky shorthand. By 1820 the slough "belonged" to Sergeant Luis Maria Peralta of Mission San Jose, part of a 44,800 acre land grant given in return for his years of service to the Spanish Crown. Title stayed with Peralta family through Mexican independence in 1821 and cession to the United States. By 1848 the Mexican period had ended. Gold seekers swarmed the countryside, set up camp, and settled. It took less than four years for a couple of squatters led by a sharpster layer, Horace Carpentier to wrest ownership of the property adjacent to the slough from the Peraltas. They laid out a town, sold lots they didn't own. Peralta won the legal battle that ensued, but the damage was done; there would be no turning back. Oakland was incorporated in 1852, Carpentier became its first mayor, and San Antonio Slough became a sewer.