Page’s will that the balance of the ranch remain intact until his youngest child reached 25 years of age, Cotate was one of the last great California land grants to be subdivided, in 1892. In 1874, the ranch, still 10,000 acres was valued at $1 million. Page died in 1872, leaving the management of the sprawling dairy, livestock and grain farm to his oldest sons. Page, his wife, Anna Maria Liljevalch Page, and their four youngest children emigrated from Chile, and set up housekeeping in San Francisco. Page’s agents purchased livestock, constructed ranch buildings, and began farming for the absentee landlord, as well as selling off portions of the rancho to Americans and European immigrants. In 1850, California became the 31 st of the United States, and a new era began for the Rancho Cotate.Īfter nearly a decade of wrangling over Spanish, Mexican, California, and U.S. Thomas Stokes Page, a native of New Jersey, then living in Valparaiso, Chile. Ruckle, who held it for only two months before selling it to Dr. In 1846, Castañeda sold the property to U.S. In 1844, the Mexican government (established in 1823) granted four square leagues (17,238 acres, stretching from what is now Penngrove to Santa Rosa) to Captain Juan Castañeda for his military service. (He soon established a rancho in southern Marin County, where he founded Mill Valley.) The tribe held on for a while longer, but maintaining traditional ways in the face of invasion became unsustainable.

The first English-speaking farmer, John Reed, arrived in 1826 in the territory of the Kota’ti-Bloomfield band, but found that raising wheat near Crane Creek where the Coast Miwok set seasonal fires was a losing proposition. Some returned to the area with the building of Mission San Rafael Archangel in 1817, but many died of European disease, became part of the mission and rancho system, or escaped to areas outside foreign control. Most of the Coast Miwok were taken into the Franciscan missions in San Francisco and points south. The region was claimed by the Spanish Empire in the late 18 th century. Traditional lifeways consisted of partnership with the land and waterways, promoting the growth of useful plants and taking the lives of animals with ceremony and gratitude.

Cotati’s unusual name (pronounced ko-TAH-tee) derives from a nearby village of the Indigenous Coast Miwok, whose territory stretches from the Golden Gate, throughout Marin County, and into the Laguna de Santa Rosa of southern Sonoma County.

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