But what was it before?

We, as Californian's as well as American's for that fact, forget that this land wasn't always used for the purposes that we use if for today.  With all of our deadlines and trying to keep our days/schedules in order it's relatively easy to fail to remember that the land around us was pretty much in a natural state.  In the area now known as the East Bay there were few inhabitants and the people that were here respected the natural terrain so much more then we do today.

Now to give a little information about those that lived here before.  The peoples that inhabited this area were the Ohlones and these Costanoan Natives lived in small villages along the shorelines of Dry Creek, Sulphur Creek, and Alameda Creek.  Their main source of food was acorns, oysters, clams, seeds, berries, and other small wildlife.  The people used canoes to get back and forth across the Bay and had their own ways of gathering salt.

                         Courtesy of the National Park Service, http://www.nps.gov/goga/historyculture/ohlones-and-coast-miwoks.htm

The Leslie Salt Company made a booklet, Salt, Our Bond With the Sea, describing how the Natives of this land collected salt.  "On the coast, and especially around the San Francisco Bay, The Indians were more fortunate.  Seaweed was a source of salt for many tribes.  Others found salt in bay marshes, which they baked into cake called 'koyo' which they mixed with their buckeye mash."  The Ohlones used willow sticks to collect the evaporated salt from the Shoreline marshes and traded the valuable goods with other peoples in the Napa Valley area.  

I hope that these little bits of information about the area and about salt through the years have been just an introduction to further research.  I can only hope to have inspired at least just a little!