The Saklan are a tribe of the Native American Miwok community, based just south of San Pablo and Suisun Bays, in Contra Costa County, California.
Though mostly semi-arid today as a result of a depleted water table from extensive farming, the region formerly had abundant springs and marshes that supported large villages.
The Saklans and other nearby cultures drew upon the great vegetable and animal wealth of the area to sustain themselves throughout the year, and this allowed them to live at much higher population densities than most other places in North America.
The favorable climate and geography of the Bay Area, as well as the constant maintenance of the forests and grasslands by the Saklan and their neighbors allowed for a wealth of animal life to coexist with the dense human population.
Formerly antelope, Tule Elk and grizzly bears were present alongside the blacktail deer and mountain lion, which are the existing remnants the region's suite of large mammals.
Villages that sometimes contained dozens of families were almost always located along watercourses, in which the people bathed, drank and fished for salmon and trout migrating upstream from the Pacific.
They introduced highly invasive Mediterranean grasses that quickly destroyed the prairie ecosystems where the Saklan foraged, and outcompeted native herbivores for pasture.
From the 1780s through to the early 1820s, it is clear from the records of San Francisco's Mission Dolores, where many Saklan fled as a result of societal collapse from disease, that the population of the area was severely diminished.
Remnant trees hundreds of years old, most often oaks and coast redwoods, still stand in most of the towns of the area as well as the hills that surround them, some of the last living links between today's world and that of the Saklan.