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Long before Colonel Thomas Baker arrived in what we now call Bakersfield, a solitary hill rose from the valley floor near the site of today’s Mercy Hospital. For generations, that hill was home to a Yokuts village, a place chosen for both its visibility and its safety from the river’s floods. 

After the Native Americans left, some of Kern County’s earliest white pioneers settled on the same hill, unknowingly building their lives atop a much older history. 

Years later, when the hill was leveled to make way for railroad tracks, workers uncovered something unexpected—an unsettling mystery buried deep within the soil itself.

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