The Esselen, the native people of Big Sur, were one of the smallest tribes in California. Because of their small population and proximity to three Spanish missions, they were severely impacted by European contact and domination. For many decades, they were mistakenly believed to have been completely destroyed by missionization, but descendants of the mission population survived, and some Esselen people may have avoided the missions entirely by retreating far into the Santa Lucia Mountains. A small group remained inland into the 1840s before dispersing to find work on local ranches or to live on the outskirts of growing towns. The Esselen had lived in the Big Sur region for thousands of years before Europeans came to California, and they are still here as part of a cultural reawakening of native language and art. Distinctive painted handprints on rock faces in remote areas of the Esselen homeland, traditional paintings called pictographs, are of great significance to the Esselen people and are protected by federal law. In the early 1900s, anthropologists Henshaw and Harrington interviewed native elders such as Isabel Meadows to help preserve some of the Esselen language.