The Yokuts, including the Tauhalame, were the first recorded people in this area, living in villages along rivers and creeks in the San Joaquin Valley, relying heavily on acorns, and later suffering removal to Mission San José, where most were forced to work and convert to Christianity, while those who remained were devastated by an epidemic in 1833. European claims to California began with Spanish and English exploration, and Spain finally ordered settlement in 1769, leading to missions, ranches, and towns and to repeated military expeditions from Mission San José into the Stanislaus County area to seize native labor, recover runaways, and punish raids. Native resistance continued, most notably under Estanislao, a Yokut convert from Mission San José, whose forces defeated expeditions in 1829 before Lieutenant Mariano G. Vallejo finally drove his band from its camps along the present Stanislaus River; Estanislao later returned to the mission, was pardoned, and died there in 1839, and Stanislaus County was named for him. After the discovery of gold in 1848, miners spread through the Sierra, ferries became crucial crossings on routes from Stockton to the Southern Mines, and Roberts Ferry emerged as an important stop on the Stockton-Mariposa Road and on a stage route east. The first Tuolumne River ferry near this site was established in 1850 by Alden Jackson and Doctor Benjamin Horr, changed owners several times, was moved to this location in 1865, remained associated with John Roberts, and was replaced in 1887 by a wooden truss toll bridge; a steel truss bridge built by Stanislaus County in 1916 stood until floods destroyed it in January 1997, and the present covered bridge was completed here in 1999. A hotel developed with the ferry, first built before 1857, sold with the ferry and surrounding land, destroyed by fire in February 1865, and rebuilt by Roberts on a bluff above the river, opening on Christmas Day 1865 and later serving as Ketcham family headquarters after it closed in 1905; its first story still stands after upper-story damage from the Tehachapi earthquake of 1950. As mining declined, settlement shifted toward farming the rich river bottoms, raising grain, vegetables, cattle, and horses, and building communities with schools; local one-room schools eventually merged into the present Roberts Ferry School District, and the current school was built in 1971 and expanded in 1987. The history of the area also includes nearby Knights Ferry, founded in 1848 as a trading post and ferry and later known for its bridge and flour mill, and long-running gold mining on the Tuolumne, from placer mining at French Bar and La Grange to hydraulic mining, outlawed in 1884, and dredging that continued into the mid-twentieth century.