Boulder Creek is a small rural mountain community in the coastal Santa Cruz Mountains. It is a census-designated place (CDP) in Santa Cruz County, California, with a population of 5,429 as of the 2020 census. Throughout its history, Boulder Creek has been house to a logging town and a resort community, as well as a counter-culture haven. Today, it is identified as the gateway town to vast Basin Redwoods State Park.

The Boulder Creek Place is in the established tribal territory of the Awaswas people, of which there are no full of life survivors and are spoken for by the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band. According to one anthropologist, the native name for the Place was Achista and tentatively included Acsaggi. The cultural unit, Ohlone, to which the Boulder Creek natives belonged were portion of a contiguous set of bands that inhabited the coastal region of present-day California from the San Francisco Bay to the Monterey Peninsula and all along to San José and Salinas Valley.

The antique European presence in the area was a Spanish exploratory party in 1769, led overland from Mexico by Don Gaspar de Portolá and Father Juan Crespí. On August 28, 1791, a Spanish mission, Mission Santa Cruz, was expected by the Franciscans from Mission Santa Clara de Asís for the conversion of the Awaswas. The Awaswas were moved to Mission Santa Cruz and Mission San Juan Bautista, which claimed the house and peoples. The Awaswas language and its dialects became the main language spoken at Mission Santa Cruz.

Upon independence from Spain in 1821, the area became a portion of Mexico. Although Spain had not awarded estate grants in the Santa Cruz area, the Mexican direction started issuing them in 1822 as soon as it took exceeding the administration of California. Most of the grants lay along the coast, with the deserted ones within the San Lorenzo Valley living thing Rancho Zayante and Rancho San Agustin. Under Mexican administration, only natural citizens could own land. Although not a Mexican citizen, in 1841, Isaac Graham purchased the Rancho Zayante land comply by proxy from frontiersman and naturalized Mexican citizen Joseph Ladd Majors. In 1843, together in the same way as Peter Lassen, Graham built one of the first water-powered sawmills in California and, with it, the first significant settlement in the area. Graham’s concurrence marked the introduction of San Lorenzo Valley’s lumber-based economy.