In the early 1970s, it's estimated there were between 10 and 20,000 people living in the

wilderness in northern California around Santa Cruz.

There were drifters, hippies, families who'd fallen on hard times, and recently released

mental hospital patients all struggling to survive and ramshackle shelters or just sleeping

among the trees.

Though a good chunk of this population was actually building cabins, just not giving them

official addresses so to say all of them were homeless was not entirely accurate.

The climate in Santa Cruz was mild and there were numerous beaches and redwood groves.

It was a tourist town for a reason and so was it the worst place to be living in the woods.

The mental patients were among this group because in the early 70s Ronald Reagan was the

governor of California and he was taking steps to overhaul the way the state handled mental

health.

It was promising both cheaper, more efficient state-run hospitals that would save taxpayers

some money as well as more private hospitals that were nicer but cost a great deal to

any patients wanting to stay there.

The main problem with that plan was that construction had not started on any of the new hospitals

when the old ones began shutting down.

Because of that, many of the patients were just released, some were around 6 to 8000 people

during the first half of the 70s.

Psychiatrist Donald Lund who was at the forefront of interviewing the criminally insane during

the 1970s said, quote, Reagan had the idea that people in mental hospitals were like people

on welfare, living off the public trough and that they should get a job instead of claiming

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