Much of the material on which the statements in the preceding essay are
based is information collected by the University of California's
Ethnological and Archaeological Survey of California since 1901 and as
yet unpublished. Of old accounts dealing with the religion of the
Indians of California, the best is by the Franciscan missionary
Boscana, entitled Chinigchinich and published in the 1846 edition of a
volume by A. Robinson called Life in California. It deals with the
Shoshonean Indians of Mission San Juan Capistrano. An occasional
reference of value may be found in other works, such as Venegas'
History of California. The series of translations and republications of
early explorers in California and the Southwest, published in the Land
of Sunshine, later Out West, beginning in 1899, is also convenient,
though naturally it deals but incidentally with religion. Reid's
account of the Indians of Los Angeles county, published in an early Los
Angeles newspaper and republished by Alexander Taylor in the fourteenth
volume of California Farmer in 1861, is particularly good, though less
so on the side of religion than on most others. Stephen Powers' Tribes
of California, issued in 1877 as the third volume of the Contributions
to North American Ethnology, a government series, deals with the
Indians of the greater part of the state and contains many references
to their religious life. Powers is however often very inexact, and the
value of his work is in its comprehensiveness rather than in its
reliability. An important work is Creation Myths of Primitive America,
by Jeremiah Curtin, which consists of a collection of myths from the
Wintun and Yana of Northern California. The differences of form which
these myths show from most Indian myths that have been published in
translation are apparently chiefly due to the method of their
presentation by the author. Curtin's introduction is very suggestive
but exaggerated. Professor R. B. Dixon has brought out a paper on Maidu
Myths, and another, a great part of which is devoted to religion, on
the Northern Maidu, both in the seventeenth volume of the Bulletin of
the American Museum of Natural History. These two contributions are
among the most careful studies as yet made by a trained observer in any
part of the state. The same author has also published briefer articles
on Some Coyote Stories from the Maidu Indians of California, System and
Sequence in Maidu Mythology, and Some Shamans of Northern California,
in recent volumes of the Journal of American Folk-Lore, and on The
Mythology of the Shasta-Achomawi in the American Anthropologist for
1905. Professor P. E. Goddard has published Life and Culture of the
Hupa, the last portion of which refers to religion; and Hupa Texts
(with both interlinear and current translations), almost all of which
are religious in character. These two papers constitute Volume I of the
University of California Publications in American Archaeology and
Ethnology. In the Journal of American Folk-Lore for 1906 is a paper by
the same author on Lassik Tales. Miss Constance Goddard DuBois has
published a number of valuable papers on the Mission Indians, mainly
concerning the mythology of the Diegueno, in the volumes of the Journal
of American Folk-Lore for 1901, 1904, and 1906. In the American
Anthropologist for 1905 Miss DuBois has an article on the Religious
Ceremonies and Myths of the Mission Indians, while another paper on The
Mythology of the Dieguenos appears in the Proceedings of the Thirteenth
International Congress of Americanists. From the present author there
have appeared, in the second and fourth volumes of the series of
American Archaeology and Ethnology, of the University of California
Publications, Types of Indian Culture in California, in part treating
of religion, and Indian Myths from South-Central California; in the
Journal of American Folk-Lore between 1904 and 1906, A Ghost Dance in
California, Wishosk Myths, and Two Myths of the Mission Indians; in the
American Anthropologist for 1902, A Preliminary Sketch of the Mohave
Indians. In the American Anthropologist for 1905 and 1906 the late
Major H. N. Rust has two brief articles on The Obsidian Blades of
California and A Puberty Ceremony of the Mission Indians. The Journal
of American Folk-Lore has contained a rather confused article on The
Cosmogony and Theogony of the Mojave Indians, by Capt. J. G. Bourke, in
1889, and others by G. W. James, on myths of the Mission Indians of
Southern California, in 1902 and 1903. In the same Journal appeared in
1902 An Indian Myth from the San Joaquin Basin by J. W. Hudson, and A
Composite Myth of the Pomo Indians by S. A. Barrett in 1906. Since 1906
the Journal has contained a series of Notes on California Folk-Lore.