THE INDIANS AT THE COMING OF THE PADRES
It is generally believed that the California Indian in his original
condition was one of the most miserable and wretched of the world's
aborigines. As one writer puts it:
"When discovered by the padres he was almost naked, half
starved, living in filthy little hovels built of tule,
speaking a meagre language broken up into as many different
and independent dialects as there were tribes, having no laws
and few definite customs, cruel, simple, lazy, and--in one
word which best describes such a condition of
existence--wretched. There are some forms of savage life that
we can admire; there are others that can only excite our
disgust; of the latter were the California Indians."
This is the general attitude taken by most writers of this later day, as
well as of the padres themselves, yet I think I shall be able to show
that in some regards it is a mistaken one. I do not believe the Indians
were the degraded and brutal creatures the padres and others have
endeavored to make out. This is no charge of bad faith against these
writers. It is merely a criticism of their judgment.
The fact that in a few years the Indians became remarkably competent in
so many fields of skilled labor is the best answer to the unfounded
charges of abject savagery. Peoples are not civilized nor educated in a
day. Brains cannot be put into a monkey, no matter how well educated his
teacher is. There must have been the mental quality, the ability to
learn; or even the miraculous patience, perseverance, and love of the
missionaries would not have availed to teach them, in several hundred
years, much less, then, in the half-century they had them under their
control, the many things we know they learned.
The Indians, prior to the coming of the padres, were skilled in some
arts, as the making of pottery, basketry, canoes, stone axes, arrow
heads, spear heads, stone knives, and the like. Holder says of the
inhabitants of Santa Catalina that although their implements were of
stone, wood, or shell "the skill with which they modelled and made their
weapons, mortars, and steatite _ollas_, their rude mosaics of abalone
shells, and their manufacture of pipes, medicine-tubes, and flutes give
them high rank among savages." The mortars found throughout California,
some of which are now to be seen in the museums of Santa Barbara, Los
Angeles, San Diego, etc., are models in shape and finish. As for their
basketry, I have elsewhere[2] shown that it alone stamps them as an
artistic, mechanically skilful, and mathematically inclined people, and
the study of their designs and their meanings reveal a love of nature,
poetry, sentiment, and religion that put them upon a superior plane.
[2] Indian Basketry, especially the chapters on Form, Poetry, and
Symbolism.
Cabrillo was the first white man so far as we know who visited the
Indians of the coast of California. He made his memorable journey in
1542-1543. In 1539, Ulloa sailed up the Gulf of California, and, a year
later, Alarcon and Diaz explored the Colorado River, possibly to the
point where Yuma now stands. These three men came in contact with the
Cocopahs and the Yumas, and possibly with other tribes.
Cabrillo tells of the Indians with whom he held communication. They were
timid and somewhat hostile at first, but easily appeased. Some of them,
especially those living on the islands (now known as San Clemente, Santa
Catalina, Anacapa, Santa Barbara, Santa Rosa, San Miguel, and Santa
Cruz), were superior to those found inland. They rowed in pine canoes
having a seating capacity of twelve or thirteen men, and were expert
fishermen. They dressed in the skins of animals, were rude
agriculturists, and built for themselves shelters or huts of willows,
tules, and mud.
The principal written source of authority for our knowledge of the
Indians at the time of the arrival of the Fathers is Fray Geronimo
Boscana's _Chinigchinich: A Historical Account, etc., of the Indians of
San Juan Capistrano_. There are many interesting things in this account,
some of importance, and others of very slight value. He insists that
there was a great difference in the intelligence of the natives north of
Santa Barbara and those to the south, in favor of the former. Of these
he says they "are much more industrious, and appear an entirely distinct
race. They formed, from shells, a kind of money, which passed current
among them, and they constructed out of logs very swift and excellent
canoes for fishing."
Of the character of his Indians he had a very poor idea. He compares
them to monkeys who imitate, and especially in their copying the ways of
the white men, "whom they respect as beings much superior to themselves;
but in so doing, they are careful to select vice in preference to
virtue. This is the result, undoubtedly, of their corrupt and natural
disposition."
Of the language of the California Indians, Boscana says there was great
diversity, finding a new dialect almost every fifteen to twenty leagues.
They were not remarkably industrious, yet the men made their home
utensils, bows and arrows, the several instruments used in making
baskets, and also constructed nets, spinning the thread from yucca
fibres, which they beat and prepared for that purpose. They also built
the houses.
The women gathered seeds, prepared them, and did the cooking, as well as
all the household duties. They made the baskets, all other utensils
being made by the men.
The dress of the men, when they dressed at all, consisted of the skins
of animals thrown over the shoulders, leaving the rest of the body
exposed, but the women wore a cloak and dress of twisted rabbit-skins. I
have found these same rabbit-skin dresses in use by Mohave and Yumas
within the past three or four years.
The youths were required to keep away from the fire, in order that they
might learn to suffer with bravery and courage. They were forbidden also
to eat certain kinds of foods, to teach them to bear deprivation and to
learn to control their appetites. In addition to these there were
certain ceremonies, which included fasting, abstinence from drinking,
and the production of hallucinations by means of a vegetable drug,
called pivat (still used, by the way, by some of the Indians of Southern
California), and the final branding of the neophyte, which Boscana
describes as follows: "A kind of herb was pounded until it became
sponge-like; this they placed, according to the figure required, upon
the spot intended to be burnt, which was generally upon the right arm,
and sometimes upon the thick part of the leg also. They then set fire to
it, and let it remain until all that was combustible was consumed.
Consequently, a large blister immediately formed, and although painful,
they used no remedy to cure it, but left it to heal itself; and thus, a
large and perpetual scar remained. The reason alleged for this ceremony
was that it added greater strength to the nerves, and gave a better
pulse for the management of the bow." This ceremony was called
_potense._
The education of the girls was by no means neglected.
"They were taught to remain at home, and not to roam about in
idleness; to be always employed in some domestic duty, so
that, when they were older, they might know how to work, and
attend to their household duties; such as procuring seeds,
and cleaning them--making 'atole' and 'pinole,' which are
kinds of gruel, and their daily food. When quite young, they
have a small, shallow basket, called by the natives 'tucmel,'
with which they learn the way to clean the seeds, and they
are also instructed in grinding, and preparing the same for
consumption."
When a girl was married, her father gave her good advice as to her
conduct. She must be faithful to her wifely duties and do nothing to
disgrace either her husband or her parents. Children of tender years
were sometimes betrothed by their parents. Padre Boscana says he married
a couple, the girl having been but eight or nine months old, and the boy
two years, when they were contracted for by their parents.
Childbirth was natural and easy with them, as it generally is with all
primitive peoples. An Indian woman has been known to give birth to a
child, walk half a mile to a stream, step into it and wash both herself
and the new-born babe, then return to her camp, put her child in a
_yakia_, or basket cradle-carrier, sling it over her back, and start on
a four or five mile journey, on foot, up the rocky and steep sides of
a canyon.
A singular custom prevailed among these people, not uncommon elsewhere.
The men, when their wives were suffering their accouchement, would
abstain from all flesh and fish, refrain from smoking and all
diversions, and stay within the _Kish_, or hut, from fifteen to
twenty days.
The god of the San Juan Indians was Chinigchinich, and it is possible,
from similarity in the ways of appearing and disappearing, that he is
the monster Tauguitch of the Sabobas and Cahuillas described in The
Legend of Tauguitch and Algoot.[3] This god was a queer compound of
goodness and evil, who taught them all the rites and ceremonies that
they afterwards observed.
[3] See Folk Lore Journal, 1904.
Many of the men and a few women posed as possessing supernatural
powers--witches, in fact, and such was the belief in their power that,
"without resistance, all immediately acquiesce in their demands." They
also had physicians who used cold water, plasters of herbs, whipping
with nettles (doubtless the principle of the counter irritant), the
smoke of certain plants, and incantations, with a great deal of general,
all-around humbug to produce their cures.
But not all the medicine ideas and methods of the Indians were to be
classed as humbug. Dr. Cephas L. Bard, who, besides extolling their
temescals, or sweat-baths, their surgical abilities, as displayed in the
operations that were performed upon skulls that have since been exhumed;
their hygienic customs, which he declares "are not only commendable, but
worthy of the consideration of an advanced civilization,"
states further:
"It has been reserved for the California Indian to furnish
three of the most valuable vegetable additions which have
been made to the Pharmacopoeia during the last twenty years.
One, the Eriodictyon Glutinosum, growing profusely in our
foothills, was used by them in affections of the respiratory
tract, and its worth was so appreciated by the Missionaries
as to be named Yerba Santa, or Holy Plant. The second, the
Rhamnus purshiana, gathered now for the market in the upper
portions of the State, is found scattered through the
timbered mountains of Southern California. It was used as a
laxative, and on account of the constipating effect of an
acorn diet, was doubtless in active demand. So highly was it
esteemed by the followers of the Cross that it was christened
Cascara Sagrada, or Sacred Bark. The third, Grindelia
robusta, was used in the treatment of pulmonary troubles, and
externally in poisoning from Rhus toxicodendron, or Poison
Oak, and in various skin diseases."
Their food was of the crudest and simplest character. Whatever they
could catch they ate, from deer or bear to grasshoppers, lizards, rats,
and snakes. In baskets of their own manufacture, they gathered all
kinds of wild seeds, and after using a rude process of threshing, they
winnowed them. They also gathered mesquite beans in large quantities,
burying them in pits for a month or two, in order to extract from them
certain disagreeable flavors, and then storing them in large and rudely
made willow granaries. But, as Dr. Bard well says:
"Of the Vegetable articles of diet the acorn was the
principal one. It was deprived of its bitter taste by
grinding, running through sieves made of interwoven grasses,
and frequent washings. Another one was Chia, the seeds of
Salvia Columbariae, which in appearance are somewhat similar
to birdseed. They were roasted, ground, and used as a food by
being mixed with water. Thus prepared, it soon develops into
a mucilaginous mass, larger than its original bulk. Its taste
is somewhat like that of linseed meal. It is exceedingly
nutritious, and was readily borne by the stomach when that
organ refused to tolerate other aliment. An atole, or gruel,
of this was one of the peace offerings to the first visiting
sailors. One tablespoonful of these seeds was sufficient to
sustain for twenty-four hours an Indian on a forced march.
Chia was no less prized by the native Californian, and at
this late date it frequently commands $6 or $8 a pound.
"The pinion, the fruit of the pine, was largely used, and
until now annual expeditions are made by the few surviving
members of the coast tribes to the mountains for a supply.
That they cultivated maize in certain localities, there can
be but little doubt. They intimated to Cabrillo by signs that
such was the case, and the supposition is confirmed by the
presence at various points of vestiges of irrigating ditches.
Yslay, the fruit of the wild cherry, was used as a food, and
prepared by fermentation as an intoxicant. The seeds, ground
and made into balls, were esteemed highly. The fruit of the
manzanita, the seeds of burr clover, malva, and alfileri,
were also used. Tunas, the fruit of the cactus, and wild
blackberries, existed in abundance, and were much relished. A
sugar was extracted from a certain reed of the tulares."
Acorns, seeds, mesquite beans, and dried meat were all pounded up in a
well made granite mortar, on the top of which, oftentimes, a basket
hopper was fixed by means of pine gum. Some of these mortars were hewn
from steatite, or soapstone, others from a rough basic rock, and many of
them were exceedingly well made and finely shaped; results requiring
much patience and no small artistic skill. Oftentimes these mortars were
made in the solid granite rocks or boulders, found near the harvesting
and winnowing places, and I have photographed many such during
late years.
These Indians were polygamists, but much of what the missionaries and
others have called their obscenities and vile conversations, were the
simple and unconscious utterances of men and women whose instincts were
not perverted. It is the invariable testimony of all careful observers
of every class that as a rule the aborigines were healthy, vigorous,
virile, and chaste, until they became demoralized by the whites. With
many of them certain ceremonies had a distinct flavor of sex worship: a
rude phallicism which exists to the present day. To the priests, as to
most modern observers, these rites were offensive and obscene, but to
the Indians they were only natural and simple prayers for the
fruitfulness of their wives and of the other producing forces.
J.S. Hittell says of the Indians of California:
"They had no religion, no conception of a deity, or of a
future life, no idols, no form of worship, no priests, no
philosophical conceptions, no historical traditions, no
proverbs, no mode of recording thought before the coming of
the missionaries among them."
Seldom has there been so much absolute misstatement as in this
quotation. Jeremiah Curtin, a life-long student of the Indian, speaking
of the same Indians, makes a remark which applies with force to these
statements:
"The Indian, _at every step_, stood face to face with
divinity as he knew or understood it. He could never escape
from the presence of those powers who had made the first
world.... The most important question of all in Indian life
was communication with divinity, intercourse with the spirits
of divine personages."
In his _Creation Myths of Primitive America_, this studious author gives
the names of a number of divinities, and the legends connected with
them. He affirms positively that
"the most striking thing in all savage belief is the low
estimate put upon man, when unaided by divine, uncreated
power. In Indian belief every object in the universe is
divine except man!"
As to their having no priests, no forms of worship, no philosophical
conceptions, no historical traditions, no proverbs, any one interested
in the Indian of to-day knows that these things are untrue. Whence came
all the myths and legends that recent writers have gathered, a score of
which I myself hold still unpublished in my notebook? Were they all
imagined after the arrival of the Mission Fathers? By no means! They
have been handed down for countless centuries, and they come to us,
perhaps a little corrupted, but still just as accurate as do the
songs of Homer.
Every tribe had its medicine men, who were developed by a most rigorous
series of tests; such as would dismay many a white man. As to their
philosophical conceptions and traditions, Curtin well says that in them
"we have a monument of thought which is absolutely
unequalled, altogether unique in human experience. The
special value of this thought lies, moreover, in the fact
that it is primitive; that it is the thought of ages long
anterior to those which we find recorded in the eastern
hemisphere, either in sacred books, in histories, or in
literature, whether preserved on baked brick, burnt
cylinders, or papyrus."
And if we go to the Pueblo Indians, the Navahos, the Pimas, and others,
all of whom were brought more or less under the influence of the
Franciscans, we find a mass of beliefs, deities, traditions,
conceptions, and proverbs, which would overpower Mr. Hittell merely
to collate.
Therefore, let it be distinctly understood that the Indian was not the
thoughtless, unimaginative, irreligious, brutal savage which he is too
often represented to be. He thought, and thought well, but still
originally. He was religious, profoundly and powerfully so, but in his
own way; he was a philosopher, but not according to Hittell; he was a
worshipper, but not after the method of Serra, Palou, and their priestly
coadjutors.