[Illustration: John Bruno Romero]
John Bruno Romero is a descendant of the Chu-Mash, once the largest and
most powerful of Indian tribes, whose domain included all the islands
along the California Coast, and, on the mainland, from the San Fernando
Mission northwest to San Francisco and north-northwest to the High
Sierras.
Mr. Romero was born in Santa Barbara, where he studied Spanish and Latin
at the Franciscan School Mission, and attended the Sherman Institute,
where he was a student of English and scientific subjects. He was later
graduated from the Detroit Veterinarian College.
At one time, the Cahuilla Indians controlled the lands of California
southward to the end of what is now the Mexican peninsula. When the
Chu-Mash tribe, in its later years, had dwindled in numbers, Mr. Romero
joined the Cahuilla tribe “to help fight the United States Government
for our land treaty rights.” Today this tribe is the second oldest in
California and the strongest in membership.
The author’s interests are wide. He is a director of Indian Affairs for
seven Southern California counties, and while his principal hobby is
medicinal botany, he is also a collector of minerals, stamps, books, and
fossils, and dabbles in taxidermy. Fond of children, he has adopted and
reared ten orphans. At one time or another, he has worked as a surveyor,
explorer, geologist, and antho-botanist, and his home is a veritable
treasure trove of interesting archaeological, geological, and botanical
specimens which he has collected in the mountains and deserts of
Southern California and Arizona—in sections where the white man has
seldom traveled.
In 1933 he discovered, in the Trabuco Hills, in Orange County, near Los
Angeles, the skeleton of a mastodon, one of the few uncovered in
Southern California. Paleontologists at the Los Angeles Museum made
varying estimates of the age of the bones, ranging from ten thousand to
a million years.
In 1937, when the author was a junior geologist at the Santa Ana Museum,
he deciphered the hieroglyphics inscribed on some rocks found on the
Indian prayer grounds at the peak of a volcanic vent in La Piomosa range
in Arizona, which have been instrumental in providing historical
information about the life of the early Indians in the Southwest. The
inscriptions revealed the location of food and water in the surrounding
country and primitive conceptions of the supernatural.