In 1910 C. Hart Merriam, already well known as a naturalist, came to
California and began the study of California ethnography which was to
occupy him for the rest of his life. Almost every year from then until
his death in 1942 Merriam spent about six months in the field, talking
to Indians and recording their memories of aboriginal times. All this
field work resulted in an immense collection of data on the California
Indians, most of which has never been published (see Merriam's
bibliography in Merriam, 1955, pp. 227-229).
In 1950 the greater part of Merriam's field notes was deposited at the
University of California, with the intention of making them available
for study and publication. One volume of papers has already appeared
(Merriam, 1955), and the present study is part of a continuing program.
The California Athabascans were selected as the first group for study at
the suggestion of A. L. Kroeber, the reason being that the Athabascans
have been and still remain one of the least known aboriginal groups
in the State. This is not because they were conquered early and their
culture dissipated, as is true of the Mission Indians; there were
scarcely any whites in the California Athabascan area before the 1850's.
Indeed, as late as the 1920's and '30's there were many good Athabascan
informants still available. The reason for the hiatus in our knowledge
lies in an accident in the history of ethnology rather than in the
history of California.
The early work among the California Athabascans was done by Pliny Earle
Goddard. Goddard began his studies of the Athabascans in 1897 at the
Hoopa Indian Reservation, where he was a lay missionary. He stayed
there until 1900, when he went to Berkeley to work for his doctorate
in linguistics under Benjamin Ide Wheeler, President of the University
of California. Between 1900 and 1909 Goddard was associated with the
University as student and professor and during this time he visited the
Athabascans periodically, until he had worked with virtually all the
groups considered in this paper.
During this same period A. L. Kroeber was engaged in gathering material
for his classic Handbook of California Indians. Because of the scarcity
of ethnographers in those years Kroeber could not afford the time to
work in the Athabascan area and duplicate Goddard's investigations.
Kroeber did study the Hupa and the Kato at either end of the Athabascan
area but, except for a hurried trip through the region in 1902, he
did not work with the other groups, and the responsibility for the
ethnographic field work therefore devolved upon Goddard.
Goddard, however, was not primarily an ethnographer but a linguist,
and he directed his chief efforts toward linguistic investigations. He
has published an impressive body of Athabascan texts and linguistic
analyses but, except for his Life and Culture of the Hupa (1903_a_),
almost nothing on the culture of the Athabascans.
The net result is that the California Athabascans are virtually unknown,
and Merriam's fresh data provide an opportunity to piece together the
available evidence.
The Merriam files, deposited at the Department of Anthropology of the
University of California, contain information on each of the tribes of
California, some of it being information gathered by Merriam himself,
the rest clippings and quotations from various historic and ethnographic
sources. The primary and secondary materials are easily distinguished,
since Merriam gave scrupulous citations to his sources.
Merriam's own data consist of word lists, ethnogeographical material,
and random notes on various aspects of native culture. I have not used
his word lists, since their usefulness is primarily linguistic and I am
not competent to perform the necessary linguistic analysis, but all the
random ethnographic notes which he recorded for the Athabascan groups
are here included under the discussion of the appropriate tribes.
Most of the Merriam Athabascan material is geographic, consisting
of lists of villages and place names, of descriptions and lengthy
discussions of tribal boundaries. Obviously Merriam attempted to
gather a complete file of this sort of information, and he was largely
successful. His work provides a good basis for establishing boundaries
and for locating tribelets and villages.
Another important source of information, serving the same purpose, is
the Goddard material. Evidently Goddard very much enjoyed the long
horseback trips he made with an informant, who could point out the
village sites, landmarks, and other points of interest of his native
territory. This information, carefully recorded by Goddard, has proved
extremely valuable in the present work, the more so since it represents
firsthand observation.
Goddard's ethnogeographic work for three of the California Athabascan
groups has already been published (1914_a_; 1923_a_; 1924). Besides
this, the present writer has been fortunate enough to have access to
Goddard's unpublished notes, which contain information on several
hundred additional villages in the area. These notes were in the
possession of Dr. Elsie Clews Parsons, Goddard's literary executor,
and on her death they were sent to the University of California by
Dr. Gladys Reichard. They remained in the files of the University of
California Museum of Anthropology until their use in the present work.
This unpublished material of Goddard's consists of a group of file
cards, on each of which is typed the name, location, and any other
pertinent data for a single village. Some of the lists are accompanied
by maps, showing precise location of the villages. In the lists for
which there are no maps but only verbal descriptions of the sites,
the township, range, and quarter section coördinates are given. The
township and range coördinates have been changed since Goddard's time,
in accordance with the more accurate surveys of the last thirty years,
but county maps of the appropriate period provide a perfectly adequate
way of locating Goddard's sites within a few hundred yards.
It is clear, on the basis of internal evidence, that there is or was
more Goddard material than is now accessible to the present author. For
the Kato, for instance, Goddard says that he recorded more than fifty
villages (Goddard, 1909, p. 67); all that remain in his notes are two
village cards numbered 51 and 52 respectively. There may also be some
data, once recorded but now lost, from the Lassik, Nongatl, and Shelter
Cove Sinkyone. I have communicated with the American Museum of Natural
History, where Goddard was a member of the staff, and with Indiana
University, where some of his manuscripts are deposited, but neither of
these institutions has any knowledge of the material in question.
The Merriam and Goddard material, taken together, provides a fair amount
of information on the geography of the California Athabascan groups. We
are now in the position of knowing a great deal about the location of
the tribes, tribelets, and villages of these people, while we know very
little about their way of life, except what can be gained by inference
from the surrounding groups.
The author's thanks are due to Dr. A. L. Kroeber and Dr. R. F. Heizer,
who gave their full coöperation throughout the preparation of the
present paper. Dr. Henry Sheffé was kind enough to advise on the
statistics used in the section on population.