COARSE GOLD REGION – DALINCHI AND CHUKCHANSI LOCAL TRIBES

The Coarse Gold region of Madera County is the well-documented historic homeland of two Foothill Yokuts-speaking local tribes, the Chukchansi in the west and the Dalinichi in the east. Both groups were involved in the resistance to the Gold Rush invasion that triggered the Mariposa Indian War, and both groups signed Federal Treaty N on the San Joaquin River on April 29, 1851. The Chukchansi may, however, have been forced into this region from the Raymond region further west by the Chauchila Yokuts during the tumultous 1830s period of horse stealing, Mexican attacks and valley epidemics (see Raymond region CPNC monograph). If that is the case, then the Dalinchi probably held the entire Coarse Gold region prior to the 1830s. Today’s Indian groups of the Madera and Fresno county foothills include many individuals with Chukchansi and Dalinchi ancestry. Chukchansi is, in fact, by far the most common ancestral affiliation of those Madera County Indians who identify as Yokuts.

Environment

Elevations in this upper foothill region range from a low of 1,600 feet on the Fresno River in the west up to 4,000 feet where it abuts the higher elevations of the Sierra Nevada on the northeast. The Fresno River flows through the northern and western portion of the region, while its southern tributary Coarse Gold Creek flows down through the central area. The eastern part of the region is drained by two laterals of the San Joaquin River system, Fine Gold Creek and the North Fork of Willow Creek. Native vegetation is foothill blue oak woodland and mixed oak-grey pine woodland in the lower southern and central areas. Interior live oak predominates in large tracts northwest of Coarse Gold and north of Oakhurst. Mixed Sierran forest, mainly ponderosa pine, covers higher ridges in the north.

Spanish Period Expedition References

No documented Spanish Period expeditions are known to have entered the Sierran Coarse Gold region.

Mission Register References

The very small number of Chukchansis in the Mission San Juan Bautista baptismal registers (4 Siucsianthre and possibly 4 Chequisinthre) are discussed in the CPNC Raymond region monograph. Mission records list 19 Dalinchi people (14 at Soledad, 5 at San Juan Bautista), all baptized between 1828 and 1840. The total of 19 baptized Dalinchi is unexpectedly high, given that smaller numbers are identified from two neighboring regions closer to the missions (8 Chukchansi of Raymon and 9 Dumna of Friant). There are not enough otherwise-unlocated “Tulare” converts at pertinent missions to greatly elevate the numbers of those neighbors. No explanation is offered for this seeming contravention of the rule of missionization diminution with distance.

The first Dalinchi person appeared in a death record at Mission San Juan Bautista on May 24, 1829. He was a 30-year-old “Talinche” man who was said to have been conditionally baptized at an unknown earlier time (SJB-D 2608). Baptisms were recorded that week at San Juan Bautista for four Hoyima children and one Copcha child, suggesting that they, and the Dalinchi man, had been captured during a Mexican government raid along the San Joaquin River.

Four Dalinchis appeared in the Mission Soledad baptismal register during March and April of 1830; all four were children in mixed groups with Pitcache and Dumna children (amid SO-B 2047-2060). Then from mid-1830 through mid-1832, five Dalinchi adults were baptized at San Juan Bautista and Soledad (SJB-B 3881, SO-B 2068-2070, 2082, 2096) in mixed groups dominated by Hoyima, Pitcachi, Gashowu, and “Uecheget” [Wechihit], all Yokuts from west and south of the Coarse Gold region. In 1833 one infant and two women from the Dalinchi were baptized at Soledad with Gashowu Yokuts (SO-B 2154, 2162, 2163).

The last three Dalinchi baptisms took place at San Juan Bautista in 1839 and 1840: a Dalinchi boy with two Wimilchi Yokuts boys (Riverdale region) in 1839 (SJB-B 4400), a lone Dalinchi boy in February 1840 (SJB-B 4451), and a lone young Dalinchi woman in August 1840 (SJB-B 4482).

Mission Marriage Patterns. Only one Dalinchi is recognized in the mission records as married at the time of baptism, a woman married to a Hoyima man (SJB-M 964). However, other indications of out-marriages are found. One Dalinchi child was said to have a “Oaquichi [Wakichi Yokuts]” mother, while another had parents later identified as Gashowu Yokuts, a situation suggesting that the missionary who baptized those parents failed to interview them closely enough to distinguish them as a dual-group couple (SJB-B 2060; SO-B 2154).

Mexican Period Expedition References

No documented Spanish Period expeditions are known to have entered the Sierran Coarse Gold region.

1846-1910 Historic References

Mariposa Indian War of 1851. The Coarse Gold region was the scene of some of the events that occured when a group of eastern San Joaquin Valley and Sierran local tribes initiated a resistance against American traders and settlers between May of 1850 and late April of 1851 (see Phillips 1997). The Chukchansi were mentioned often in reports as prime participants in that resistance, but the Dalinchi were not mentioned at all. Details regarding the Mariposa Indian War are presented in the CPNC monograph for the Raymond region.

Treaty N, 1851. The Dalinchi and Chukchansi were among 16 local tribes to sign US government Treaty N on April 29, 1851 at a spot near the foothills on the San Joaquin River (Heizer 1972:71-81; Phillips 2004:27, 30). (For the Chuckchansi involvement, see the Raymond region CPNC monograph.) The Dalinchi were called the “Tallinchees” and their signatories were Cho-kete, Pal-lo-koosh, How-il-me-na, and So-kuch. The Treaty N reservation was designed to stretch along the base of the Sierra from the Chowchilla River to the Kings River. Of note, the 16 signatory tribes were assigned by the commissioners to three geographic subgroups by the commissioners, each under the leadership of one chief. The Dalinchi were part of the central group with the Gashowu Yokuts (signed as Cas-sons), Dumna Yokuts (signed as Toom-nas), Pitcache Yokuts (signed as Pit-ca-chees), and Posgisa Monos (signed as Pos-ke-sas), all under Chief Tom-quit of the Pitcaches (Heizer 1972:72-79).

Fresno River Reservation 1854-1859. The headquarters of the Fresno River Reservation, founded in 1854, was on the river at the eastern edge of the Madera region. Office of Indian Affairs reports from the Fresno River agency during the 1850s, now in the National Archives, have not been examined for this report. However, Cook (1955:71), who paraphrased the documents, noted D. A. Enyart’s report statement that “220 Choot-chances” were at the Fresno Farm [a temporary federal reservation] in November of 1854; the Dalinches were not listed. A report by M. B. Lewis on August 30, 1859 stated that the “Cooc-chances, the largest ‘unbroken’ tribe in the agency, originally on Coarse Gold Creek, some still there, some at agency” totalled 240 persons, while the “Pit-cat-ches and Tal-linches (two distinct tribes) native habitat was the San Joaquin River; still near Fort Miller … 150 people” (Cook 1955:71).

Powers 1877. In his list of numerous Yokuts local tribe locations, without detail and without sources, Powers (1877:370) mentioned the Chukchansi “on the San Joaquin, from Whisky Creek down to Millerton.” He also mentioned "Slōk’-nich, chief of the Chukchansi” (1877:371). That would generally include the southern portion of the Coarse Gold region, given his level of generality. But it also includes the northeast portion of the Friant region, believed here to have been held by the Dumna. Since Powers (1877) did not list either the Dalinchi or the Dumna at all, it is probable that he, like so many others, used the term Chuckchansi as a catch-all for any Northern Hills Yokuts speakers. In later text he documented time spent among Chukchansi people on Coarse Gold Creek:

While in Coarse Gold Gulch, it was my good fortune to witness the great dance of the dead (ko-ti’-wa-chil), which was one of the most extraordinary human spectacles I ever beheld. It was not the regular annual dance but a special one, held by request of Kol-lo’mus-nim, a subchief of the Chukchansi [Powers 1877:384].

The multi-page description of the ceremony included Powers' second mention of "Slōk’-nich, the head-chief of the Chukchansi” (1877:385).

Classic Ethnographic References

Merriam 1902-1907. C. Hart Merriam visited the Coarse Gold region a number of times between 1902 and 1907. His field journals (1902-1934) have yet to be systematically paraphrased for this study. Instead, his selectively published materials are cited, beginning with one in September of 1902.

September 22, 1902. On the way from Fresno Flat to Coarse Gold Gulch I passed and stopped at two camps of Chuk-chancy Indians…. Five miles from the first camp is a camp called Picayune. Here there are about six or seven rough board houses and a few brush huts. …. An old woman at the Picayune camp from whom I purchased a basket of acorn soup called the basket nah-cheech. The soup was made of green acorns of the blue oak. They say that those of the black oak are better [Merriam 1967:411]

The full published entry provides a rich picture of the Picayune village at the time of the visit. During this trip Merriam obtained Chukchansi natural history word lists from “Old Matilda Neal & Mrs. Sophie Jones. Picayune and Fresno Flats. Sept. 21 & 22, 1902” (Merriam [1898-1938], Bancroft Library reference W/22c/NH87). He also obtained a Chukchansi vocabulary at the time (Merriam [1898-1938] Bancroft Library reference W/22c/V91).

On October 30, 1903 Merriam learned more about the Chukchansi during a visit to Mrs. Matthews, a Dumna-Gashowu, at Table Mountain near Millerton, in Fresno County:

The Indians now living on Table Mountain are Kosho-o, Pit-kah’-te, Toom’-nah, and Chuk-chan’-sy. The Chukcansy country is north of the San Joaquin River, extending north to Fresno Creek [Merriam 1967:417].

Merriam returned to the Coarse Gold region in 1930. He filled out portions of a natural history word list at Coarse Gold with a “Tallin'che” man named Bill See on August 18 and October 7, 1930 (Merriam [1898-1938], Bancroft Library reference W/22e/NH88).

Barrett 1908. Barrett (1908a:Map 3) identified the Fresno River as the dividing line between Miwok and Yokuts speakers in the Madera County foothills. Thus, he identified most of the Coarse Gold region as Yokuts:

The boundary …. follows the divide between the headwaters of San Joaquin and Merced river to the head of Fresno river. It then follows, in a general way, the course of this stream with its northeasterly and southwesterly trend down, at least, to a point a few miles west of Fresno Flat. Here it probably makes a slight swing to the south to include the vicinity of what was formerly known as Fresno Crossing, then returns to the river itself and continues down it to a point about due south of Raymond [Barrett 1908a:348]

By his mapping, the small portion of the Coarse Gold region on the west side of the Fresno River was within the Miwok area. Also, he mapped the entire Willow Creek watershed, including Crane Valley north of Bass Lake, as Shoshonean (Barrett 1908:Map 3).

Kroeber 1925. Kroeber (1925: Plate 47) assigned the western portion of the Coarse Gold region to the Chukchansi Yokuts, along with a small southeast portion of the Raymond region and a small northern portion of the Friant region. He placed the Dalinchi in the southeast portion of the Coarse Gold region. Kroeber wrote about the Chukchansi extensively:

The Chukchansi, Shukshansi, or Shukshanchi (plural Chukadnisha) held Coarse Gold Creek, an affluent of Fresno River, and the head of Cottonwood Creek. They are the northernmost of all the foothill tribes, and their border, Fresno River, where they adjoined the Miwok, was the farthest limit of all the hill Yokuts. They appear to have moved and scattered considerably, and, being on friendly terms with their Miwok neighbors, to have had no hesitation in entering their territory. This is probably the reason why the modern Chukchansi list among their settlements certain places across the Fresno River, such as Aplau and Yiwisniu, whereas actually it was the Miwok who seem to have owned a small tract on the south side of the stream. Hapasau, near Fresno Flats, was, however, Chukchansi. Also well up on Fresno River was Chukchanau or Suksanau, “Chukchansi place.” On Coarse Gold Creek they inhabited Tsuloniu near the headwaters; Kowoniu or Kohoniu, on Picayune Creek; Kataniu, the present Picayune Rancheria, where the majority of the survivors dwell; and, on Cottonwood Creek, they lived at Ch’eyau, ‘bone place,’ near Bates [Kroeber 1925:481-482].

Kroeber’s text on the Dalinchi was brief:

The Dalinchi (plural Da’elnashi) were a little off the San Joaquin. Fine Gold Creek was their territory. Here the inhabited Moloneu; also O’Neals. Dalinau, ‘Dalinchi place,’ was over the divide in the Coarse Gold Creek drainage” [1925:481].

Kroeber’s incorrect placement of streams in his map work and his vague location of some sites in text indicates that he was not familiar with the local landscape and therefore may also have misunderstood some of the information he obtained for the Coarse Gold Creek region. (Kroeber gathered Chukchansi linguistic material from Dick Neale at Picayune on Jan 13 1904. His Field Notebook 5737-40 should be checked for possible contextual information.)

Aginsky 1943. Bert Aginsky wrote in his “Central Sierra” cultural elements distribution report that he did fieldwork on cultural traits in 1936 at Coarse Gold with Matilda Neal (then over 80 years old) and Mandy Lewis (age unknown), who were “Yokuts, of Northern Hill speech division, Chukchansi tribe of Coarse Gold.” Field notes should be checked for ethno-geographic information.

Newman 1944. In his “Yokuts Language of California,” Newman wrote that he obtained Chukchansi vocabularies from Bill Wilson and Martin Wilson (Dumnas, father and son) at Friant in 1931, and from Chicago Dick and Henry Chenot at Coarsegold in the same year. Field notes should be checked for ethno-geographic information.

Gayton 1948. Gayton summarized Kroeber’s (1925) description of Chukchanci territory and village locations in the introduction to her own 1948 report on the Chukchanci. She then gave the following list of site locations provided to her by a Miss Thrall, who obtained them from three Chukchansi informants: Chicago Dick (born ca. 1895), Nancy Wyatt (born ca. 1900), and Jack Roan (Chukchansi and S.Miwok, born ca. 1865):

Lulniu: Oakhurst, an old village site, the western boundary of the Chukchansi

Gratniu: Picayune (N.W.), an old village site with only one sweat house

Kat’aneu: Picayune (J.R.)

Dalinao: a settlement where many Chukchansi had lived

Docimilpao: a settlement

Baonaiu: a settlement

Wehil: Grub Gulch, a village with a captain was there.

T’oxolo: a place east of Raymond, at the foot of the hills, on the Fresno River

The next to last site on this list, Wehil at Grub Gulch, was in the Nipinnawassee region and is otherwise documented as a Miwok-speaking village. It is suggested here that T’oxolo on the Fresno River may have been in the Raymond or Madera region, or that it is merely a general reference to “the west.”

Gayton discussed Chukchansi lands and land use, based on information from Nancy Wyatt and Jack Roan, as well as three additional people identified as Chukchansis (Mike Wyatt, born ca. 1890, Polly Roan, born ca. 1890, and Matilda Neal, born ca. 1870? [Gayton 1948:iv].

The Chukchansi people went as far north as Yosemite, Southern Miwok territory, said J.R., although none lived permanently north of the Fresno River, unless married to Miwok. Southward they went no farther than Friant, Gashowu territory….

People would move around, perhaps two or three miles for the summer and come back for the winter. They went up in the mountains to get berries or seeds, always going to the same place on which they had a traditional claim. “When white people came they got everyting mixed up.”

For pine nuts, hazel nuts, and a superior type of elderberry people went far up into the mountains. This trip was made about August and camps were established as entire families went.

For acorns the Chukchansi went north to Bass Lake, said N.W. While up there they always feared the approach of bears. For seed-gathering they went down toward Madera to what is now the Dobie [adobe?] Ranch.

Expeditions to get basketry materials – roots which did not grow abundantly in the hills – were made to the lower Fresno River near Madera [Gayton 1948:175-176].

Gayton provided an important comment on the relationship between families and village locations:

Related families usually built their houses in an informal group. These groups, consisting of perhaps three to five houses, would be three to five hundred feet apart, yet in toto the families regarded themselves as comprising a single village. Such scattered house-groups were not unusual in the Northern Foothills, and “community” is perhaps a better term than “village,” in distinction from the townlike villages of the Yokuts to the south [Gayton 1948:176].

Gayton (1948:176-184) also gathered important oral histories regarding the Mariposa Indian War, the 1851 treaty signing, and pre-Gold Rush horse raiding into the Coast Ranges.

Latta 1949. Latta did not mention or map the Dalinchi in his 1949 work. His “inside cover” map gave the Chukchansi the south side of the upper Fresno River area, generally the Coarse Gold region and adjacent areas of the Friant and Raymond regions. “Above the Heuchi, on the south side of Fresno River, were the Chukchansi, a foothill tribe” (1949:3). He assigned specific villages in the Friant region, Cheyau at Bates and Dinisheu at Indian Springs, as Chukchansi (1949:4):

On the location of the later white village of Bates, on upper Cottonwood Creek, was the Chukchansi village of Cheyau. Farther east, and about six miles south of O’Neals, was the village of Dinishneu

Note that Dinishneu, in the Friant region, was said by other ethnographers to have been a Dumna village (see Friant region CPNC monograph). All in all, Latta’s 1949 information for the Coarse Gold region is negligible, in contrast to the rich information he documented for areas south of the San Joaquin River watershed.

Recent Ethnographic References

Cook 1955. In his study of the aboriginal population of the entire San Joaquin Valley and adjacent Sierra, Cook (1955:76) split the Coarse Gold region into two mapping areas, mapping the Chuckchansi and Dalinchi together in the western two-thirds of the region, while giving the Toltichi Yokuts (here discussed in the CPNC North Fork region monograph) the eastern third of the region. In text he described a convoluted process for inferring population density from hints in the ethnographic record:

The tribes on the Fresno and San Joaquin not seen or at least not reported by the Spanish writers are the Gashowu, Wakichi, Kechayi, Dumna, Toltichi, Dalinchi, and Chukchansi. The total number of villages recognized for these seven tribes by Kroeber, Gayton, and Latta is 36 … Since there is no evidence to the contrary and since the hypothesis is inherently reasonable, we may concede 36 villages of 150 persons each or 5,400 people [Cook 1955:51].

That figure of 5,400 people was part of the figure Cook (1955:50-54) used to arrive at an overall population density of 5.05 people per square mile for the area from the Merced River on the north to the Kaweah River on the south.

Broadbent 1955-1958. Sylvia Broadbent did fieldwork on the Chukchansi language with Rose Watt and Emma Lord of Usona, in the Nipinnawassee region (Archive of the Survey of Californian and Other Indian Languages, Department of Linguistics, University of California at Berkeley). Broadbent’s field notes should be checked for ethno-geographic information.

Latta 1977. Latta added material on the Chukchansi to his 1977 volume that is not found in the 1949 work, and he added a section on the Dalinchi, a group that he did not mention at all in 1949. He repeated that the Chukchansi (he now spelled them Chukchanse) lived above the Heuchi, in the foothills on the south side of the Fresno River, and he again assigned the Friant region villages of Cheyau at Bates and Dinishneu at Bellview to the Chukchansi. He then extensively paraphrased Kroeber (1925) regarding the Chukchansi villages in the Coarse Gold Creek drainage (Latta 1977:160). His new 1977 section on the Dalinchi was short. Again he paraphrased precise village names and locations from Kroeber (1925); but he did add a new piece of material that he had collected, oral history from Pahmit:

Little else is known about the Dalinche [than Kroeber’s place-name material.]. Pahmit stated that as a young man he camped and mined gold with a group of them on the San Joaquin River in Dumna Land, but that they suddenly became sick and died off before the mining was over in that area [Latta 1977:160].

Latta’s lack of original material about the Chukchansi and Dalinchi is surprising, given that one of his consultants was George Rivercomb, a man he identified as a half-blood “Chukchanse” born around 1858 (Latta 1977:59, 443).

Spier 1978. The California volume (Heizer 1978) divided Yokuts groups into Northern Valley, Southern Valley, and Foothill to discuss the large Yokuts language territory in three conveniently-sized chapters. The Coarse Gold region was included within the Foothill Yokuts chapter, written by Robert Spier. Spier (1978:471) left the Dalinchi off of his map, while he mapped the Chukchansi Yokuts in the north-central portion of the Coarse Gold region. He excluded the town of Oakhurst from his Chukchansi area; he left the south half of the region and the eastern Fine Gold Creek area unassigned to any local tribe. Spier (1978:484) did include both Chukchansi and Dalinchi in the list of Foothill Yokuts tribes at the end of his chapter. In the chapter itself, he used the Chukchansi as an example of Yokuts alliances with neighbors who spoke other languages:

The unity among Yokuts tribes was not so strong as to preclude extra-Yokuts relations locally. The Chukchansi, northernmost of the Foothill Yokuts, had close alliances with the Southern Sierra Miwok, so much so that there is confusion about the tribal affiliation of some border villages [Spier 1978:472].

In fact, most California local groups had close relations with all neighbors, regardless of language, and there were multi-lingual individuals. The degree to which a Yokuts group had “extra-Yokuts” relations depended on its proximity to non-Yokuts-speaking groups. The Chukchansi lived adjacent to a Miwok-speaking local group, and therefore it is not surprising that they had close alliances with them.

All in all, Spier’s Foothill Yokuts chapter is one of the richest of the 1978 California volume chapters, with many references to the Chukchansi. Nevertheless, it is an uneven, secondary source.