LITTLE PANOCHE REGION – OCHENTAC LOCAL TRIBE

By Randall Milliken

The Little Panoche region is drawn to represent the possible homeland area of Ochentac and Millanistac people, small closely tied village groups that moved to Mission San Juan Bautista between 1798 and 1807. Like their Orestac neighbors to the north, they probably spoke Chalon Costanoan or a variant form of Mutsun Costanoan; evidenced by linguist priest Felipe Arroyo de la Cuesta referenced differences in their numerals from those of the Mutsun at Mission San Juan Bautista. While the region’s boundaries are hypothetical and highly suspect, they probably do encompass most of the core area from which the Ochentac and Millanistac people derived. The boundary problem is part of a wider problem with identification of homeland areas from Los Banos Creek on the north to Silver Creek on the south, including the neighboring Potrero Peak, Panoche Pass, Griswold Creek, and Silver Creek regions. An additional problem involves the neighboring Oro Loma region just to the east, an area that includes the lowest foothills of Little Panoche Creek and which has been assigned in the CDM model to a Yokuts-speaking group with a large amount of doubt. Unfortunately, we lack any later classical ethnographic referents for the various groups that went to missions San Juan Bautista and Soledad from any of these regions. Future modelers will certainly be able to improve the boundaries in all these areas on the basis of detailed family reconstitution-based studies of the mission register evidence.

Environment

The Little Panoche region of the dry eastern Coast Range foothills encompasses upper Little Panoche Creek and the upper middle portion of Panoche Creek in the Planada area. Highest elevation is more than 3,600 feet at Cerro Colorado in the west and lowest is at about 800 feet along Little Panoche Creek as it passes through the Panoche Hills, the last low Coast Range ridge, at the boundary with the currently mapped Oro Loma region. Historic vegetation in this eastern Coast Range region of low rainfall was preponderantly open grassland, with blue oak woodland stands in the higher western portion.

Early Expedition References

None of the early Spanish or Mexican expeditions that kept diaries passed through the Little Panoche region.

Mission Register References

A total of 72 people baptized at Franciscan missions is currently assigned to the Little Panoche region. The great majority, 70, were baptized at Mission San Juan Bautista, with the remaining two baptized at Mission Soledad. Distances to the two missions suggest that some other people at Soledad came from this region, probably some of those that were identified in the Soledad records as Chalon people.

At Mission San Juan Bautista 18 converts were explicitly identified as Ochentacs, all between 1802 and 1807. Another 18 people were identified as Milanistacs, between 1801 and 1807. And four other baptismal entries, all by one priest, provide the documentation of the close relationship, or even synonymy, between the two groups: "Milanitacos y Ochentacos" (SJB-B 1380, Father Iturrate in 1804); "Milanistaco [text]", "Ochentacos, difunto en Soledad [margin]" (SJB-B 1516, Father Iturrate in 1805); "Milanistacos, como Ochentacos" (SJB-B 1517 Father Iturrate in 1805); "Millanistacos Ochentac" (SJB-B 1518 Father. Iturrate in 1805). A few years earlier two missionaries at Mission San Juan Bautista considered the Millanistacs to be a subgroup of the Pagsin: "Pagsin r[ancheria] Milicnixta" (SJB-B 0244, 248, Father Pedro Antonio Martinez in 1798, SJB-B 263, Father Martiarena in 1798). And one missionary considered Millanistac to be a Tamarron village; "Tam. Mirianixtac" (SJB 635, Father Lopez in 1800).

At Mission Soledad, the missionaries labeled the vast majority of their eastern Coast Range converts as Chalons, whether they came from the San Benito River just 15 miles east over the first mountain ridge, from the San Benito Pass area 25 miles northeast (where people went to San Juan Bautista as Pagsins), or from the San Benito Mountains 35 miles to the southeast. Thus, it seems that any Ochentacs or Milanistacs who went to Soledad (and that mission was just as close as Soledad to Little Panoche Creek) went there as Chalons that cannot be identified to specific watersheds or regions. All Chalons at Mission Soledad have been assigned to regions west and south of the Little Panoche region, but only upon an arbitrary basis for purposes of population density modeling. There is a good chance that the last large group of Chalons baptized during the 1805-1807 period at Mission Soledad, the group of February 26, 1807, were Little Panoche Creek region people.

1840-1900 Historic References

No ethnographic information is available for the Little Panoche region during the 1846-1900 early American Period.

Classic Ethnographic References

A. L. Kroeber lacked information about this region. He mapped it as Yokuts territory, but admitted that the language boundary east of the Coast Range divide was not known to him (Kroeber 1925:462). None of the other classical anthropologists documented any information for the region.

Recent Ethnographic References

Critiques are needed here on the "California" volume (Heizer, editor 1978)—articles by Wallace because he maps the area as Northern Valley Yokuts, and Levy’s article because the region is in the domain of his Costanoan chapter, even though he does not map the area as such. Also relevant are King and Hickman (1976), Milliken (1993, 2006a, 2006b), and Milliken and Johnson (2005), all limited distribution technical papers.