Volume 9: Introduction to the Contact-Period Native California Community Distribution Model

By:

Randall Milliken,Consulting in the Past

With:

John Johnson,Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History
David Earle,Antelope Valley College
Norval Smith,University of Amsterdam
Patricia Mikkelsen,Far Western Anthropological Research Group, Inc.
Paul Brandy,Far Western Anthropological Research Group, Inc.
Jerome King,Far Western Anthropological Research Group, Inc.

Submitted to:
California Department of Transportation, District 6, 2015 East Shields Ave, Fresno, CA 93726

It may be anticipated that future scholars, undaunted by the huge mass of available published and manuscript data on California Indians, will work over the information on a tribe-by-tribe basis and prepare maps showing the domains of the identifiable or inferable tribelets. -R. F. Heizer 1966

Abstract

The in-progress Contact-Period Native California Community Distribution Model (CDM) brings together decades of research and mission record analysis into selected volumes that will eventually be part of a 15 volume print/wiki encyclopedia portraying the socio-political landscape of native California after first contact with the Spanish, between 1770 and 1830.

Volume 1 of the series presents an overview of the CDM model, explaining the process of ethnographic data analysis and regional mapping unit construction across all portions of California. Volumes 2-15 will eventually represent contextual overviews of each of the 14 analytical zones identified within California. Each zone has a group of independent, landholding regions (totaling 663) defined by mutual history, shared languages, and similar land-use patterns. (Table 1) An introduction to each volume will focus on multi-regional issues (overview of history, ethnography, and research techniques) followed by individual regional monographs (some complete, some unfinished) covering languages, environment, and early expedition, mission, historic, and ethnographic sources, as applicable. A comprehensive bibliography will conclude each volume.

Volume 9, entitled South San Joaquin Analytical Zone, almost complete, includes the southern portion of the Yokuts language family area as well as the western Mono and Tubatalabal language areas. It contains 56 regions covering portions of Merced, Fresno, Madera, Kings, Tulare, and Kern counties.

The CDM is also presented in a collaborative Wiki website (currently accessible through farwestern.com) which consists of several major elements—ACCESS data tables, GIS maps, and narrative text. In this format, the ethnographic data are available to scholars from academia, tribal communities, and agencies that can locate and organize data effectively, add new information as it becomes available, and generate feature articles that can include maps, pictures, or cross-references.

This series has been produced by Far Western Anthropological Research Group, Inc., with support from a number of district environmental branches within the California Department of Transportation.

Landholding Groups of the South San Joaquin Zone - Yokutsan, Tubatulabal, and Western Mono Speakers

Figure 1. South San Joaquin Analytical Zone with Regions.

This zone does not represent any distinct ethnographic socio-political area. It is rather a conveniently sized subarea of California for presenting an overview about ethnography, history, and problems in ethnogeographic reconstruction. The South San Joaquin zone is one of those portions of California where we must rely upon the clues imbedded in the Franciscan mission registers to build the ethnogeographic picture in the west, while relying upon the classic ethnographic literature for reconstructing ethnogeography in the east. Contextual ethnogeographic and historic information for understanding the details in the zone’s monographs are provided below. This zone study concludes with the combined bibliography for all of its constituent regional monographs.

Linguistic Groups

Figure 2. Community Distribution Model Regions by Language Group.

Uto-Aztecan Family Languages

The Uto-Aztecan family has nine major branches spoken over a wide area from Idaho on the north to El Salvador on the south: Numic, Tubatulabal, Takic, Hopi, Tepiman, Taracahitan, Tubar, Corachol, and Aztecan (Goddard 1996:323). The four northern branches, as argued by Kroeber, form a distinct Shoshonean branch of the overall family; they are Hopic, Numic, Takic, and Tubatulabal. Linguists today refer to the former Shoshonean branch as Northern Uto-Aztecan (Miller 1986; Mithun 1999:540).

Mono (a language within the Numic subbranch) and Tubatulabal are the two ethnographic Uto-Aztecan languages of the South San Joaquin Zone. Mono was spoken by the Western Mono people along the west slope of the southern Sierra Nevada range from south of Mono Lake down to the Mount Whitney vicinity; it is precisely the same language as that spoken by the Owens Valley Paiute directly across the southern Sierra Nevada Range to the east. Farther south, Tubatulabal was the native language in the mountainous portion of the Kern River watershed at the time of western contact. Mithun (1999:541) provides a bibliography of linguistic studies of the Mono and Tubatulabal languages.

Yokutsan Family Languages

The Yokutsan language family includes a number of closely related Yokuts languages, all within the drainage of the San Joaquin River in California (Shipley 1979:82-84). The family is a member of the Penutian language stock. It has recently been suggested to be a branch of a Yok-Utian family within that stock, together with Miwokan and Ohlone-Costanoan (Callaghan 1997; Mithun 1999:309). The northern boundary of Yokutsan, where its speakers bordered the Plains Miwok, lay just north of Stockton (within the Delta-North San Joaquin zone). To the south, Yokutsan languages were spoken down the San Joaquin Valley to Buena Vista Lake at the foot of the Transverse Ranges. The eastern Yokutsan boundary varied. Where it contacted Sierra Miwok speakers, it was generally along the break between the plains and the Sierra Nevada foothills. South of the Fresno River, where it contacted Mono speakers, the border tended to be at higher elevations, in the yellow pine forest belt. On the west, the boundary between Yokutsan and Ohlone-Costanoan speakers was along the edge of the Coast Range foothills (Milliken 1994; cf. Kroeber 1925).

Three major branches within the Yokutsan language family are distinguished—Poso Creek, Buena Vista, and Nim-Yokuts. On the basis of comparative historical phonology and morphology, Whistler and Golla (1986) portray a complex division of ever-more-recent splits and expansions in Yokuts languages from south to north. They provide evidence that the Poso Creek language, on the one hand, and combined Buena Vista and Nim-Yokuts on the other hand, are two separate branches of the family. Nim-Yokuts, the most widespread of the three main branches, is itself split into Tule-Kaweah (of the southern Sierran foothills) and Northern Yokuts. Finally, Northern Yokuts itself is represented by the Delta, Northern Valley, Southern Valley, and Kings River Yokuts languages. Mithun (1999:567-568) provides an overview of recent linguistic insights regarding Yokutsan, as well as a bibliography of relevant linguistic studies.

The South San Joaquin region includes all of the Yokutsan language areas except the Delta Yokuts, a language within the Nim-Yokuts branch.

Western Contact and Disruption

Change of traditional native life in the South San Joaquin vicinity was caused by both direct and indirect forces. The direct forces were Spanish expeditions, emigration to Coast Range missions (Figure 3), arrival of traders and gold miners in the late 1840s, arrival of settlers in the 1850s, and the removal of many groups to a series of reservations from the 1850s through the 1890s. Indirect impacts were the arrival of new diseases, new ideas, and new tools that reached groups ahead of direct contact.

Spanish Period

First Contact

Figure 3. Degree of Mission-Induced Depopulation in the South San Joaquin Analytic Zone.

In their villages the natives live in the winter in very large squares, the families divided from each other, and outside they have very large houses in the form of hemisphere, where they keep their seeds and utensils [Fages 1772 in Bolton 1935:12].

In 1776 Father F. Garces came into the southern San Joaquin Valley from the south as an unarmed evangelizer for Christianity. Garces probably entered the valley by way of Cottonwood Creek and Tejon Creek, and then went north to the Kern River in the present Bakersfield area. He learned that the Yokuts people of the Kern Lake and Bakersfield regions had been visited by Spanish deserters who abused their women; the tribal people executed them for committing these assaults. He also was told that one Spanish deserter was living happily in a nearby community, married to an Indian woman (Coues 1900:272-302).

Post-1800 Spanish Expeditions

No Spanish expeditions into the South San Joaquin are documented from the time of Garcés to 1805. Beginning that year, numerous groups entered the valley during the Spanish period. Whether led by soldiers or missionaries, these parties always included soldiers and always searched for baptized Indians who broke the territorial law by leaving their missions without permission. The expeditions included:

• 1805 Martin (in Cook 1960:243-244): Mission San Miguel to the Wowol villages on the south shore of Tulare Lake.
• 1806 Zalvidea (in Cook 1960:245-247): Mission Santa Barbara over San Rafael Mountains to Buenavista and Kern Lakes, then to the Kern River at present Bakersfield (Kern County), over Tejon Pass to Antelope Valley, Cajon Pass, and Mission San Gabriel.
• 1806 Moraga-Muñoz (in Cook 1960: 247-253): Mission San Juan Bautista east to the east side of the San Joaquin River (in Merced County), north as far as the Mokelumne River (San Joaquin County), then back south along the east side of the valley all the way to Kern Lake and over Tejon Pass (Kern County) to Mission San Gabriel.
• 1808 Palomares (in Cook 1960:256-257): From Mission San Fernando to the Antelope Valley (Los Angeles and Kern counties), to the hill country overlooking the southern San Joaquin Valley (Kern County), and back to Mission San Fernando.
• 1815 Ortega (in Cook 1960:267-68): From Mission San Miguel to the Kaweah River (through Kings and Tulare counties)
• 1815 Pico (in Cook 1960: 268-269): From Mission San Juan Bautista to the Kaweah River (through Merced, Fresno, and Kings counties).
• 1815 Pico-Ortega (in Cook 1960 269-271): Pico and Ortega joined forces at a distributary of the Kaweah River (Corcoran vicinity), then backtracked Pico’s route north (through Kings and Fresno counties), crossed the San Joaquin River, and continued north (in Madera County) almost to the Merced River, then west to Mission San Juan Bautista.
• 1816 Martinez (in Cook 1960:271-272): From Mission San Luis Obispo across the Temblor Range to the south end of Tulare Lake (Kern County), thence southeast to Goose Lake, and probably to the Bakersfield vicinity on the Kern River, back to Tulare Lake (all Kern County), then west back to Mission San Luis Obispo.
• 1819 Estudillo (in Gayton 1936): From Mission San Miguel to the south side of Tulare Lake and Goose Lake (Kern County), northeast to the White, Tule, and Kaweah rivers (Tulare County), to the north side of Tulare Lake and lower Kings River (Kings County), then north along Fresno Slough to the bend of the San Joaquin River (Fresno County) and Los Banos Creek (Merced County), then west to Mission San Juan Bautista.

Spanish Era (up through 1821) Mission Recruitment

Approximately 3,200 people moved to Franciscan missions in the Coast Ranges from the South San Joaquin zone. The preponderance of them (1,790; 56%) went during the Spanish era, through late 1821. Many, but not all, of the South San Joaquin Valley people to arrive at the missions before 1822 can be traced to groups from specific areas. Probably all in that early group were Yokuts speakers. Below is an overview of Spanish period Yokuts missionization, presented by county.

Merced County—More than 800 Yokuts people moved to the missions from Merced County between 1798 and 1821. The largest group was Nopchenches from the Santa Rita region, 111 people. Surprisingly, most members of the next largest single group—208 Janalamne/Tejeys—went to Mission Santa Clara, the remainder to Santa Cruz; they are tentatively associated with the Gustine area. The first Merced County people at the missions were the Chaneches of the Los Banos region, 106 people (most at Santa Cruz). The Notoals/Huocons of the Mud Slough region were split between missions Santa Cruz and San Juan Bautista. From just east of the San Joaquin River, most of the Quithrathres of the Atwater region and Uthrocus of the El Nido region were at Mission San Juan Bautista by the end of 1821.

Fresno County—More than 500 people from western Fresno County were at the missions by the end of 1821. First came the Quihueths of the Oro Loma region, More than 100 people were absorbed into missions San Juan Bautista and Soledad before 1817. The Helm region people—hard to identify individually, but probably more than 90 people—went to Mission Soledad prior to 1818. Mendota people, the Cutochos, were at the missions before 1821, split between San Juan Bautista and Soledad. The other large Fresno County groups nearly entirely removed to the missions by that time were the Eyuslahuas and Copchas of the Firebaugh region. Remaining Fresno County groups at the end of the period lived eastward of the lowest portions of the San Joaquin Valley.

Madera County—Only 78 identifiable Yokuts people from areas centered in Madera County were at any mission before 1822. Most, 65, were Chausilas from the western Chausila Dairyland region. Another 11 were Heuchis from the Madera region. One was a Hoyima and one was from a poorly documented small group called Oatsin that may have been in the Sierra foothills.

Kings County—At least 82 Yokuts people from groups in Kings County were at the missions before 1822. The great majority (61; 74%) were Tachis; they were divided almost equally among missions Soledad, San Antonio, and San Miguel. Another 11 were Telesmecoyo people from the Dudley Ridge area on the west shore of Tulare Lake, three at Mission San Antonio, and eight at San Miguel; there should have been more, and it is likely that they also appeared at the missions under synonymous names that have not been identified with any specific San Joaquin Valley location. Another nine Chunuts from the Corcoran region were at the missions, four each at Soledad and San Miguel, plus one at San Antonio. One Nutunutu from the Hanford region had gone to Mission San Antonio.

Tulare County—Only eight people from groups centered in Tulare County had gone to the missions by the end of 1821. Six of them were Telamnes from Goshen/Visalia, at Mission San Miguel. Two others were Choinocs from the Tulare region, at Mission San Buenaventura.

Kern County—At least 243 Yokuts people from Kern County were at missions by the end of 1822. The great majority (198; 81%) went to San Miguel, where the Wowols of Alpaugh were the highest represented (103), followed by the Auyamnes of the Buttonwillow region (63). Also appearing in San Miguel registers were 14 Tulamnis from the Buenavista region and 11 Yaulmanis from Bakersfield. Mission San Luis Obispo had baptized 29 South San Joaquin people, the largest group being 14 Auyamnes from Buttonwillow, and the next largest being only seven Tulamnis from Buenavista. Buenavista also sent two people to Santa Barbara, three to San Fernando, and two to San Buenaventura. Ten Quiyamnes were distributed among San Miguel, San Luis Obispo, and San Fernando. Only four Kern Lake Hometwalis are identifiable in the pre-1822 records, two at Santa Barbara and one each at San Buenaventura and La Purisima.

In summary, by the end of 1821 the northwest portion of the South San Joaquin zone was empty of villages on the plains on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley in northwest Fresno County and Merced County, as well as along the north-south flowing San Joaquin River in present Merced County and far western Madera County. Southeast and east of that area tribal life was still intact at the end of the year 1821.

One other caveat—the Quiyamne (Famoso region) and Auyamne (Buttonwillow), two Yokuts tribelets in the otherwise-intact area south of Tulare Lake, seem to have been destroyed as viable groups in wars with their neighbors prior to 1821.

Mexican Period

An independent Mexican government replaced Spain in control of the coastal missions and presidios over the winter of 1821-1822. More military expeditions entered the valley during the Mexican Period, in search of fugitive Christian neophytes and of native people who raided mission horse herds. North American fur trappers also began to enter the South San Joaquin regions during the Mexican period. Brief overviews are provided below regarding key expeditions.

Mexican Period San Joaquin Diaries

1826 Pico (in Cook 1962:181-184): Pico went into the San Joaquin Valley to punish horse raiders and capture fugitive Christian Indians. He left Monterey on December 27, 1825. The raid took them into Madera, Fresno, Kings, and Tulare counties. After discovering some fugitive Christian Indians in the Firebaugh area they went east to the Herndon vicinity, then north into Heuchi lands, in search of the Hoyima. They captured 40 people, and arrested seven of these as criminals. Next they traveled south to the Kings River, where they visited villages up and down the river. Returning north along the east side of Fresno Slough to the Mendota area, they split off a group to return to Monterey with their prisoners. Then Pico doubled back south along the west side of Fresno Slough to Tulare Lake, in an attempt to sneak up on the Tachi, who were harboring fugitive Christians. Unsuccessful in that attempt, the party swung around the east side of Tulare Lake lands, stopped to visit friendly Wowols, and returned westward. The party reached Mission San Miguel on January 25, 1826.

1827 Jedediah Smith (1977): Jedediah Smith led a group of American trappers up the San Joaquin Valley in the late winter and early spring of 1827. His large party, complete with its own herd of horses, crossed the Tehachapi Range from Antelope Valley to Kern Lake over February 9-11. At the lake they secured as a guide an Indian man who spoke Spanish. Farther north in the Bakersfield region Smith reported, "Several Indians some of them having horses visited the encampment" (Smith 1977:136). Arriving at Tulare Lake, he saw a Wowol village "of two or three hundred inhabitants" (Smith 1977:139). He described the Kaweah River country as "populous" and specifically mentioned a large village of the "Wimmilche" people, after whom he named the current Kings River. The population picture changed when Smith moved north to the bend of the San Joaquin River, which "they called the Peticutry." From that point northward Smith found no villages in the flat San Joaquin Valley until he reached the Mokelumne River (Smith 1977:146).

1828a Rodriguez (in Cook1962:184-185): From April 22 until May 5, Rodriguez was in the Merced and Madera county areas raiding the Chausila, Heuchi, and Hoyima. "I brought in 52 horses taken from the village called Joyima and, between Christians and heathen, 85 souls," Rodriguez reported (in Cook 1962:185).

1828b Rodriguez (in Cook 1962:185-186): On his second 1828 trip, Rodriguez raided areas south of Tulare Lake. He entered the San Joaquin Valley from La Panza (east of Mission San Luis Obispo) and reached the Tulamni on the west side of Buenavista Lake on May 29. Upon being informed that Indian people in the mountains to the south had horses, he moved south and raided small villages in the Santiago Creek, San Emigdio, and Grapevine Creek regions (Santa Barbara CDM zone). Returning northward, he raided the "Carrizos" (probably Hometwali) and the Yaulmani of the Bakersfield region before arriving farther north at his allies the Wowol of the Alpaugh region at Tulare Lake. He then left the San Joaquin Valley in the direction of Mission San Miguel.

1830<: North American fur trappers entered California in the 1830s, for instance Ewing Young (in Holmes 1967). Any diaries they might have left should be examined for information on ethnogeography.

Mexican Era (1822-1846) Mission Recruitment

Some 1,460 South San Joaquin region people moved to the missions during the Mexican era. About 1,270 (87%) have been assigned to specific regions, all Yokuts-speaking. Of the remaining 190 who are merely from "the Tulares," some small number may have been Western Mono or Tubatulabal. Three-quarters of the 1,270 people identifiable to region were baptized in one or another of three years:

1822—288 people, most (124) from the San Joaquin River in Fresno and Madera counties or from Merced County (121). Most were remnants of the Merced County groups on and just east of the San Joaquin River (Nopchenche, Quithrathre, Uthrocos), but a significant new group were the Pitcache of the Kerman region.

1834—264 people, most from Kings or Tulare counties. They included Chunut, Tachi, and Wowol of Tulare Lake, as well as Choinoc of Tulare and Wechihit of Sanger. These people were probably survivors of the malaria epidemic of 1833.

1835—277 people, most from Kern, Kings, and Tulare counties. Most were from the same groups baptized the previous year, but they also included a few Tulamnis of Buenavista, Tajanishilac (Hometwali) of Kern Lake, Yualmani of Bakersfied, and Telamne of Goshen/Visalia.

Malaria struck the Central Valley in August 1833. The epidemic devastated tribal groups farther north in the Sacramento Valley (Cook 1955) and south of the bend of the San Joaquin River as far as Kern Lake.

Mission Closure and Horse Raiding, 1837-1845

The Franciscan missions were closed as land-holding communes between 1834 and 1836. Under the original Spanish law and subsequent Mexican law, mission Indians were to be given half of the mission lands and livestock (Geary 1934). But only a handful of Mission Indian individuals were given any land or livestock by the commissioners of the Mexican government. None of them were tribal people of the South San Joaquin zone.

Surviving Coast Range Chumash, Salinan, and Ohlone-Costanoans went to work on various Mexican ranchos to the south and west of the San Joaquin Valley, as did some of those Yokuts people who had been at the missions since the early 1820s or earlier. Some of the "New Christians" who had been baptized since 1822 also stayed to work on Coast Range ranches. But most of the New Christians from tribelets on the east side of the San Joaquin Valley returned to their old homelands.

Many of those who returned to the San Joaquin Valley joined their remnant valley relatives who had survived the malaria epidemic to take up the horse raiding life that they had practiced in the early 1820s, before they moved to the missions. To an unknown extent, they brought people from Sierra foothill groups along on some of the horse raids. Horse raiding in the South San Joaquin seems to have been centered in present Madera County.

1845 John C. Fremont (1886): Fremont brought his third exploring expedition down the east side of the San Joaquin Valley from Sutter’s Fort in December 1845. His encounter with the "Chauchiles" is discussed in detail in the Raymond region monograph, with quotes from Latta’s (1949) extract of his memoirs. Freemont’s full works have not been seen by this author. They should be consulted and all relevant material for ethnogeography should be cited in appropriate CDM monographs.

Early American Period

On May 13, 1846, the United States declared war on Mexico over an incident along the Texas border. The military occupation government appointed John Sutter sub-Indian agent for the district of Sacramento and San Joaquin in the spring of 1847. He was granted power to advise the government and threaten Indians and settlers with future recriminations in cases of illegal behavior. There is no evidence that he interacted with any groups of the South San Joaquin zone.

Reports of gold discovery in the mountains east of Sutter’s Fort brought a small flood of Hispanic and Anglo Californians to the Sierra foothills in the spring of 1848. In the summer of 1848, Governor Mason toured the central mines and reported thousands of Indians panning for gold with pans or willow baskets (Hurtado 1988:104). Adventurer James D. Savage soon hired Indian people to conduct placer mining operations with their basketry equipment. Savage set up a series of trading posts to collect gold from Indian people of the present Mariposa and Madera county areas (Hall 1978:66-67; Hurtado 1988:112-115; Munoz 1980); his main ally was Jose Reyes, a Chausila headman from the present west-central Madera County area who had been baptized at Mission San Juan Bautista in 1837 (San Juan Bautista Baptism 4298).

The spring and summer of 1849 brought a huge influx of young foreign men to California. By late 1850, 10,000 miners were reportedly working the Stanislaus River watershed (Hall 1978:54). The famous gold-mining settlements of Sutter Creek, Jackson, Mokelumne Hill, San Andreas, Angels Camp, Sonora, Coulterville, and Mariposa all grew up within Sierra Miwok territory. North Americans, French, Mexicans, and Chileans joined the Anglo and Hispanic Californians at the mines in 1849 and 1850. Some Mission Indians from the coastal settlements took up entrepreneurial activities in the mining towns, as Perkins described, in late 1849 or 1850:

Mission Indians, with scarlet bandanas round their heads, a richly colored zarape over their shoulders, a pair of cotton drawers, and bare-footed, would push their way through the crowd, carrying pails of iced liquor on their heads, crying … agua fresca, cuatro reales [Perkins 1964:106].

Anglo Americans predominated in the mines by 1850. Most of them had little regard for the native Indian people, considered them racially inferior and a nuisance, to be removed in any way possible. They began to drive the native workers out, often with violence and brutality. After 1850 the local Indians "continued to live on the margins of mining camps and boomtowns" but were never again a large percentage of the labor force (Hurtado 1988:108).

Unratified Treaties, Mariposa Indian War, 1850-1852

California was admitted to the United States as a free state on September 9, 1850. The new governor of California reflected the attitude of the majority of the state’s citizens. On January 7, 1851, in his annual message to the state legislature, Governor Peter Burnett stated that a war of extermination would be waged "until the Indian race should become extinct" and that it was "beyond the power and wisdom of man to avert the inevitable destiny" (Hittell 1897:899). As North American whites settled the best lands of the San Joaquin Valley, the Indians were driven off. When they poached some of the immigrant property, they were hunted down and killed.

Friction between the local people and North Americans in the southern mining district in present Mariposa County sparked the native resistance called the Mariposa Indian War of 1851.The resistance began in the fall of 1850 and culminated with the defeat of the leading groups, the Chauchila and the Chukchansi Yokuts, in the spring of 1851. Their leaders signed a treaty with the US government on April 29, 1851. (See further discussion of this and other treaties in the next section below.) We present here a summary of that war’s events, which involved local tribes who were living at the time in the Raymond, Le Grand, Coarse Gold, and Nipinnawassee regions. (The sources used here are the 1997 and 2004 works by George Phillips, themselves based on a myriad of primary manuscripts):

• At the start of the Gold Rush the Chauchila seem to have been living in either the Le Grand or Raymond region, perhaps both. In 1849, James Savage, a widower from Illinois, established trading posts along the Merced, Mariposa, and Fresno rivers, cohabited with a number of Indian wives, and hired local Indians to pan gold dust for him.
• Late in 1850 some Indians from the region between the Merced and Fresno rivers attacked Savage’s northern trading post on the Merced River. As tensions continued to build, Savage attempted to help the local groups face the new reality of western conquest by taking a "Chowchilla" chief named Jose Juarez to see San Francisco in the fall. (Jose Juarez is not identifiable in any Franciscan mission records.) In San Francisco, Juarez boasted that the tribes were preparing to drive the whites from the mountains (Phillips 1997:42, 43).
• In late November 1850, a group of tribes gathered near Savage’s Fresno River post (near the later Savage Monument in the eastern Raymond region); Phillips lists the Potuyanthre Miwok, Nuchu Miwok, Chauchila Yokuts, and Pitkachi Yokuts. (It is hard to imagine that the Chuckchansi Yokuts were not there also.) Savage went to talk with them and urge them to avoid war, but his efforts were rejected. Then, on December 1, Indian agent Adam Johnston arrived in the area and went to talk to the Chauchila chiefs at Savage’s Fresno River station. After Johnson distributed gifts, the Chauchila assured him they would not oppose the whites.
• On December 17, a combined group of Chauchila Yokuts, Chukchansi Yokuts, and Pohonichi Miwoks raided Savage’s Fresno River post, killed three men, and made off with goods and livestock. On the same day Savage noticed that Potuyanthre Indians living around his Mariposa post had withdrawn into the mountains and followed them to a camp in the higher mountains; they may have been diverting Savage away from the Fresno River attack (Phillips 1997:43, 44).
• On December 25, more than 100 Indians attacked a miners’ camp and ferry in what may be the later Cassidys Bar area along the San Joaquin River, an area now flooded by Millerton Lake. One miner was killed and ten were wounded. Specific tribes were not mentioned, but just days before, the local sheriff had warned all miners to leave the San Joaquin River after he spoke with Pitkachi chief Tom-quit at his village (Phillips 1997:47).
• The Americans responded by sending out a posse of about 100 miners and settlers from various mining camps in the Mariposa district. A few days after January 7, 1851 they found the Heuchi, along with many Chauchilas and some Chukchansis, in a mountainous village of 60 or 70 huts; diaries indicate they traveled 50 miles, but that may not have been on a direct line. They burned the village and killed 30 people (Phillips 1997:49-52). This refuge may have been at Fresno Flats or farther east in the Bass Lake area.
• On January 17, 1851 the settler posse went out again, by way of Fine Gold Creek. They found the resisting Indians "on the north fork of the San Joaquin" (Phillips 1997:53), which, if true, put them deep into the Sierra and far above the snow line of the North Fork region. Phillips summarized: "At a nearby village resided elements of the Chauchila, Chukchansi, Gawia, Nukchu, Potoyanti, Pohonichi, and Yosemite. Numbering some five hundred fighting men, they were led by Chauchila chiefs José Rey and José Juarez" (Phillips 1997:53). (Chief Jose Rey is probably the individual baptized at San Juan Bautista in 1837 as a 19 year old Chauchila [SJB-B 4298]). Again, the native camp was burned and the Indians retreated.
• In February and early March 1851 miners and settlers were attacked over a wide area of the Sierra foothills, from the Stanislaus River south to the Kaweah River. Among places where whites were killed were the San Joaquin River in the Friant region and Fine Gold Gulch in the Coarse Gold region. The Chauchila were blamed for most of the raids (Phillips 1997:55, 71).

A group of three federal commissioners arrived in the Jamestown vicinity (Delta/North San Joaquin zone), north of the main disturbance area, on February 20, 1851. They had been directed by the United States Congress to make a series of treaties with local groups across the state. The purpose of the treaties was to get the tribes out of the mining and farming lands and onto lands that were not desired by the rapidly growing North American population. Under the treaties, three reservations were set up along the front edge of the foothills within the South San Joaquin zone.

• The federal treaty commissioners arrived in the San Joaquin Valley in February 1851, at the same time that state officials were organizing an official militia to suppress the Indians. The commissioners established Camp Fremont on the Little Mariposa River on March 8 and soon began talking with the adjacent Potoyanti (the Hunter Valley region) and Siyante (Catheys Valley region). The commissioners picked lands for their reservation north of the Merced River in the San Joaquin Valley. The Potoyanti, Siyante, and four local tribes of the upper Merced and Tuolumne rivers signed the first federal treaty (later called Treaty M<ref>The letter sequence for these treaties was not used in the field but was imposed years later in Washington D.C.</ref>) on March 19, 1851 (Phillips 2004:27).
• Beginning on March 19, 1851, companies from the newly organized Mariposa Battalion went into the mountains to bring in the many resisting groups. One of the companies followed Tenaya’s Yosemite group into Yosemite Valley in late March.
• While the militia was chasing the various groups, the commissioners moved south to the Fresno River, where they arrived on March 27.
• On April 9 some Indian women came in to the commissioners to say that the Chauchila would sign a treaty, but not until they had finished their mortuary ceremonies for Chief José Reyes, who had died of his earlier wounds. In mid-April a portion of the Mariposa Battalion headed towards the North Fork of the San Joaquin River by way of Coarse Gold Gulch, in search of the Chauchila. They found a deserted village and the remains of José Reye’s cremation. It turned out that the main group of Chauchila people had already gone down the San Joaquin River to the valley to meet with the commissioners (Phillips 1997:83-84).

Treaty N was signed on April 29, 1851 with tribelets of present southwest Mariposa County, central Madera County, and central Fresno County. The Chauchila, Heuchi, Chukchansi (all three Yokuts), Pohonichi, and Nuchu (both Sierra Miwok) all came out of the mountains to sign the treaty at a spot called Camp Barbour on the San Joaquin River (now the Friant vicinity of Fresno County). There they joined local tribes from along the San Joaquin and others who had been brought north from the Kings River. The Treaty N reservation territory, as described in the treaty text, was to be a very large stretch of plain along the base of the Sierra, from the Chowchilla River to the Kings River. In all, 16 tribes signed the treaty in three geographic groupings (Heizer 1972:71-81; Phillips 2004:27, 30). The Chauchila and Chukchansi were part of the northern geographic group, along with the Heuchi Yokuts, the Pohonichi Miwok, and the Nutchu Miwok, all of whom "acknowledge Nai-yak-qua as their principal chief" (Heizer 1972:72). (See the Madera region CDM monograph for more information about Nai-yak-qua of the Heuchi.) Also of note, none of the Chauchila or Chukchansi Treaty N signatories had a Spanish name; the Chauchila signatories were Po-ho-leel, E-keeno, Kay-o-ya, A-pem-shee, and Cho-no-hal-ma, while the Chukchansi were Co-tumsi, Ti-moh, Sa-wa-lai, A-chat-a-na, and Mi-e-wal (Heizer 1972:72-79).

The Mariposa War was nearly over with the signing of Treaty N in April 1851 by all of the resisting groups except the Yosemites (probably composite Bull Creek region and eastern Sierra Monos) and "Monos" of the North Fork region. The Yosemites were captured by mid-May, by which time the Monos were believed to have fled over the Sierra (Phillips 1997:1-99, 2004:25-34).

The commissioners continued south in May 1851. On May 13, at the Kings River, perhaps in the Kingston vicinity, the Tachi, Nutunutu, Wimilche, Telamni, Choinoc, Kaweah, and Yokod of the plains signed Treaty A along with the Entibich, Tuhucmache, Toineche, Holcuma, and Wukchumne of the foothills. Some of the hill groups were Mono speakers.

On May 30 more groups were brought together by the commissioners on the Kaweah River. There the Koyeti, Wolasi, Padwisha, and Wacksache signed Treaty B, along with some groups whose names are not definitely associated with those known ethnographically. Again, the groups included both Yokuts and Mono speakers.

On June 3, 1851, groups gathered on the White River signed Treay C. The groups included the Chunut, Wowol, Yalumne, and another segment of the Koyeti.

On June 10, 1851 groups from the far south end of the San Joaquin Valley and surrounding hill country, who had been gathered together at Tejon Creek, signed Treaty D. Those who are recognizable were the Texon (Kitenamuk), Castake (Castaic Chumash), San Imigdio (Chumash), Uvas (Chumash), Carises (Hometwali Yokuts), Buena Vista (Tulamni Yokuts), and Hol-mi-uh (Paleumne Yokuts). Less definite by location were the Holoclame, Sohonuts, and Tocia groups.

Valley and Sierra Indian Experience, 1852-1868

Edward F. Beale was appointed Superintendent of Indian Affairs for California in March 1852. In October he proposed a series of temporary reservations with military posts. All Indians from the northern and central San Joaquin Valley and adjoining hills were to be brought to the Fresno River Farm, a small part of the Treaty N territory in present Madera County. The Fresno River Farm was activated that winter and maintained until 1860 (Hurtado 1988:142). Hurtado writes, "Indians from Tuolumne and Mariposa counties lived part of the year on the reservations and spent the rest of their time in their homelands" (1988:152).

The Fresno Indian Farm was closed in 1861. During the Civil War, a number of hostilities occurred between Indian people in the far north of California and the US military. However, other reservations were founded at Tule River and on Tejon Creek. Indian people of the South San Joaquin counties who did not stay on those reservations were subjected to many atrocities without recourse to legal protection.

Church-run Reservations in the Grant Administration

Ulysses Grant appointed army officers to run most of the reservations in the west at the outset of his first administration, in 1869. However, the US Congress passed a law in 1870 that forbade army officers from holding civil positions. Grant then turned to religious institutions, including the Methodists, Episcopalians, and the Friends, to run the reservations of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In 1873 the Tule River Reservation, the only remaining reservation in the San Joaquin Valley, was moved from high quality valley lands up to less valuable lands in the dry foothills of Tulare County (Forbes 1969:65). Some Yokuts speakers from the old Fresno Indian Farm may have been moved there during the 1870s or earlier.

Indian Boarding Schools

The federal government began an aggressive policy of training Indians to assimilate into white culture during the 1870s and 1880s. Day schools for Indians were established in reservation areas of the state during the 1880s. Additionally, boarding schools were established to remove young Indians from the cultural influences of their parents. Boarding schools were established at Tule River in 1881, at Middletown in Lake County in 1885, at Hoopa Valley and Perris in 1893, and at Fort Bidwell in 1898 (Castillo 1978:116). The boarding schools were vocationally oriented, and young Indians from some schools were sent out as domestics to nearby white homes.

Dawes Act of 1887 and Jackson Rancheria in 1895

The Dawes Act, directing the breakup of communal Indian reservation tracts across the United States into small family-owned parcels, was passed by Congress in 1887. The Act was the result of general indignation regarding the situation of non-reservation California Indians stimulated by publication of Helen Hunt Jackson’s book Century of Dishonor (1881). Jackson Rancheria was one of 17 small "postage stamp" reservations or rancherias (14 in the southern California mission area), purchased in California during the 1890s under the Act.

Legal and Social Status Changes after 1900

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the economies of the Sierra foothill counties were shifting from mining to farming, ranching, and timber harvesting. Yokuts and Mono men who had survived to this period obtained jobs as laborers in these industries when they could. The women worked as field laborers and house servants. Indian people were still being treated badly by many whites, but laws and attitudes were beginning to change—slowly.

In 1905-1906 C. E. Kelsey, a lawyer from San Jose, carried out an investigation into the condition of landless Indians in California for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. As a result, Congress authorized $100,000 to the Secretary of the Interior for land purchase and water development for landless California Indians in acts of June 21, 1906 and April 30, 1908. Dozens of tiny rancherias were purchased throughout California over the next few years under this act.

Education and Voting Rights Activities

From 1909 forward, California Indian people pressed their own claims for civil rights and land. Some of the cases were aided by an umbrella group called The Indian Board of Cooperation, led by a white protestant minister named Frederick G. Collet. One of their first actions was to press for improved Indian access to education. Major educational improvements occurred between 1915 and 1919, writes Jack Forbes (1969:73):

In 1915 only 316 Indian pupils were attending public school in California but by 1919 this number had increased to 2,199. In general, this was the result of a campaign carried out by Indians and the Indian Board of Cooperation and a new government policy of integrating Indians in public schools in areas such as California and Nevada where the native population was intermixed with white communities.

The Indian Board of Cooperation also aided a Lake County Pomo man, Ethan Anderson, in his court case to obtain the right to vote. Anderson won his case before the California Supreme Court in 1917, thereby essentially winning citizenship rights for all California Indians who did not live on reservations. Thus most California Indian people first became US citizens in 1917.

Recognition of Indian voting rights in 1917 pertained only to Indians living off of federal reservations. Full citizenship for all Native Americans was not recognized by Congress until an act of June 1924. However, a series of complex decisions since that time has limited Indian civil rights on federal reservation lands (see Forbes 1969:95-98).

Classic and Recent Ethnographers

Many of California’s most famous field ethnographers worked in the southern San Joaquin Valley. The six whose works are most valuable—Anna Gayton, Edward W. Gifford, J. P. Harrington, A. L. Kroeber, Frank Latta, and C. Hart Merriam—are discussed individually below, followed by a paragraph on others who also contributed in the field, and a final paragraph mentioning those who have contributed more recent synthetic ethnogeographic studies.

C. Hart Merriam (1855-1942)

Merriam, a university-trained biologist and medical doctor, became first chief of the predecessor agency to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service in 1886. In that capacity he worked in the field in California off-and-on between 1898 and 1910, keeping numerous notes about the Indian people that he met in his regular biologists field notebooks. In 1910 he received a life-time endowment from the Harriman Trust which allowed him to retire and conduct any research that he wanted. He chose to devote most of his attention to fieldwork with California Indians. Reflecting that change in circumstances, from 1910 forward he wrote his detailed ethnographic notes separately from his daily journals, the latter becoming merely diaries.

Merriam worked among Indian people in many areas of the South San Joaquin zone, all in or near the Sierra Nevada foothills, between 1902 and 1934. Most of his material pertinent to the local regions of the South San Joaquin zone have been published under editorship of Robert F. Heizer (Merriam 1967, 1977). These materials have been quoted in the completed CDM monographs. Detailed future research should rely, whenever possible, on Merriam’s original field materials to best appreciate the context of their collection.

Merriam’s field dairy/journals are now in the Library of Congress (Merriam [1898-1938a]). His separate ethnographic journals and notes are at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, along with his extensive collection of photographs of Indian people (Merriam [1898-1938b]). His collection of North American Indian basketry is at the Anthropology Museum at the Department of Anthropology at UC Davis.

Alfred L. Kroeber (1876-1960)

A. L. Kroeber received the first doctorate in anthropology awarded at Columbia University in 1901 under Franz Boas. His first California field work took place a year earlier, when, as temporary curator of Indian artifacts at the Academy of Science in San Francisco, he interviewed Indian people in the Klamath River area of northwest California. With Ph.D. in hand, he joined the new Department of Anthropology at the University of California in 1902, where he became department head and taught until his retirement in 1946. The entire body of his field notes is in the Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley (Kroeber [1869-1972]).

Kroeber did quite a bit of field work in the South San Joaquin, much of it prior to 1910. In later years he wrote, "A summary of what I obtained as to tribal territories, place names, sites inhabited, and local resources went into my Handbook of the Indians of California, chapter 32. But the great mass of primary data was too intricate and detailed to print in so general a work as that was, and much of the mass remains in my notebooks, or in incomplete handwritten extracts" (Kroeber 1963:178). Good references to his early informants, but little in the way of ethnogeography, is found in the posthumously published "Yokuts Dialect Survey" (Kroeber 1963).

John P. Harrington (1884-1961)

J. P. Harrington took a circuitous route to become a great linguist and ethnologist of California Indian people. Finishing undergraduate work at Stanford University in 1905, he went to Leipzig and then Berlin to pursue a Ph.D. But he dropped out and returned to become a high school teacher and work with elderly Chumash speakers between 1912 and 1914. He was hired as a permanent field ethnologist by the Bureau of American Ethnography in 1915 and worked for the Bureau until 1955. He published very little, but left behind more than one million pages of only moderately organized notes, mostly on language but also on mythology and geography, for native groups from Alaska to South America. His papers are housed at the Smithsonian Institution, although many are available through copy microfilm at a number of institutions across the United States (Mills 1986).

Between 1912 and 1940 Harrington made two significant trips into the South San Joaquin regions. In October 1914 he visited elderly Yokuts speakers at the Santa Rosa Rancheria and Tule River Reservation. Then he spent months at the Tejon Reservation among Chumash, Kitenamuk, Serrano, and Yokuts speakers during the late fall and winter of 1916-1917. Although these two visits represent a small portion of Harrington’s field time, they resulted in a rich and important body of material (Earle 2003).

E. W. Gifford (1887-1959)

Gifford was a colleague of Kroeber’s at the UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology. He made a number of important contributions to California ethnology, particularly in the areas of kinship systems and kinship terminology. This included an important ethnographic study of clans and moieties in the southern part of the state, carried out in 1918. Gifford was a remarkable scholar, particularly as he had no college degree—something of a rarity for a UC Berkeley faculty member.

Gifford worked among Sierran Miwok groups and the North Fork Mono. His monograph on the North Fork Mono is perhaps the most detailed ethnogeography of any central California people.

Frank F. Latta (1892-1981)

Frank Latta was an educator and self-trained field ethnographer of the Yokuts. He began interviewing his Yokuts neighbors soon after he moved to Visalia, Tulare County, in 1923. One of his important informants was Bill Wilson (Pahmit), a mixed Dumna-Kechayi-Pitkachi of Friant, Fresno County. The other was Yoimut, Chunut-Wowol who spent her life on the ranches of Tulare County. Yoimut may have been the best-informed of all Yokuts consultants. "She could read, write, and speak Spanish and English, as well as talk six Yokuts languages," wrote Latta (1949:224). Latta published two significantly different versions of his Handbook of Yokuts Indians, first in 1949 and then an expanded version in 1977. The two should be studied and cited separately because the 1977 version re-arranged earlier text, added new conclusions, and modified the spellings of several words.

Anna Gayton (1899-1977)

Anna H. Gayton was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in anthropology from UC Berkeley, in 1928, majoring under Kroeber and Lowie. She taught Decorative Art at Berkeley from 1948 to 1965. Gayton produced a spectacular amount of published material on Yokuts and Western Mono groups of the southern Sierra Nevada and adjacent eastern portions of the San Joaquin Valley based on field work done in 1925-1930. A series of articles and a detailed monograph embodying most of her field data were published in 1948. In addition to presenting her own field results, she performs knowledgeable critiques of contradictory and unclear material gathered by earlier ethnographers.

Other Field Ethnographers

Other people did work in the South San Joaquin zone who have contributed to our ethnogeographic monographs, such as linguist Stanley S. Newman (1905-1984) and Harold Driver (1907-1992), professor of Anthropology at Indiana University.

More Recent Synthesizers

The first researcher to study the systematic distribution of groups and populations in the South San Joaquin zone was Sherburne Cook(1955, 1976)), a Harvard-trained professor of physiology at Berkeley who detailed the population of California Indians using quantitative analysis. George Phillips, a University of Colorado historian, synthesized literature on the 1851 treaties (1975) and, more recently, data on the Tejón reservation (1997). William J. Wallace’s sections on the Yokuts in the Handbook of North American Indians, California, offer an unsystematic presentation from the classic literature.

Organization of Landholding Groups

Yokuts clearly had tribelets: Kroeber (1925); Kunkel (1962).

Western Mono were independent hamlets, but some were given regional names by Yokuts neighbors, names that have stuck. It is not clear if they really formed regional communities.

Tubatulabal seem to have been between tribelets and independent hamlet groups, but they had some sense of being in three loose communities.

Conclusion: Mapping Approaches and Constraints

Mapping approaches with the South San Joaquin zone varied with the nature of available evidence. To put simply, wherever the heartland of a particular group was identifiable through classic ethnography or an early diary, a node was established for that group. Upon initial application of nodes, the analytical zone could be divided into five areas, each with its own unique mapping problems and opportunities, in order of data quality:

• Sierra foothills: all areas of the zone, from the upper San Joaquin River south to the Kern River, had excellent field ethnographic work among people who still remembered the original tribal distributions. There are two exceptions: in Madera County, ethnographic consultants remembered that the Chuckchanis held a large expanse north of the San Joaquin River; other evidence suggests that the term was taken from one regional tribelet and generalized to some of their neighbors. The other ambiguity involves Toltechi, a Yokuts group attributed by one consultant to a small area in the San Joaquin River Canyon (Kerchoff reservoir) that would otherwise seem to have been within Western Mono lands.
• Tulare Lake, Kern-Buenavista Lake Basin, Kaweah River delta: Classic ethnographic consultants remembered well the native groups of these flat valley regions, with two exceptions. First, the mission records list a group called Quiyamne, unknown to ethnographic consultants; their marriage ties suggest they were from the Famosa region and their name is reminiscent of the obscure Giamina Uto-Aztecans of Kroeber (1925:479). The other problem is contradictory evidence regarding the geography and identity of the Wolasi and Choinok Yokuts between the modern towns of Visalia and Tulare.
• San Joaquin River on the valley plain: triblet organization in this area had been almost completely destroyed through missionization and disease by the time of the gold rush. Remnant Chausila, Heuchi, Hoyima, and Pitcache people were living with foothill people in the years of classic ethnographic field research. Thus their tribelet locations are tentatively reconstructed from hints garnered by ethnographers, comments in Hispanic expedition diaries, and the traditional mission register analysis techniques of time sequence and marriage studies. Confident locational results have been obtained for all but the Chausila.
• Kings River drainage: survivors told classic ethnographiers the locations of the Wilmilche, Nutunuu, and Wechihit, in locations supported by early expedition commentaries. However, a mystery still remains about the groups at the edge of the Sierra foothills, adjacent to the Wechihit, to both the northwest and southeast. We tentatively model the Gashowu as originally inhabiting the plain west of Sanger and in the Fresno vicinity, following Kroeber (1925). On the southeast side, the Orange Grove inhabitants are still more problematic. Although we lack positive evidence, we suggest the possibility that the historical Chukamina were driven up into the Dunlap region from the plain in the Orange Grove region below.
• Western Plain from Merced River south to the Kings River Country: people of this area were entirely removed to the missions before 1820. Group names such as Quihueths, Cutocho, and Yyin, appear enough times in the mission records to suggest they were the major groups of the west side; however, a significant number of west-side people were merely identified as "Tulares" in the mission records. Thus the CDM regions in this area are best-guess representations of the original condition.