Miwok and Mono chapters from Handbook of Indians of California by A. L. Kroeber (1919)

[Editor’s note: only Sierra Miwok and Mono chapters from Handbook are copied here—dea.]

- 30. The Miwok

- 40. The Paiute, Mono, and Koso

- 58. Place Names [Miwok and Mono only]

- Appendix. Pronunciation of Native Words

About the Author

Alfred Louis Kroeber (A. L. Kroeber) was born June 11, 1876. He is known as an influential anthropologist of the early 20th century. He sought to understand the nature of culture and its processes through studying the cultures of the American Indian people. He was a professor at University of California Berkeley and is most known for his work with Ishi, the last survivor of the Yahi Indian people. A. L. Kroeber died in October 5, 1960.

Bibliographical Information

A. L. Kroeber (Alfred Louis Kroeber) (1876 - 1960), Handbook of the Indians of California, Bulletin 78 of the Bureau of American Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution (1919)

Digitized by Dan Anderson, 2004, 2007. These files may be used for any non-commercial purpose, provided this notice is left intact.
—Dan Anderson, www.yosemite.ca.us

Chapter 30.

THE MIWOK.

Geography, 442; culture, 445; material arts, 447; the Kuksu religion, 449; other ceremonies and beliefs, 451; social practices, 452; totemic moieties, 453; marriage of relatives, 457.

GEOGRAPHY.

The Miwok comprised three territorially discrete groups: the Coast Miwok, the Lake Miwok, and the Interior Miwok. The first two have already been described. The Interior Miwok constituted by far the largest portion of the stock. With the Maidu on their right hand, the Yokuts on the left, Washo and Mono behind them, they lived on the long westward slope of the great Sierra, looking out over the lower San Joaquin Valley. A few, the Plains Miwok. were in the valley itself, where this is intersected by the winding arms of the deltas of the San Joaquin and the Sacramento. The bulk of the group were a true foothill people, without claims to the floor of the valley, and moving into the higher Sierra only for summer residence or hunting.

A primary cleavage of speech separates the Plains from the Sierra Miwok, exactly as among the Yokuts. The Plains speech is a little the nearest that of the Coast and Lake divisions in its forms as well as in location. The dwellers in the foothills followed three principal dialects, which in default of native names have come to be known as northern, central, and southern. The latter stands somewhat apart; the two former are similar to each other and evince some approach to the Plains dialect. There are some subdialects within several or all of these four idioms; but they are rather insignificant and may be disregarded.

The Sierra territory of the Miwok extended from the Cosumnes River on the north to the Fresno on the south. Roughly, the northern division held the drainage of the Mokelumne and Calaveras; the central, that of the Stanislaus and Tuolumne; the southern, that of the Merced and adjacent smaller streams. But there was some transgressing of these natural limits, as appears from Plate 37.

The exact boundaries of the Miwok are still a matter of controversy at many points, especially as between the Plains division and the adjacent Yokuts, Wintun, and Maidu of the delta, all of whom are practically extinct.

Thus the entire tongue of land between the lower Cosumnes and Sacramento, as well as Grand, Andrews, Tyler, Staten, and Brannan Islands between the easternmost and westernmost channels of the Sacramento, have sometimes been assigned to the Maidu. Sherman Island and a tract to the southeast seem to have been Miwok, but there is some conflict of evidence as to the location of the line separating the Plains Miwok and the most northerly Yokuts in this vicinity.

The region from Michigan Bar to Plymouth has been variously claimed as Maidu, Plains Miwok, and northern Miwok. The whole northern boundary of the Miwok, in fact, is obscure, the North, Middle. and South Forks of the Cosumnes, as well as various compromises between these, being cited by different authorities. The Middle Fork has been followed in Plates 1 and 37.

On the eastern front discrepancies are even wider, but simmer down substantially to technical differences. The Miwok lived permanently as far up into the Sierra its the heavy winter snows permitted; in summer they moved higher; and no other people held residence between them and the crest. The Washo had admitted hunting and therefore camping rights almost down to Big Trees in Calaveras County. They may have enjoyed similar but unrecorded claims elsewhere; and the same may possibly be true of the Mono. Very likely there were tracts that were jointly visited on friendly terms by the Miwok and their trans-Sierra neighbors. The “boundary” may therefore well have been shifting as amity or hostility prevailed. in this connection it may be noted that In the region of the headwaters of the middle and south Stanislaus the Miwok find Mono were on bad terms in recent times, while along the Mereed they were more at ease with each other.

On the south it is reasonably certain that Fresno River itself separated the Miwok from the Yokuts, except for a small tract below Fresno Flats where the Miwok held the southern bank of a northward bend of the stream. The exact location of the village of Hapasau is in doubt. The name is Yokuts; the location may have been on the Miwok side of the river.

As for the West, it has sometimes been assumed that the Miwok ranged as rightful owners over the whole eastern and more fertile side of the lower San Joaquin Valley, but the evidence is nearly positive that this tract was Yokuts, and that the precise commencement of the first foothills marked the boundary between the two stocks. This is the line that has been followed in Plate 37.

Like Wintun, Maidu, and Yokuts, “Miwok” is not originally a distinctive tribal or group name, but the native word for people, plural of miwü, “person.” The northernmost Miwok respond to the designation Koni, which is their Maidu name; and those of the extreme south are often known as Pohonichi, which appellation seems to be of Yokuts origin; whether connected with Pohono Falls in Yosemite is less certain.

Chauchila appears to be the name of both a Yokuts tribe on the plains and of a Miwok village in the canyon of Chowchilla River, whose designation haa been applied also to a larger Miwok group or division. It is scarcely probable that the same name was in use by both stocks in aboriginal times. The American is likely to have been responsible for its spread. Before the conflict can be solved we shall have to be in a position to distinguish between ancient native usage and more modern terminology adopted by the Indians in their relations with the whites.

Moquelumnan is an artificially derived synonym of Miwok that has attained some book usage. An earlier term of similar nature that is now happily obsolete is Mutsun, based on the name of a Costanoan village taken as a designation of the conjoined Costanoan and Miwok groups.

Among themselves the Miwok are content to refer to one another by village, or employ an endless succession of “northerners” and similar directional names that never crystallize into specific designations. The same people that are northerners to their neighbors on one side are southerners to those on the other, and so on ad infinitum, even beyond the boundaries of the stock, as far as knowledge extends. A group of people as a unit possessing an existence and therefore a name of its own is a concept that has not dawned on the Miwok. Humanity must appear to them like a uniform sheet spread over an endless earth, differentiable only with reference to one’s own location in the whole. A national sense is weak enough among most of the California Indians; but there are usually a few generic names for outside groups of foreigners. If the Miwok have such, they have not become known; except Koyuwe-k, “salt people,” for the Mono. Mono-k seems to be a recent term. Even the Washo are only “easterners” or “uplanders.” Lisnayu-k denotes either the Yokuts or the Costanoans of the vicinity of Pacheco Pass.

Their four standard terms are Tamuleko, Tamulek, or Tumitok, northerners; Chumetoko, Chumetok. or Chumteya, southerners; Hisotoko, Hisatok, or Hittoya, easterners; Olowitoko, Olowitok, Olokok, or Olwiya, westerners; or other close dialectic variants.

Among the Plains Miwok names in -mni are frequent which suggest the tribal appellations of the Yokuts: Mokelumni, Mokoslumni, Ochehamni, Lelamni, Hulpumni, Umuchamni or Omochumne, Sakayaktimni. As with the Maidu, the words probably denote a political community named after its principal or permanent settlement.

The same appears to hold of names ending in -chi.

Something over a hundred Miwok villages are shown on Plate 37. The total number of those whose names have been recorded is considerably larger; but some are in doubtful or conflicting records, others are vaguely located, and in general the condition of knowledge concerning the settlements of the group—even those included in the map—is far from satisfactory. We are in total ignorance, for instance, to what extent near villages were, truly independent or only outlying settlements that recognized their political and social unity with a central larger town.

The villages that can be both named and approximately located are, as shown on Plate 37.

Plains Miwok: 1, Hulpu-mni; 2, *Yumhul; 3, *Yomit; 4, *Lulimal; 5, *Sukididi; 6, *Mayeman; 7, *Chuyumkatat; 8, Umucha; 9, Supu; 10, Tukul; 11, Mokos-umni; 12, Ocheh-ak; 13, Mokel(-umni) ; 14, Lel-amni; 15, Sakayak-ümni. (Starred names are in the southern Maidu language.)

Northern Miwok: 16, Yule; 17, Omo; 18, Noma; 19, Chakane-sü; 20, Yuloni; 21, Seweu-su; 22, Upüsüni (Fig. 40); 23, Tukupe-sü; 24; Pola-sü; 25, Tumuti; 26, Sopochi; 27, Ketina; 28, Mona-sü; 29, Apautawilü; 30, Heina; 31, Künüsü; 32, Penken-sü; 33, Kaitimü; 34, Hechenü; 35, Huta-sü.

Central Miwok: 36, Sasamu; 37, Shulaputi; 38, Katuka; 39, Humata; 40, Akutanuka; 41, Kosoimuno-nu; 42, Newichu; 43, Yungakatok; 44, Alakani; 45, Tuyiwü-nu; 46, Kewe-no; 47, Tulana-chi; 48, Oloikoto; 49, Wüyü; 50, Tipotoya; 51, Loyowisa; 52, Kawinucha; 53, Takema; 54, Tulsuna; 55, Hangwite; 56, Wokachet; 57, Sutamasina; 58, Singawü-nu; 59, Akankau-nchi (cf. 67) ; 60, Akawila; 61, Kapanina; 62, Chakachi-no; 63, Suchumumu; 64, Waka-che; 65, Kotoplana; 66, Pokto-no; 67, Akankau-nchi (cf. 59) ; 68, Kuluti; 69, Pota; 70, Wolanga-su; 71, Tel'ula; 72, Tunuk-chi; 73, Kesa; 74, Hochhochmeti; 75, Siksike-no; 76, Sopka-su; 77, Pasi-nu; 78, Pangasema-nu; 79, Sukanola; 80, Sukwela; 81, Teles-eno; 82, Hunga; 83, Olawiye; 84, Kulamu; 85, Hechhechi; 86, Pigliku (Miwok pronunciation of “Big Creek") ; 87, Sala.

Southern Miwok: 88, Sayangasi; 89, Alaula-chi; 90, Kuyuka-chi; 91, Angisa-wepa; 92, Hikena; 93, Owelinhatihü; 94, Wilito; 95, Kakahula-chi; 96, Awal; 97, Yawoka-chi; 98, Kitiwina; 99, Siso-chi; 100, Sope-nchi; 101, Sotpok; 102, Awani; 103, Palachan; 104, Kasumati; 105, Nochu-chi; 106, Nowach; 107, Olwia; 108, Wasema; 109, Wehilto.

In 1817 Father Duran, voyaging from the Golden Gate up San Francisco Bay, through the delta, and some hundred miles up the Sacramento, encountered or reported Chupcanes, Ompines, Quenemsias or Quenemisas, Chucumnes, Ilamnes, Chuppumne, Ochejamnes, Guaypems, Passasimas, Nototemnes, Tauquimnes, Yatchicomnes, Muquelemnes, and Julpunes. The first of these groups were Costanoan; the next probably Maidu or perhaps in part Wintun; from the Ochejamnes on, the list refers to Plains Miwok and the northernmost Yokuts. It seems, therefore, that all five of the great Penutian divisions were represented among the natives of whom this little expedition makes mention.

Nine thousand seems a liberal estimate for the number of interior Miwok in ancient times. This allows more than 2,000 to each of the four divisions. But all specific data are wanting. The 1910 census counted 670, only one-half of them full blood. The Miwok have thus failed to preserve as large a fraction of their numbers as the Maidu, but have done better than the Yokuts. The Plains division came pretty thoroughly under mission control and shows very few survivors. The three foothill groups escaped this well-meant but nearly fatal influence.

CULTURE.

The civilization of the Miwok is imperfectly known, and is the more difficult to reconstruct in that the culture of all their immediate neighbors, except in some degree that of the Yokuts, is also unrecorded in detail.

Even in a larger sense, comparison with the stocks to the east and west is mostly invalidated by the profound difference of habitat. As between the adjacent Sierra dwellers on the north and south, the Maidu and the Yokuts, Miwok affiliations incline somewhat more to the former; but perhaps this fact is at bottom to be ascribed to environmental adaptations, the Maidu being in the main Sierra dwellers like the Miwok, whereas the Yokuts, although in part situated in the foothills, were so much more extensively a plains people that their civilization as a whole has no doubt been intensively colored by this circumstance.

The strongest link with the Maidu is the presence of the Kuksu cult of the Sacramento Valley, with its long variety of rituals, impersonation of spirits, distinctive costumes, and the accompaniment of the large semisubterranean dance house. The complement is the absence among the Miwok of the Yokuts jimsonweed cult.

Another important link in the same direction is the apparent lack of the more definite tribal organization of the Yokuts.

So far as Miwok mythology is known, on the other hand, it is rather of Yokuts type. This fact is surprising, since an anthropomorphic

Fig. 38.—Yokuts loop stirrer and Miwok paddle. (Compare
Pls. 17, 44.)

creator tends to appear in the beliefs of the tribes addicted to the Kuksu religion. It is true the Costanoan and Salinan stocks, who participate in the Kuksu cult and live in the same transverse belt of California as the Miwok, seem also to lean in their mythology toward the Yokuts more than to the Sacramento Valley tribes. A less specialized type of cosmogony is therefore indicated for the southern Kuksu-dancing groups.1 [1If, as seems probable, the southerly Kuksu tribes (the Miwok, Costanoans, Esselen, and northernmost Yokuts) had no real society in connection with their Kuksu ceremonies, the distinctness of their mythology appears less surprising.]

The organization of society on the plan of two totemically contrasted halves, which was first discovered in California among the Miwok, extends south from them to the Yokuts and western Mono. It has not, been reported from the north.

In material arts the balance again inclines northward. Coiled baskets, for instance, are made on a foundation of rods, as by the Maidu, whereas the Yokuts use grass. The Yokuts cap and constricted-neck vessel are also wanting. So is Yokuts pottery. Games, on the other hand, are rather of Yokuts type, so far as can be judged. Perhaps this is due to an association with the social organization. (Fig. 41.)

In some minor points the Miwok follow varying practices according to the habits of their neighbors. Thus the southernmost Miwok often employ the grass foundation of the Yokuts and approximate the shape of their “bottle neck” baskets. South of the Tuolumne, too, the Yokuts looped-stick mush stirrer and the Yokuts type of basketry cradle are used. North of the Stanislaus the mush stirrer is a small, plain paddle (Fig. 38), as among the Achomawi and Pomo; and the cradle takes on the peculiar form of being built on two rods whose upper ends are bent forward as a hood support. (Pls. 39, 40.) Also, it is chiefly north of the Stanislaus that one-rod basket foundations are found alongside of the more usual three-rod coil. Here influence of contact with the adjacent Washo is likely.

MATERIAL ARTS.

Fig. 39.—Miwok dance or assembly
house. Diameter, 25 feet. Construction:
1, tole, posts, forked or notched
on top. 2, chawik, main rafters, extending
east and west. 3, lolapa, cross-beams
on rafters. 4, shuchapa, brush
on beams, radiating from center. On
this brush was a layer of grass, and
then of earth. Parts of house: A,
wole; BB, oni; C, hawana; D, door or
tunnel—always toward east; E, smoke
hole, 3 feet square; perhaps the entrance
in ancient times; F, fireplace.
(Cf. Figures 19, 35.)

The distribution of house types in the Miwok region is still far from clear. The semisubterranean dance house or hangi was known to the whole group. It rested on a square of four center posts, or on two rows of posts, whereas the Yuki, Pomo, Wintun, and Maidu employed a single large post, or two set in line with the door. The diameter was as great as farther north, up to 20 yards; the door regularly faced eastward; the general construction presented few noteworthy peculiarities. (Fig. 39.)

The sweat house was much smaller than the dance house, but built on the same plan.

The Miwok living house, kocha or uchu, appears to have been often of the earth-covered type, although smaller and ruder than the dance house. It is not certain how far south the range of this extended. It may have been rare in the higher foothills, and was probably not lived in more than half the year. A lean-to of bark was used in the mountains in summer; it may have been the permanent house of some sections.

The cache or granary used by the Miwok for the storage of acorns is an outdoor affair, a yard or so in diameter, a foot or two above the ground, and thatched over, beyond reach of a standing person, after it was filled. Plate 38 shows the type. The natural branches of a tree sometimes were used in place of posts. There was no true basket construction in the cache; the sides were sticks and brush lined with grass, the whole stuck together and fied where necessary. No door was necessary: the twigs were readily pushed aside almost anywhere, and with a little start acorns rolled out in a stream. Even the squirrels had little difficulty in helping themselves at will.

An outdoor cache coincides rather closely with the distribution of coiled basketry. None of the tribes that twine make use of any granary. This is no accident. A large storage basket is readily twined. Mere there is a feeling that the proper way to make a basket intended to be preserved is by coiling, the laboriousness of this technique would incline toward the manufacture by other processes of vessels holding several bushels.

The Miwok pound acorns with pestles in holes in granite exposures: on flat slabs laid on or sunk into the ground without basketry

Fig. 40.—The Miwok village of
Upüsüni. Lines are hill contours.
Dotted line (X), old village site.
YY, modern houses. A, pit of oldest
dance house, diameter 50 feet.
B, dance-house pit, diameter 65
feet. C, standing dance house
(plan shown in Fig. 39), diameter
25 feet. S, spring Upüsüni, whence
the name of the village.

hopper; and grind them by crushing and rubbing on similar slabs. The conical and cylindrical mortars found in their habitat are prehistoric. Occasionally a small one is in use; but if so, it is employed by some toothless crone to crack bones, or to beat an occasional gift of a gopher or squirrel into a soft, edible pulp. Such a mortar may contain a pit or two for cracking acorns, and perhaps a groove in which bone awls have been whetted for a lifetime. In default of anything more practical the owner’s husband may now and then grind his tobacco in the same utensils. Ancient stone implements that have been put to secondary uses are rather common in California, and can still be seen in service now and then. That an object is already in use is if anything an added reason why it should be employed for another purpose. A neat people would feel differently; but a glance into almost any California Indian home suffices to reveal that these people are actuated by but little sense of order as compared with the Plains or Pueblo Indians.

Clamshell disk currency was less precious than in the north, though that may have been one of the directions from which it reached the Miwok. Its value in American terms is said to have averaged $5 a yard, only a fraction of the figure at which the southern Maidu rated it. Whole strung olivella shells went at $1 a yard among both groups. The cylinders made from magnesite by the southeastern Pomo reached the hill Miwok, but were scarce and valuable. Possibly clamshell money traveled to them from the Chumash via the Yokuts, as well as from the Pomo; whence its abundance and comparative depreciation.

THE KUKSU RELIGION.

The Miwok follow the Kuksu ritual organization. It happens that we possess considerable knowledge of their individual dances and none at all of the society underlying these;2 [2It seems quite doubtful whether there was a society; there is certainly no trace of a communal one.] but, the names and character of several of the ceremonies, their large number, the type of feather dress worn, the stamping of the foot drum, and the holding of the performances in the earth-covered assembly chamber, all make the adhesion of the Miwok to the Sacramento Valley scheme of rites clear, even though the precise form which the system takes among them remains undetermined.

The distinction between ceremony and dance and between ceremony and impersonation, as it has been described among the Wintun,

Fig. 41.—Acorn tops.
a, Pomo; b, Miwok.

evidently recurs among the Miwok. Thus there is the Kuksuyu, an exceptionally sacred performance, seemingly occupying the same primary position that the Hesi holds among the Patwin and Maidu, and the Guksu impersonator among the Pomo. In this Kuksuyu appear at least three personages: Kuksuyu himself; Osa-be, or “woman"; and Mochilo, who is perhaps the Miwok representative of the Sacramento Valley Moki, and whose impersonator is known as mochil-be. In addition, there is the Mochilasi dance, held without the drum, in which the Mochilo appears impersonated by a sotokbe, and accompanied by the 0sa-be. At some point in the Mochilasi, as in most. Miwok dances, women participate; but they do not appear in the Kuksuyu.

Besides the Miwok rituals mentioned in Table 1 in the chapter on the Wintun, they practice the following dances:

The Lileusi and Uchupelu are of a type with the Patwin Akantoto or creeper dance, the Maidu Tsamyempi, and the Pomo Dama, in that in all of them there are acrobatic demonstrations. In the Akantoto the performer descends the center post of the dance house head first, clapsing it with his legs. The Uchupelu is similar, but less spectacular. In the Lileusi, in which the drum is not used, the dancer is believed to fly about the darkened house. The songs tell of one, no doubt the impersonated spirit, who thus came to the Miwok country from Mount Diablo, the name of which reflects, the native belief in its habitation by spirits.

The Kalea is a frequent and perhaps an important dance, which has survived until more recently than the majority. In it are worn a back cape of feathers similar to the Maidu sikli and the corresponding garments of the Patwin, Pomo, and Yuki; a large tuft; and two smaller ones, skewered into the net-gathered hair.

The Tamula may be the “north,” dance: tamal-in is the ordinary word designating this direction.

In the Temayasu, a personage of the same name, who is followed by seven seyapbe, showers coals on the spectators, who may not laugh, evidently for fear of provoking his anger. The Temayasu thus evinces something of the nature of the Polno “ash ghosts.” The Patwin Temeyu bears a similar name.

A ritual called Sule tumum laksü, “ghost from drum emerging,” also has close Pomo parallels. The performer, painted with horizontal black and white stripes, emerges from a tunnel under the drum and then dances upon it. It is likely that he is taken for a real ghost by the uninitiated.

To the Sulesko, said to be named after a kind of spirit in some way associated with the sule or ghost of dead people, is ascribed a recent origin. It was performed to cure people made ill by such spirits. Four dancers wear something like face coverings of skin. This is a nearer approach to what are ordinarily considered masks than anything yet reported from California; but on the other hand, there is less reference by the Miwok to veiling of the face by feathers or grass in other dances than among the Maidu and Patwin. The Miwok Kuksuyu, indeed, has his features hidden by feathers; but the only other personage known to be disguised, other than perhaps by crude paint, occurs in the Helekasi, in which a piece of buckskin, with eyeholes cut in it, is worn around the head.

The clowns, or Wo'ochi, who shout woo, appear in a number of ceremonies In an Interlude named after them. They are painted white and evidently represent coyotes. The gluttonous, greedy, tricky, but also insensate nature which the California Indian attributes to this animal is the character which is portrayed in the actions also of the Maidu clown; but no avowed symbolic reference to the contemned canine has been reported from the latter people.

The Uzumati or grizzly bear ceremony came to the central Miwok from the west or northwest, they say; that is, probably, the northernmost Yokuts such as the Chulamni of Stockton, or the Plains Miwok. The performer, who was a dance impersonator and not a bear doctor or shaman, carried curved pieces of obsidian attached to his fingers in place of the bear’s claws. He Imitated the animal in his dancing. This description accounts for the hitherto unexplained “Stockton curves,” as antiquarians have come to call the semilunar flaked objects of obsidian found in ancient burials in the San Joaquin delta.

Other dances or ceremonies were the Mamasu, Tula, Henepasi, Yahuha, Alina, Hekeke or “quail,” Wehena, and 0lochina. There is also a Helika, which may or may not be the some as the Helekasi in which masks are worn, and a less sacred Helikna.

A leading dancer called hoyuche, assisted by several echuto, appears in the Salute, Helika, Alina, and other dances. Whether the term indicates his leadership, a particular costume, or a spirit that he impersonates, is not known. A village chief is called echuto hayapo in distinction from the toko hayapo or head chief of a district.

Besides the Helikna, the Aleü, Ahana, Ulula, and Helkibüksu are mentioned as at least semiprofane. The drum is not used; the sobobbe or shouters who accompany the dancers in the major ceremonies are absent; and some, at least of these dances are held outdoors, away from the gloom of the assembly chamber. Women take part in all these dances, whose general character is probably analogous to that of the Maidu Loli and Toto. In or after the Aletü two black-painted clowns, called Humchilwe, may appear.

It is said that women were allowed to witness all dances, even the most sacred of those. held in the assembly chamber. This would indicate a status of the secret society in the community rather different from that which obtains among the tribes in the latitude of the Sacramento Valley. Miwok women seem to have participated in probably the majority of dances.

Nothing has been learned of the order or classificatory relations of the various major and minor dances so far enumerated. Yet it may be suspected that, like the Maidu ceremonies, they came in some sort of an orderly sequence at specified seasons of the year rather than randomly.

OTHER CEREMONIES AND BELIEFS.

Sule yuse, “ghost hair,” or Sule sikanui, “ghost scalp”—a single word to denote “ghost,” “dead person,” and “skeleton” seems to be customary in a number of the Californian languages—was the name of the dance of triumphant revenge held over a scalp. It was made in the dance house, as by the Yuki, and the drum was stamped.

The Pota was a ceremony in which several rude dummies of tules were put up on poles. It appears likely that songs of malevolence and perhaps other expressions of hatred were directed toward the figures. The images represented foes of the village: murderers, successful war leaders in past affrays, or shamans believed to have caused sickness and death. Care was taken to invite the towns to which these individuals belonged; but as no identification was given the image, and no names mentioned at the time, this method of revenge could contribute little but moral satisfaction to the preformers. The guests might suspect that it was their townsman who was meant, but as no insult was tendered, none could be resented; until later, when care would be taken that the visitors learned that it was their kinsman whom they had helped to revile. The whole procedure is characteristically Californian. By impulse, the native is thoroughly peaceable. A plan of spoliation or oppression rarely enters his mind. But suspicion is ever gnawing within him. Punctilious as he is not to commit a deliberate offense, he constantly conceives that others have wished him ill and worked the contemplated injury. And so he spends his life in half-concealed bad will, in non-intercourse, in plotting with more or less open magic, or occasionally in an open feud. He has always been wronged by some one, and is always planning a merited but dark punishment. Though they are rarely uttered expressly, he mutters his feelings about; with the consequence that those whom he hates soon have equal or greater cause for hating in return. There must be a subtle pleasure in publicly dishonoring and threatening a foe, who may suspect but can not know that he is meant. But the satisfaction thus obtainable is an equally extraordinary one, and obviously peculiar of a people more given to keeping grievances alive by cherishing them than to ending them by an open appeal to the nobler violence that springs from indignation.

The Kalea seems to be made in connection with this Pota ceremony.

The Aiyetme, named from aiye'a, the signs of a girl’s maturity, is an adolescence ceremony, as is also clear from the fact that the dancers are called kichaume, from kichau, “blood.” There are four of these, men, painted with red streaks down the face, but they wear no feathers or costume. At present the dance is a short performance on and about the drum in the assembly house, and evidently a part of larger ceremonies that have other purposes. Originally, however, it was made for the girl, and probably over her as she lay for four days in a trench dug in the floor of her home.

The Miwok are said to have held that there was no after life; but this is a white man’s superstition about them. One of their favorite traditions, which they share with the Yokuts, relates the visit of an aboriginal Orpheus to the western or northern country of the dead in pursuit of his wife.

SOCIAL PRACTICES.

Cremation of the dead was the usual but probably not universal practice of the Miwok.

Widows singed their hair off and pitched the face. In the southern districts the pitch was put on over smaller areas. The levirate was observed, but perhaps not invariably.

The annual mourning ceremony included dancing as well as wailing, culminated in a burning of property, and ended with a ritualistic washing of the mourners by people of the opposite totemic moiety. Rude lay figures were made and burned for people of rank.

Chieftainship was a well-defined and hereditary affair, as is shown by the passage of the title to women, in the male line. In the central division there were head chiefs, toko hayapo, whose authority was recognized over considerable districts; echuto hayapo, chiefs of villages; and euchi or liwape (liwa, “speak"), who were either the heads of subsidiary villages or speakers and messengers for the more important chiefs. A born chieftainess, and the wife of a chief, were both called mayenu. The husband of a born chieftainess was usually her speaker; the latter had authority after her husband’s death until the majority of her son.

It is evident that concepts of rank were fairly developed, and it is regrettable that more is not known of this interesting subject.

TOTEMIC MOIETIES.

With the Miwok we encounter for the first time a social scheme that recurs among several of the groups to the south: a division of the people into balanced halves, or moieties, as they are called, which are totemic, and adhesion to which is hereditary. The descent is from the father, and among the Miwok the moieties were at least theoretically exogamic.

The totemic aspects of these moieties are refined to an extreme tenuousness, but are undeniable. Nature is divided into a water and a land or dry half, which are thought to correspond to the Kikua and Tunuka moieties among the people. Kikua is from kiku, water, but the etymology of Tunuka is not clear. Synonyms, though apparently only of a joking implication, are Lotasuna and Kosituna, “frog people” and “blue jay people"; or the contrast is between frog and deer, or coyote and blue jay. All these terms apply to the central and southern Miwok. The northern division uses a word formed from walli “land,” in place of Tunuka; and the animal equivalents are not clear. There is also some doubt as to the form which the scheme takes among the northerners, some accounts denying its existence, or that the individual’s adherence was determined by descent. It is apparent that the northern Miwok are institutionally as well as geographically on the border of the moiety system.

There are no subdivisions of any sort within the moieties. Associated with each, however, is a long list of animals, plants, and objects; in fact, the native concept is that everything in the world belongs to one or the other side. Each member of a moiety stands in relation to one of the objects characteristic of his moiety—a relation that must be considered totemic—in one way only: through his name. This name, given him in infancy by a grandfather or other relative, and retained through life, refers to one of the totem animals or objects characteristic of his moiety.

Nor is this all: in the great majority of cases the totem is not mentioned in the name, which is formed from some verbal or adjectival stem, and describes an action or condition that might apply equally well to other totems. Thus, on the verb hausu-s, are based the names Hausu and Haucku, which connote, respectively, the yawning of an awakening bear and the gaping of a salmon drawn out of the water. There is nothing in either name that indicates the animals in question—which even belong to opposite moieties. The old men who bestowed them no doubt announced the totemic reference of the names; the bearers, and their family, kin, and more intimate associates, knew the implication; but a Miwok from another district would have been uncertain whether a bear, a salmon, or one of a dozen other animals was meant. Just so, Akulu means “looking up”—at the sun. Hopoto is understood to refer to frog eggs hatching in the water; but its literal meaning is only “round.” Sewati connotes bear claws, but denotes “curved” and nothing more. Etumu is “to bask.” An individual so called happens to be named after the bear; but there is nothing to prevent the identical name referring to the lizard, if it were borne by some other man.

It is true that the Miwok seem to pay some attention to these implications of their names, since they are aware of the totemic reference of the names of practically all their acquaintance, as well as of kinsmen for some generations past. At the same time, it is certain that whatever totemic significance the majority of the names have is, not actually expressed but is extrinsically attached to them.

In fact, the totemic quality of the names is very probably a secondary and comparatively late reading in on the part of the Miwok, since names of exactly the same character, so far as structure and range of denotation go, are prevalent over the greater part of California without a trace of totemism attached to them. Even the adjacent totemic Yokuts, whose names, when intelligible, are similar to the Miwok ones, do not interpret them totemically.

It might be thought that the names are remnants of an older clan system; that what is now the land moiety was formerly an aggregation of bear, panther, dog, raven, and other clans; that for some reason the clans became merged in the two larger groups; that as their separate existence, as social units, became lost, it was preserved for some time longer in the names that originally belonged to the clans. But there is no evidence that such is the case. If a man and his sons and their sons all bore appellations referring to the bear—as among the Mohave all the women in a certain male line of descent. are called Hipa, which connotes “coyote”—we might justifiedly speak of the Miwok condition as a disguised clan system. But the supposition does not hold. In the majority of cases the child is not named after the same animal as its father; and in a line of male descent extending over several generations the proportion of instances, in which the same totemic reference is maintained throughout becomes very small.

By far the most commonly referred to animal in names of people in the land moiety is the bear. On the water side there is no such pronounced predominance, but the deer comes first. This fact is certainly of significance with reference to the bear and deer “totems” reported among the Salinan group across the Coast Range.

A number of animals or objects are referred to in names belonging to both moieties; such are the coyote, falcon, acorn, buckeye, seeds, and bow and arrow. This is an unexplained effacement of the otherwise sharp distinction between the moieties.

Moreover, some of the most important animals, such as the eagle, puma, and rattlesnake, are very rarely or not at all referred to in names, to judge by the available translations rendered by the natives, whereas objects of far less natural importance, such as nose shells, ear plugs, and ceremonial objects, are more common. A truer idea of the totemic classification of the world is therefore, obtainable from general statements made by the Miwok. From these the following partial alignment results:

Land side.

Water side.

Land side.

Water side.

Bear.

Deer.

Katydid.

Bee.

Puma.

Antelope.

Caterpillar.

Wildcat.

Cocoon.

Dog.

Coyote.

Butterfly.

Fox.

Snail.

Raccoon.

Beaver.

Haliotis, and other

Tree squirrel.

Otter.

shells and bead

Badger.

money.

Jack rabbit.

Sugar pine.

Jimson weed.

Eagle.

Black oak.

White oak.

Condor.

Buzzard.

Pine nuts.

Vetch.

Raven.

Manzanita.

Oak gall.

Magpie.

Tobacco.

Wild “cabbage."

Hawk.

Falcon (probably).

Tule.

Chicken hawk.

Salmonberry.

Great owl.

Burrowing owl.

(And other

(And other

Blue jay.

Meadow lark.

plants.)

plants.)

Woodpecker.

Killdeer.

Yellow-hammer.

Hummingbird.

Sky.

Cloud.

Goldfinch.

Kingbird.

Sun, sunshine,
sunrise

Rain.

Creeper.

Bluebird.

Fog.

Dove.

Stars.

Water, lake.

Quail.

Night.

Ice.

Goose.

Fire.

Mud.

Swan.

Earth.

Lightning.

Crane.

Salt.

Rock.

Jacksnipe.

Sand.

Kingfisher, and no

doubt other water
birds.

Bow, arrows, quiver
(probably).

Nose ornament of
shell.

Lizard.

Frog.

Drum.

Salamander.

Ear plug.

Feather apron.

Water snake.

Feather headdress. Football

Turtle.

Gambling bones.

Salmon, and various
other fishes.

Yellow jacket.

Ant.

It is apparent that every water animal, and all phenomena associated with water, are on the appropriate side; but that the remainder of the world is divided quite arbitrarily, or perhaps according to some principle that is obscure to our minds.

The briefer list of totems which the Yokuts enumerate follows the same lines with but few exceptions: beaver and antelope, and hawks and owls, are transposed to the opposite moieties by these southerners.

The Miwok do not regard the totem animals as ancestors, except in an indirect and vague sort of way, to stress which would result in misconception of their attitude. According to their beliefs, as of those of all Indians, the bear, the coyote, and all the animals were once quasi human. The California belief is that they occupied the earth before there were true human beings. They are therefore predecessors of mankind. From that to ancestors is not a far leap; and it has perhaps been made now and then more or less randomly. But there is no definite theory or understanding to this effect. Least of all does a man with an eagle or deer name believe that he can trace his particular lineal descent back to the eagle or deer.

Nor is there any connection in the native mind between a man’s totem and the animal guardian spirit that may reveal itself to him. A bear-named man may acquire the bear for his protector; but he is just, as likely to be patronized by any other animal; and if he does secure a bear spirit, the fact seems a meaningless coincidence to him and his fellows. The interpretation of Miwok totemism, as a development out of the widespread guardian spirit concept, in other words out of shamanism, would therefore be without warrant. Among other nations this interpretation may here. and there have some support. In fact, the two sets of phenomena have enough in common to make it highly probable that the native mind would on occasion connect them secondarily and assimilate them further. And it is an obviously tenable idea that they may spring from a common root. But to derive an essentially social and classifying institution from a religious, inherently individual and therefore variable one, is, as a proposition of generic applicability, one of those explanations with which ethnological science is choked, but which would be more in need of being explained, if they were true, than the phenomena which they purport to elucidate.

The rule of moiety exogamy is definitely formulated by the Miwok, but has not been very rigidly enforced for several generations. It is therefore doubtful whether the sentiment in favor of exogamy was ever more than a marked predilection. The natives say that marriage within the moiety evoked protest but no attempt at actual interference. At present one marriage. out of four is endogamic in place of exogamic among the central Miwok. A numerical disproportion, which gives the land moiety an average excess of nearly 20 per cent over its rival, may help to account for these lapses, though marriages within the smaller water moiety also occur.

According to the limited statistical data available, the water moiety actually predominates in some of the higher villages, while nearer the plains it is much inferior in strength. As the Yokuts equivalent of the water moiety is called “upstream” and its antithesis “downstream,” it is possible that the greater strength of the former in the Miwok highlands is more than an accident of distribution.

The moieties compete with each other in games, and they assist each other at funerals, mourning anniversaries, adolescence observances, and the like. They do not appear to enter at all into the Kuksu religion.

Thus they possess social and semiceremonial functions besides those concerned with marriage and descent, but no strong ritualistic ones.

Many Miwok terms of relationship are applied by any given individual only to persons of one or the other moiety. But for many terms such a limitation is inevitable the moment there is any social grouping on hereditary lines accompanied by exogamy. The father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister, and other relatives must each be exclusively of one’s own moiety or of the opposite one. When it comes to relatives like our “uncle,” such a term, because it comprises the mother’s brother as well as the father’s brother, would in Miwok refer to persons of both moieties. As a matter of fact, like almost all Indians, they possess no word that means what our “uncle” does; but they have a considerable number of kinship terms—more than a fourth of the total—that designate, potentially at least, individuals of both moieties; or, after deduction of the above-mentioned terms denoting the closest relatives, nearly one-half. The system of relationship accordingly reflects the social grouping much less than might be anticipated—not nearly so well as among most Australians, for instance. From this the inference may be drawn that the moiety organization is either comparatively recent among the Miwok or that it has failed to impress their other institutions and their life as a whole very deeply.

MARRIAGE OF RELATIVES.

There is another point which the terms of relationship clear up. The preferential marriage among the Miwok, the one considered most natural and correct, was with certain relatives of the opposite moiety. Now, it was long ago reported that the Miwok married their cousins, which is a practice horribly repugnant to the vast majority of American Indians. Investigation has confirmed and restricted the statement. The Miwok man did often marry his first cousin; but only his mother’s brother’s daughter; that is, one of the two kinds of cross cousins, as they are called. Even these marriages were considered too close in some districts and were frowned upon; a first cousin once removed, or second cousin, or some such distant relative was the proper mate.

It proves that all the female blood relatives that a man might marry come under the designation anisü, and all the kin that a woman could mate with are included in what she calls her angsi. Now angsi is also the word for “son” or “nephew” and anisü for mother’s younger sister or stepmother. It is inconceivable, f rom what we know of the Indian temper, that the Miwok ever married their aunts; and they indignantly deny such an imputation: it is only the cousin or second cousin called anisü, and not the aunt anisü, that one espouses.

Further, it is remarkable that not one of the 30 or more words by which the Miwok designate their various blood kindred or relatives by marriage is of such denotation that it in any way reflects or implies cross-cousin marriage as customary.

If to these circumstances is added the fact that a man may never espouse one of his two kinds of cross cousins—his father’s sister’s daughters—it is clear that the Miwok cross-cousin marriage is an isolated and anomalous institution; and the presumption is forced that it is neither basic nor original in their society.

The foundation of the practice can in fact be traced. It is the almost universal California Indian custom of marrying people who are already connected with one by marriage. To most civilized people such a custom seems quite shocking. But that is only because we introduce a false sentiment, or sentimentality, based in part on confusion of thought, in part on an oversensitiveness, and in part on a fanatical avoidance of everything that even seems to savor of polygamy, whether or not it is connected with that practice. All nations abhor the marriage of near blood kin, but the vast majority distinguish clearly between kindred in fact, such as a sister, and kindred in name, such as a sister-in-law; which of course is the only logical procedure if blood is to mean anything at all. We do not make this distinction with nearly the same force and clearness of perception that most other peoples do. English is one of the few languages in the world that has no independent words for affinities by marriage; “brother-in-law” is based on “brother"; and we show the weakness of vocabulary, and therefore of our thinking in these matters, by not possessing even a single, convenient, generic term for the clumsy “affinities” or “relatives by marriage.” Other European nations approach the Anglo-Saxon condition. In short, for better or for worse, we have lost the keenness of a sense that not only primitive people but the civilized ancients possessed. The idea of blood means but little to us. We are given to imagining that we have developed home and family ties far stronger and deeper than any other people; and we do not know half so well as a savage or a Mohammedan what “family” means. We think of association, when we believe we think of consanguinity. The very word “kin,” except as employed in ethnological literature, is nearly dead: it survives only in poetry and in the occasional mouths of the illiterate. There are people to whom the mere mention of marriage with a former brother’s wife or dead wife’s sister is abhorrent because the word “sister-in-law” reminds them of “sister.”

From this particular overrefinement the overwhelming mass of nations are exempt. They often have their own equivalent scruples, such as balking at marrying a “clan-sister.” But in the present point they think consistently, and it is we who are exceptionally irrational. Not only in aboriginal America, but all over the world people espouse what we miscall “relatives by marriage.” Thus, all through California a man is entitled to marry his brother’s widow; and among most tribes it is expected of him. So, too, if his wife dies he weds her sister or some other kin of hers. If he marries the sister while the wife is still living the objection can be only on the ground of the rule of monogamy being violated. If, finally, he adds to his mates his wife’s daughter by some other man, he is still adhering rigidly to his premises. We are revolted by a false impression of incestuousness as well as by the polygamy, when actually we might base a valid objection only on the ground of sexual delicacy. This particular delicacy the Indian of many tribes lacks; but he replaces it by another, in the total lack of which we are utter barbarians and brutes: he will not look his wife’s mother in the eye or give himself any opportunity to do so. He will marry his stepdaughter; but he will refuse ever to address a word to his mother-in-law.

That, then, is the condition of marriage that underlies the practices of the Miwok as of the other Californian tribes. There is only one point at which their possession of the dual organization specializes it. If a Miwok can marry a woman, he can marry her sister, because she is of the same eligible moiety; and for the same reason he can marry the woman that his brother was wed to. Both these practices are indeed followed. He can not, however, properly marry his wife’s daughter, as a Costanoan or Yurok is free to do. because the daughter is of the moiety of her father. which is also that of her stepfather. If no sister is available some other relative of the wife must therefore be substituted for her daughter as successor or cowife the moment the moiety system is operative. The nearest of these kin, of the same moiety as herself, is her brother’s daughter; if the husband is Land, his wife is Water, her brother must be Water. and his daughter Water also, and therefore eligible. Now. the Miwok actually marry their wives’ brothers’ daughters, and they proclaim such marriages as fitting and frequent.

One more step and we have cross-cousin marriage. Once this type of marriage is fairly frequent the husband is likely to he conceded some right to his wife’s niece, just as most nonmoiety tribes in California admit that he possesses at least some preferential priority to his wife’s sister. Such a claim once established, no matter how irregularly exercised, would descend to the man’s son, who is of the man’s own moiety. The father would only have to die before his wife’s niece was old enough to be wed; or he might reach an age in which he would voluntarily transfer his claim to his son, particularly if he had bound it by a payment. But the son in marrying his father’s wife’s brother’s daughter would be marrying his mother’s brother’s daughter; that is, exactly the type of cross cousin whom among the Miwok he can and does marry.

It seems rather likely that this is exactly the manner in which the curiously one-sided cousin marriage of the Miwok has come about: it is merely a secondary outgrowth of the more basic marriage to the wife’s niece, and this in turn a specialized form of the general practice of wedding a close relative of the wife. This deduction is confirmed by the fact that while there are no terms of relationship that reflect cross-cousin marriage as such, there are a dozen that suggest and agree with marriage to the wife’s niece.

Here, too, we have an explanation of the extraordinary fact that the cousins who marry call each other “stepmother” and “son.” If the father marries the girl, she becomes a second mother or stepmother to her cousin and he a sort of son to her. She therefore is his potential stepmother until the father vacates his right; when she becomes, or can become, the son’s wife instead of his stepmother.

This so exceptional marriage of a relative—quite abnormal from the generic American point of view—thus seems to rest upon the almost universal basis of marriage to an affinity by marriage, modified in detail but not in principle by the exogamic moiety scheme of the Miwok, and given its culmination by the simple transfer of a privilege from father to son. The real specialization of the Miwok lies in this last transfer. Natural as it may seem, it may have caused them a hard wrench; for after all, in spite of its plausibility, it transcended the fundamental principle that kin do not cohabit. What is legitimate for the father is not necessarily legitimate for the son, for after all one is not and the other is related by ties of blood to the woman in question. The problem presented by Miwok cousin marriage is therefore reduced rather than solved: we still do not know what caused the son’s right to prevail over the aversion to kin wedlock. If the Miwok were a people with a marked interest in property, as shown by numerous and refined regulations concerning ownership such as the Yurok have worked out, the case would be simple: but their institutions are not of this, cast. It is even doubtful whether purchase entered very seriously into their marriages. Nothing to this effect has ever been reported of them; and their neighbors on all sides did indeed give something for their wives, but quite clearly never thought of turning marriage into a wholehearted commercial transaction like the northwestern tribes. Another explanation must therefore be sought: and the only circumstance that appears is the moiety system itself. This, with its accentuation of one-sided in place of undifferentiated descent, may well have accentuated the idea of descent itself, and therefore of inheritance, and thus brought about the necessary reenforcement of the son’s claim. A dual organization lends itself particularly to such a development.

Under a multiple clan system a man’s nearer kin are overwhelmingly of only two social groups out of several or many, so that normally he would have few or no blood relatives, and those more or less remote, in whatever of the other groups he married into. With a dual organization. however, he must necessarily average as many actual kinsmen in the group into which he is bound to marry as in his own. Under clan organization, therefore, a distinction between kin groups and marriage groups tends to be kept alive; in any moiety scheme it is liable to effacement, at least in mental attitude. As long as a man must marry into a group in which he has many immediate relatives, the feeling that he may marry a relative can not be very remote; and now and then it is likely to crop out and be accepted. Such seems to be the case in Australia, where the dual scheme is very deeply impressed on society and where kin marriage is almost normal. In fact the Australian feeling seems to be as much that one should marry persons standing in a certain relationship to oneself as that one should not marry certain others; just as the Australian classes are now properly recognized as not being really exogamic; one is compelled to marry into a particular group, whereas under the clan system one is compelled to marry out of it. That the Miwok are dualistically organized, therefore, makes it the more likely that it is this very social scheme of theirs that gave the impetus to the final step that resulted in cross-cousin marriage.

If this argument is valid it reacts to strengthen the probability, already mentioned, that the Miwok moiety scheme is original and not a reduced survival of a former clan system.

No communication is held between a Miwok man and his brothers on the one hand and his mother-in-law and her sisters on the other; nor between a woman and her sisters, and her father-in-law and his brothers. A man also does not address his mother’s brother’s wife—his potential mother-in-law in that she is the mother of his eligible cross cousin.

It is said that when speech is urgent between such shame-faced relatives, and no go-between or third party to be addressed is present, they will communicate with each other in the plural number—“as though more than one person were there.” The feeling, perhaps, is that the individuality of the addressed is obscured by the plurality. The same custom is followed by the Pomo and Kato.

Chapter 40.

THE PAIUTE, MONO, AND KOSO.

The Northern Paiute: Nomenclature, 581; the Great Basin culture, 582; the two ghost dance waves, 583; tribal data, 584. The Mono: Designations, 584; eastern and western Mono, 585; western Mono divisions, 585; eastern Mono territory, 586; numbers, 586; culture, 587; totemic grouping, 587; other notes, 588. The Koso or Panamint: Connections, 589; habitat and population, 589; manufactures, 590; subsistence, 591.

The Northern Paiute.

NOMENCLATURE.

The northeasternmost corner of California is held by a Shoshonean people who popularly are known by the blanket term “Paiute.” People of the same speech and very similar customs occupy the adjacent parts of Nevada, in fact the whole northwestern third of that State; the majority of the eastern half of Oregon; roughly the southern half of Idaho; and they extend southward along the eastern border of California, except for the local interruption of the Washo, for 300 or 400 miles. In Nevada and Oregon they are called Paiutes; in central California sometimes by this term and sometimes Mono; in Idaho they are the Bannock. The form of speech over this vast stretch is, however, virtually identical: minor dialects may be numerous, but intelligibility prevails throughout. Mono-Bannock is perhaps the generic designation least open to confusion. Paviotso is the term of the Shoshoni proper for the Nevada members of the group, but, like Mono and Monachi, is too limited in its application to serve for the entire Mono-Bannock body without producing opportunity for error.

The unqualified term “Paiute” is unfortunate because it refers to two quite different peoples, both indeed Shoshonean, and Plateau Shoshonean at that, but of quite distinct divisions. The other Paiute are in southern Utah, southern Nevada, and southern California. Their affiliations are with the Ute and Chemehuevi, and their speech is divergent enough from that of their northern namesakes to be at first contact mainly unintelligible, at least as connected discourse.

As a matter of fact, the Mono-Bannock and Ute-Chemehuevi divisions seem nowhere to be even in contact, Shoshoni-Comanche tribes intervening from California to Colorado. The distinction between Southern Paiutes and Northern Paiutes will therefore be rigidly adhered to hereafter whenever the term is used at all. For the former term, Chemehuevi is a customary and convenient synonym in southern California. For the latter, “Mono “occupies a similar position in central California. Only the Northern Paiute in northern California have no alternative epithet. Paviotso originated in eastern Nevada, and is locally unknown in California. The northwestern Maidu call the Northern Paiute near them Monozi or Mona, which are evidently forms of Monachi and Mono. This very fact of its being a related name for a related people would make Monozi a desirable designation were it not that Mono has become so definitely identified with the central Californian Shoshoneans of the same division that its extension, even in slightly altered form, to a people several hundred miles distant would be certain to cause confusion. For our northeasterly Californians, then, the unwieldy designation “Northern Paiute” seems to remain as the only safe one.

The only other native ethnic name known for the Northern Paiute is Toloma, applied by the northeastern Maidu.

THE GREAT BASIN CULTURE.

These people should be described in connection with those of Nevada and Oregon, of whom they constitute a minute peripheral fraction. They can, in fact, not be described here because nothing of any significance is known of them, and little of moment of their main body to the east. Their country was un-Californian. What has been said before of Great Basin tribes that belong to California unnaturally and only through the courtesy of arbitrary political lines is particularly applicable here. The land is one of sagebrush and cedar, as what appears to be really a juniper is currently called. The acorn of California has vanished. The true pine nut takes its place only in a measure. The soil is desert, the mountains rocky, with timber in spots. Lakes are numerous, but they are evaporation pools, swampy sinks, or salt basins. Streams run only in the mountains, and flow nowhere. The outlook is wide of necessity, the population scant, travel and movement almost enforced. The Californian self-chaining to a short compass, with a dim gloom everywhere beyond, is impossible. But, to compensate, subsistence is slender and a constant makeshift. There may be leisure indeed, but it is an intermittent idleness, not the occupied and productive luxury of well-fed time. The imagination has little occasion for flight; or when the opportunity arises, there is but scant stimulus in the concrete basis of life. Customs, therefore, remain rude. They are too flexible to bear any ramifying elaboration. Ritual, symbolism, and art attain little intensity, and monotonous simplicity takes the place of a rich growth. Where an activity specializes, it develops in isolation, and fails to merge or expand into a broad scheme: eagle hunting, shamans’ singing, mourning customs fix the attention, not an assemblage of the gods or a coordinated series of rites.

The very poverty of Nevadan native civilization endows it with an interest. Its numberless little but crudely effective devices to struggle along under this burden, its occasional short plunges here or there, contain a wealth of significance. But we can only glimpse this cultural story from bits of stray knowledge. Its import and tenor can scarcely be mistaken; but the episodes that make the real tale have never been assembled.

We must leave the Northern Paiute of our northeasterly angle of California to some future historian of the bordering States. That they had much in common with their Maidu and Achomawi neighbors in the detail of their existence can not be doubted. But it is equally certain that in other respects they were true Basin people, members of a substantially homogeneous mass that extended eastward to the crest of the Rockies, and that in some measure, whether to a considerable or a subsidiary extent, was infiltrated with thoughts and practices whose hearth was in the Plains beyond. Several traces of this remote influence have already been detected among the Achomawi.

THE TWO GHOST-DANCE WAVES.

It was a Northern Paiute, though one of Nevada, Jack Wilson or Wovoka, who in 1889 in his obscurity gave birth to the great ghost-dance movement; and before him his father, or another relative, about 1870, originated a similar wave, whose weaker antecedent stimulus carried it less far and scarcely impressed the American public. In both cases the fringe of Northern Paiute whom we hold under consideration were involved with the main body of their kinsmen to the southeast, and passed the doctrine westward, the first time to the Modoc, the second to the Achomawi. The later and greater agitation stopped there: the California Indian inside the Sierra had long since given up all hope and wish of the old life and adapted himself as best he might to the new civilization that engulfed him. But in the early seventies less than 25 years had passed since the pre-American clays of undisturbed and undiluted native existence. The middle-aged Indian of northern California had spent his early years under its conditions; the idea of its renewal seemed not impossible; and its appeal to his imagination was stirring. From Klamath Lake the tidings were carried to the Shasta; from them they spread to Karok, Yurok, and Athabascan tribes. The doctrine, taking new forms, but keeping something of its kernel, worked its uneasy way about and somewhere was carried across and up the Sacramento Valley, until, among the Porno and southern Wintun, it merged with the old religion, crystallized, and remains to-day a recognizable element in ceremonial.

TRIBAL DATA.

The band of Northern Paiute of Surprise Valley and on Upper, Middle, and Lower Alkali Lakes, south of Fort Bidwell, were the Kaivanungavidukw. To the north, around Warner Lake in Oregon, but ranging southward toward or to Fort Bidwell, were the Tuziyammo, also known as Ochoho’s band. The Honey Lake group were the Waratika or Wadatika, the “wada-seed eaters.” East of these, over the State line, the Smoke Creek region seems to have belonged to the Kuyui-dika or “sucker-eaters,” the Pyramid Lake people or Winnemucca’s band. (Pl. 37.)

The California limits of the Northern Paiute are not quite certain. The doubts that exist have been aired in the foregoing discussions of Achomawi, Atsugewi, and Maidu. The present population appears to be in the vicinity of 300. It probably never exceeded double this figure.

THE MONO.

DESIGNATIONS.

After the alien Washo have been passed in a southward journey along the eastern base of the Sierra Nevada, Mono-Bannock people are again encountered. They can now be named Monos with little fear of misunderstanding.

The word Mono means “monkey” in Spanish, but this signification, some guesses notwithstanding, can be eliminated from consideration of the origin of the term. So can a Yokuts folk etymology, which derives it from monai, monoyi, “flies,” on the ground that the Mono scaled the cliffs of their high mountains as the insect walks up the wall of a house. Monachi is the Yokuts term for the people, corresponding to Miwok Mono-k, and to Maidu Monozi for the Northern Paiute. It is a meaningless name. The subtraction of the tribal suffix chi leaves a stem of which a Spaniard could hardly have made anything but Mono. Whether the Yokuts originated the word, or whether it comes from some Shoshonean or other source, is not known. The Mono call themselves only Nümü, which means no more than “persons.”

Besides Monachi, the Yokuts call the western Mono Nuta'a (plural Nuchawayi), which, however, is only a directional term meaning “uplanders,” and therefore generally easterners. That it is not a true ethnic term is clear from the fact that Garcés, in 1776, used the same name, in the form Noche, for the southern foothill Yokuts themselves. Malda is a specific southern Yokuts term for the Kern River Shoshoneans, and perhaps for all members of the family. The eastern Mono of Owens Valley are called by themselves or their kinsmen Pitanakwat, which probably means “pine-nut-eaters,” after a system of tribal or band nomenclature that prevails over much of Nevada and the surrounding Shoshonean regions. The Kern River Tobatulabal call the eastern Mono, Yiwinanghal; the western Mono, Winanghatal.

EASTERN AND WESTERN MONO.

The bulk of Mono territory and population is still in the Great Basin; but a branch is established in the high Sierra, at least in its marginal, permanently habitable portion, from which they look down on the foothill and valley Yokuts. The upper San Joaquin, Kings, and Kaweah comprise this domain, in which all the pine forest, and some stretches below it, are Mono. The dialect east and west of the huge crest is not identical, but appears to be remarkably similar considering that the two parts of the people have only their backs in contact—if contact it be with one of the earth’s greatest walls between—and that their outlooks are opposite. The western, cis-Sierra, truly Californian Mono can hardly, therefore, have come into their present seats very long ago, as the historian reckons; and they are certainly newer than their neighbors, the Tübatulabal of Kern River, or the southern Californians of the same family. Both the western and the eastern halves answer to the name Mono, and the Yokuts call them both Monachi.

WESTERN MONO DIVISIONS.

The western Mono have several distinctive names applied to them by the Yokuts. It is not clear whether the Mono themselves employ these, or equivalents; nor whether, as the names might indicate, the Mono have borrowed the tribal organization of the Yokuts, or the latter merely attribute their own political unity to each Mono group to which its habitat gives a topographic unity.

On the North Fork of the San Joaquin, close to the Chukchansi, Dalinchi, and half-mythical Toltichi, as well as the uppermost of the southern Miwok on Fresno River, was a Mono band that survives in some strength to-day, but for which no “tribal” name is known.

South of the San Joaquin, on Big Sandy Creek, and toward if not on the heads of Little and Big Dry Creeks, were the Posgisa or Poshgisha. Their Yokuts neighbors were the Gashowu.

On a series of confluent streams—of which Big, Burr, and Sycamore Creeks are the most important—entering Kings River above Mill Creek, were the Holkoma. Towincheba has been given as a synonym and Kokoheba as the name of a coordinate neighboring tribe, but both appear to be designations of Holkoma villages.

At the head of Mill Creek, a southern affluent of Kings River, and in the pine ridges to the north, were the Wobonuch. Their Yokuts associates were the Michahai, Chukaimina, and Entimbich. In regard to the latter there is some confusion whether they are Yokuts or Mono.

On Limekiln and Eshom Creeks and the North Fork of Izaweah River were the Waksachi, whose Yokuts contacts were primarily with the Wükchamni.

On the Kaweah itself, especially on its south side, the Balwisha had their home. They, too, associated with the Wukchamni lower down on their own stream, but also with the Yaudanchi on the headwaters of Tule River, the next stream south.

This makes six named western Mono divisions, one each, roughly speaking, on each side of the three great streams that flow through their territory. Their more precise location appears on the Yokuts map (Pl. 47).

EASTERN MONO TERRITORY.

The eastern Mono inhabit a long, arid depression that lies along the base of the Sierra. Numerous small streams descend, even on this almost rainless side, from the snowy summits; and through most of the valley there flows one fair-sized longitudinal stream, the Owens River—the Jordan of California—and, like it, lost in a salt sea. The exact southward limits of the Mono have not been recorded, it appears. The line between them and the Koso, the next group beyond, has been drawn between Independence and Owens Lake; but it is possible that the shores of this sheet should have been assigned rather to the Mono.

Eastward and northward the Mono extend indefinitely across the diagonal line that gives the State of Nevada its characteristic contour. There appears to be no consequential change of dialect and no great modification of custom. On Owens River and around Mono Lake the people are sometimes called Mono and sometimes Paiute; in western Nevada they are only Paiutes; as the center of that State is approached, the Shoshoni name Paviotso begins to be applicable. To the Paiute of Pyramid Lake they are all, together with the bands far in Oregon, one people.

To the northwest, toward the Washo, the Mono boundary is formed by the watershed between Carson and Walker Rivers.

NUMBERS.

The Mono are to-day the most numerous body of Indians in California. The eastern Mono alone exceed, according to census returns, every group except the Maidu and Pomo; and at that both the latter are composite bodies, each including distinct languages, and are likely to have been more completely enumerated. The returns show 1,388 Mono in California. But as Mono and Inyo Counties, which are wholly eastern Mono except for a few Koso, are credited with nearly 1,200 Indians; and as the western Mono are about half as numerous as their eastern kinsmen, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the total for the combined group is above rather than below 1,500. Part of them have probably been classed under other names, such as Paiute, or reported without tribal designation.

This relatively high standing is, however, of recent date. A century ago the Mono were feeble in numbers compared with many other groups. The very inhospitability of their habitat, which then caused their population to be sparse, has prevented any considerable influx of Americans and has spared them much of the consequent incisive diminution that a full and sudden dose of our civilization always brings the Indian. They may retain in 1916 a full one-half of their numbers in 1816; the proportion among tribes situated as they are is in the vicinity of this fraction. A conservative estimate of their original number is 3,000 to 4,000; 5,000 or 6,000 a very liberal figure.

Much the same result is reached by comparison. If 50 Yokuts tribes totaled 15,000 to 20,000, the 6 western Mono divisions higher in the mountains may have aggregated 2,000 at best; and allowing double for the eastern division, we are still within the range of our estimate.

It is a subject for thought that a body of people that once stood to their neighbors as three or four to one should now be outranked by them one to three, merely because the former were a few miles more accessible to Caucasian contact.

CULTURE.

Mono civilization is little known, either as to customs or preserved implements. It is not even certain that they formed a group other than in speech and origin. There may have been a deep cultural cleft between the two halves, the western people being essentially Yokuts in practices and ideas, the eastern little else than Nevada Paviotso. Or they may really have been one people, whose western division had their civilization overlaid with a partial veneer of Yokuts customs. Information is practically lacking, for ethnologists have put little on record concerning either half of the group.

TOTEMIC GROUPING.

The western Mono, at least those on the San Joaquin and very likely those on other streams also, possessed one important central California institution that had not penetrated to their eastern brothers nor to any trans-Sierra people: the totemic moieties. But these moieties exhibit one feature that is neither Miwok nor Yokuts: they are not exogamous. Marriage is within or without the moiety. Descent is in the male line, and a group of animals is associated as “ pets” or “dogs” with each moiety. These animals, at least the birds among them, were sometimes reared in captivity. When adult they were either despoiled of their feathers or released unharmed. The personal name is of Yokuts rather than Miwok type: it is inherited, and generally meaningless, not of totemic connotation. Chieftainship was dual as among the Yokuts, but the chief of the moiety represented by the eagle had precedence.

Besides being nonexogamous, the Mono moieties are peculiar in being definitely subdivided. The entire scheme is:

Moiety I, corresponding to Miwok “land” and Yokuts “downstream;” Yayanchi.

Subdivisions: Dakats, Kunugechi.

Totem animals: Eagle, crow, chicken hawk.

The name Dakats suggests Kawaiisu adagatsi, “crow,” and Yayanchi the yayu hawk, identified with the opposite moiety.

Moiety II, corresponding to Miwok “water” and Yokuts “upstream:” Pakwihu.

Subdivisions: Tübahinagatu, Puza'ots or Pazo'odz.

Totem animals: Buzzard, coyote, yayu hawk, bald eagle.

Pakwihu is probably from pakwi, “fish”; Tübahinagatu perhaps from tüba, which seems to mean “pine nut” in certain Shoshonean dialects—compare “Tüba-tulabal “; Puza'ots recalls oza'ots, “magpie “—a bird of the opposite moiety among the Miwok—hut the etymology seems more than venturesome. In fact, oza'ots may be nothing but a modified loan ward, the Yokuts ochoch.

The animal associations are the same as among the Miwok and Yokuts. The yayu may prove to be the Yokuts limik, the falcon, and as for the “bald eagle” on the buzzard or coyote side, this may be the “fish hawk” whom the Tachi put in the same division. But the Mono totemism is perhaps looser than that of their neighbors; it is said that a person may change his moiety.

OTHER NOTES.

The relationship terms of the San Joaquin Mono are, like those of the eastern Mono, of Great Basin type. Cross cousins are “brothers” or “sisters,” not “parents” or “children” as among the Miwok and central Yokuts. This circumstance, coupled with the absence of exogamic regulations, makes it very probable that none of the Mono practiced cross-cousin marriage, a peculiar custom established among the Miwok.

The western Mono observed rather strictly the taboo between mother-in-law and son-in-law. If speech was necessary, these persons addressed each other in the plural, as if to dull the edge of personal communication by circumlocution. This device has already been noted among more northerly tribes. Some restraint or shame, though of a milder degree, was observed also toward the father-in-law; and—as among the Yana—between brother and sister. The eastern Mono knew nothing of these customs.

The rough Yokuts type of pottery seems to have been made by the western Mono but its precise range among them is unknown. Their basketry agreed with that of the Yokuts in forms, technique, and materials. A diagonally twined cap from the eastern Mono is shown in Plate 55, d.

The southern Yokuts report that the Mono cremated their dead; but it is not clear to what, subdivision this statement refers. The eastern Mono about Bishop buried.

The mourning anniversary of south and central California was probably made by the western Mono. The eastern Mono burned considerable property over the graves of dead chiefs and possibly of other people, too; and saved their remaining belongings in order to destroy them a year later. This is an echo of the standard mourning anniversary.

The ritual number of the eastern Mono was four.

The Koso or Panamint.

CONNECTIONS.

With the Koso (also called Kosho, Panamint, Shikaviyam, Sikaium, Shikaich, Kaich, Kwüts, Sosoni, and Shoshone) a new division of the Plateau Shoshoneans is entered—the Shoshoni-Comanche. This group, which keeps apart the Mono-Bannock and the Ute-Chemehuevi (Fig. 52), stretches in a tenuous band—of which the Koso form one end at the base of the Sierra Nevada—through the most desert part of California, across central and northeastern Nevada, thence across the region of the Utah-Idaho boundary into Wyoming, over the Continental Divide of the Rockies to the headwaters of the Platte; and, as if this were insufficient, one part, and the most famous, of the division, the Comanche, had pushed southeastward through Colorado far into Texas.

HABITAT AND POPULATION.

The territory of the westernmost member of this group, our Koso, who form as it were the head of a serpent that curves across the map for 1,500 miles, is one of the largest of any Californian people. It was also perhaps the most thinly populated, and one of the least defined. If there were boundaries, they are not known. To the west the crest of the Sierra has been assumed as the limit of the Koso toward the Tübatulabal. On the north were the eastern Mono of Owens River. Owens Lake, it seems, should go with the stream that it receives; and perhaps Koso territory only began east or south of the sheet; but the available data make the inhabitants of its shores “ Shoshones “and not “Paiutes.” On the south the Kawaiisu and Chemehuevi ranged over a similarly barren habitat, and there is so little exact knowledge of ethnic relations that the map has had to be made almost at random. The boundaries in this desert were certainly not straight lines, but for the present there is no recourse but to draw them.

The fact is that this region was habitable only in spots, in oases, if we can so call a spring or a short trickle down a rocky canyon. Between these minute patches in or at the foot of mountains were wide stretches of stony ranges, equally barren valleys, and alkaline flats. All through California it is the inhabited sites that are significant in the life of the Indians, rather than the territories; and boundaries are of least consequence of all. In the unchanging desert this condition applies with tenfold force; but ignorance prevents a distributional description that would be adequate.

It is only known that at least four successive ranges, with the intervening valleys, were the portion of this people—the Coso, Argus, Panamint, and Funeral Mountains, with Coso, Panamint, and Death Valleys. Thirty years ago they actually lived at four spots in this area—on Cottonwood Creek, in the northwestern arm of Death Valley; south of Bennett Mills on the eastern side of the Panamint Mountains, in another canyon leading into Death Valley; near Hot Springs, at the mouth of Hall Creek into Panamint Valley; and northwest from these locations, on the west side of Saline Valley, near Hunter Creek at the foot of the Inyo Mountains.

It is not clear whether the terms “Coso “and “Panamint “were first used geographically or ethnically. The latter is the most common American designation of the group, and would be preferable to Koso except that, in the form Vanyume, it has also been applied to a Serrano group.

Koso population was of the meagerest. It is exceedingly doubtful whether the country would have supported as many as 500 souls; and there may have been fewer. In 1883 an estimate was 150; in 1891, less than 100; a recent one, between 100 and 150. The Koso are not sufficiently differentiated from adjoining groups in the popular American mind to make ordinary census figures worth much.

MANUFACTURES.

The Koso must have lived a very different life from the San Joaquin Valley tribes; but they share many implements with the Yokuts, through intercourse of both with the Tübatulabal; and it can not be doubted that ideas and practices were also carried back and forth. The ceremonial skirt of strings of eagle down is one such evidence. Whether this traveled from west. to east or the reverse, it is almost certain to have transported with it some religious associations. (Pl. 42.)

Flat feather bands are of the type of the yellow-hammer ornaments so characteristic of the whole cis-Sierra region, but their detailed form, as revealed in total length, inaccuracy of stringing, and proportion of feather to quill, allies them more particularly to the corresponding article of the Luiseño and other southern Californians. (Pl.58.)

Baskets, again, are of Yokuts rather than southern affinities. The plate or shallow bowl, it is true, is coiled; but there is a conical carrying basket, and it is twined. The pitched water basket is indispensable to a potless desert people. The carrying cap was worn by women. It was coiled. The foundation for coiled ware is a bundle of Epicampes grass stems containing a single woody rod; the sewing is strands of willow, and black patterns are made with the horns of Mart ynia pods, or Scirpus bulrush roots soaked in ashes. For red, tree yucca root is used. Twined vessels are of strands of willow or sumac on shoots of the same. The patterns are also in Martynia, or if red, of tree yucca root.

The carrying net is of southern California type (Fig. 53), but without tilt convenient loops of the Cahuilla form (Fig. 59).

Earth-covered sweat houses were used regularly, at least by some men. They were large enough to stand up in. The soil was heaped over a layer of “arrowweed,” Pluchea sericea. (Pl. 56.)

The bow is of juniper, short, and sinew-backed. The string is sinew, or Apocynum, wild hemp, the usual cordage material. The arrow is of willow, or of Phragmites cane; the latter has a long point of greasewood. The cane arrow is heated in the groove of a stone straightener of Yokuts-Cahuilla type, then seized in the teeth and the ends bent.

SUBSISTENCE.

The most important food in the oakless country was the Nevada pine nut, from Pinus monophylla. Seeds were gathered by beating as by the more favored Californian tribes. Oryzopsis, the desert sand grass, perhaps furnished the most abundant supply. Seeds of evening primroses, of Ephedra, and of the devil’s pincushion cactus, were also available. Most of these were ground and then parched with coals in a shallow basket. The mesquite bean, Prosopis, was pounded in wooden mortars; the stalks of the common reed, Phragmites, were treated similarly and cakes of the flour toasted.

The “mescal” of the Southwest and southernmost California hardly penetrates the Koso country, but the tree yucca bud affords a substitute, which has the advantage of being edible after roasting on an open fire, whereas the agave butt or stalk requires prolonged steam cooking in an earth-covered pit.

Prickly pear joints, however, are treated by the Koso in this manner, and can then be kept indefinitely, or are sun dried and boiled when wanted. The thorns are first rubbed off.

The leaves and shoots of several varieties of crucifers are eaten.

In the fertile parts of California clover and other greens are mostly eaten raw, but the desert vegetation requires repeated boiling, washing, and squeezing to remove the bitter and perhaps deleterious salts.

Animal food is only occasionally obtainable. Rabbits, jack rabbits, rats, and lizards, with some birds, furnish the bulk. Mountain sheep take the place of deer as the chief big game. On the shores of Owens Lake countless grubs of a fly were scooped out of the shallow water and dried for food.

Chapter 58.

PLACE NAMES.

. . . .

Table 12.—Source of Some California Place Names of Indian Origin.

[Editor’s note: only Sierra Miwok and Mono place names in the Handbook are copied here—dea.]

Ahwahnee

Miwok village in Yosemite valley.

Chagoopa

Probably Mono

Cosumnes

Miwok village

Hetch Hetchy

Miwok name of a plant.

Kaiaiauwa

Possibly Miwok.

Koip

Probably Mono “mountain sheep.”

Kuna

Perhaps Mono “firewood.”

Mokelumne

Miwok "people of Mokel," a village.

Oleta

Perhaps Miwok.

Omo

Miwok village.

Omochumnes.

Miwok "people of Umucha."

Pohono

Probably Miwok.

Taboose

Perhaps a Mono Shoshonean word.

Tehipite

Perhaps a Mono Shoshonean word.

Tenaya

Miwok chief.

Tissaack

Miwok place name of mythological origin.

Toowa

Probably a Mono word.

Yosemite

Miwok: usually said to mean "grizzly bear;" perhaps "killers."

. . . .

Appendix.
PRONUNCIATION OF NATIVE WORDS.

Many an Indian language contains more different sounds than the Roman alphabet has letters. If, according to a basic rule of philology, a distinct character were to be employed for each distinct sound, an alphabet of several hundred characters would have had to be devised for this book, since there are nearly a hundred native dialects in California of which some record has been made, and the vast majority of these contain sounds that are not identical. Such a scheme of orthography is both impracticable and unnecessary for anything but purely linguistic studies. On the other hand, the writing of Indian words with the current English values of the letters—sometimes falsely called "phonetic"—was out of the question, because words written in this way can often be read in two or three ways. If anyone can correctly pronounce a foreign word written by the English method, it is not because he can read it, but because his tongue remembers the pronunciation. It is impossible to convey to others a fixed pronunciation of alien terms rendered in English orthography.

The system of spelling followed in this work employs only letters of the Roman alphabet and three or four diacritical marks. In general, the vowel signs have the sound of the letters in the languages of the continent of Europe, the consonant signs the sound of the English letters. This system does not permit of any one of the Indian languages referred to being pronounced with absolute correctness. On the other hand, if the description of the sound or sounds denoted by each letter is carefully observed, this spelling will permit of the pronunciation of the native terms in this book with sufficient accuracy for an Indian to recognize all the words quoted from his dialect.

a

as in father, sometimes as in what; in Yurok only, sometimes as in bad.

b

usually a little more difficult to distinguish from p than in English.

c

not employed; s or k has been written instead.

ch

as in English, or nearly so.

d

somewhat as in English; but its quality is like that of b, its tongue position like t.

dh

in Mohave and Luiseño only, like th in English the.

dj

as in English, but with some approach to ch quality (compare b, d, g).

e

as in met, there; sometimes like a in mate.

f

rare; the upper lip touches the lower lip, not the teeth.

g

as in go, but harder to distinguish from k than in English; in Yurok, always a "fricative," that is, like g in Spanish gente or colloquial German wagen; in Pomo, and occasionally in other languages, both values of g occur, but are designated by the one letter.

h

sometimes as in English; occasionally fainter; sometimes more harshly made with constriction at the back of the mouth, producing a sound equal, or nearly so, to Spanish j or German ch. H must always be sounded, even at the end of words.

hl

a "surd" l, made without vibration of the vocal cords.

hw

a "surd" w, much like wh in English which.

i

as in pin, long or short, or as in machine, long or short.

j

not used, except in dj.

k

in languages which possess g, is as in English; in those which do not, it is usually somewhat nearer g than is English k, at least at the beginning and in the middle of words. Indian k is often pronounced much farther back in the mouth than English k.

l

never quite the same as in English, but near enough in sound to be unmistakable.

m

substantially as in English.

n

substantially as in English.

ng

as in English singing, not as in finger.

o

as in come, ore; when long, sometimes like o in note, more frequently like aw in law.

p

as in English, but with a tendency of approach toward b like that of k toward g.

q

not used; kw has been written instead.

r

much as in German, French, Spanish, or Irish brogue; only in Yurok it is "soft" as in American English. Yurok er is a vowel.

s

is a sound of the same type as English s, though rarely quite identical. In languages like Yana and Mohave, in which sh has not been written, s is usually as similar in effect to English sh as to English s.

sh

much as in English, but probably never quite the same.

t

tends to approach d as k does g. Pomo, Yuki, Costanoan, Yokuts, Luiseflo, Diegueño, Mohave, and perhaps other languages, possess one t made with the tip of the tongue against the teeth, and another against the front palate, the latter sounding almost like English tr; but the two sounds have been represented by one letter.

th

in Mohave only, like English th in thin.

tl

an "affricative surd" l, much like tl in English little.

u

as in rule, long or short; or as in full, long or short; never as in unit.

ü

in Shoshonean, Chumash, Yokuts, Miwok, Maidu, is spoken with the tongue in position for u, the lips formed as if for i or e. It is almost the "opposite" in articulation from German ft or French u.

v

in Shoshonean, Mohave, and Karok; the lower lip touches the upper, not the teeth. w as in English, or nearly so. x. not used. The sound of English x is represented by ks; the "fricative palatal" sound usually denoted by x in works on American Indian languages is here represented by h.

y

as in English.

z

as in English zebra.

zh

rare; like s in pleasure or z in azure.

'

the so-called glottal stop; a contraction of the larynx or Adam’s apple, closing the breath passage; a cessation of sound, or pause, and therefore inaudible except sometimes as a faint click or catch. When written after p, t, k, ch, ts, tl, the closing of the larynx is usually simultaneous with the first part of the consonant, while the last portion of the sound is reenforeed and has to the ear something of the quality of a smack or crack.

denotes the accented or most loudly spoken vowel of the word. Accent is generally less marked in the Californian Indian languages than in English, and its designation has been omitted in all but a few instances.

when used, denotes a long vowel; but as a rule, length and shortness of vowels have not been distinguished. Lengthened consonants are represented by being written twice. This device does not indicate shortness of the preceding vowel as in English.

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