Many Puzzles in Bay Indian Life - Oakland Tribune, 29 Nov 1970

Many Puzzles in Bay Indian Life

Much of what we know about how the Bay Area Indians lived in prehistoric times comes from the fragmentary notes of early explorers from Europe, such as Sir Francis Drake.

More detailed ethnographic information began to be collected from Indian survivors late in the last century, but by then groups had been scattered and intermixed for almost a century. Their memories and practices were probably substantially different from the lifestyle of their ancestors.

Historians may never agree on just where Drake came ashore in this area, but the reports from his crew that remain make it clear he must have landed in Marin County, at a place that looks like Drake's Bay.

It was June of 1579. He was greeted by Indians who performed a ceremony that Drake interpreted as turning over their country to him and England's Queen Elizabeth.

However, from the descriptions left by Drake's chroniclers, anthropologists know that the Indians were performing something akin to the "Kuksu," or ghost ceremony. They apparently regarded Drake and his men as the returned spirits of the dead, whom it was necessary to appease.

This raises an interesting puzzle. Alfred L. Kroeber, the University of California anthropologist who did the definitive study of California Indians early in this century, concluded that Indians in this region believed the dead went to an island across the ocean, from which they may have returned from time to time.

Was that a belief that grew from Drake's visit, 300 years earlier? Or did the belief predate the visit, and thus explained why the Kuksu was performed for Drake?

It is likely that the answer will never be known, because today no identifiable survivor of the Bay Area's Indians remains.

For most of them, we have no direct evidence of their way of life, aside from what can be gleaned from the ruins of their villages, their burial sites and shell mounds that have not yet been engulfed in urban sprawl. 

The Indians who greeted Drake were probably those today called Coast Miwok, although their name for themselves (or their language) may have been "Hukueko." Their language was related to that of the Central Valley and Sierra Miwok, but their customs seem to have been very similar to those of the Pomo groups to the north. 

The Spanish explorer, Sebastian Rodriguez Cermeno, was the second European to land in the area, going ashore at Drake's Bay 16 years later.

Cermeno described the Indians as "well set up and robust, with long hair, and go entirely naked, only the women wearing skirts of grass or deerskin.” Their faces were painted red and black, and they were armed with bows and arrows.

Cermeno's ship was driven ashore and wrecked in a storm, and there was a skirmish when the Spanish tried to reclaim timbers and other items the Indians salvaged from the wreck. Later, however, the Indians brought gifts of food, and Cermeno's party sailed south in a small launch that had been intended for shallow-water explorations.


Earlier, an overland exploration led by Don Gaspar de Portola and Father Juan Crespi reached as far north as Palo Alto in 1769. Portola sent a scouting party, led by Sgt. Jose Ortega, around the southern tip of the Bay and up the east coast.

Ortega got as far as the present site of Hayward, but turned back because the Indians were hostile, unlike the gentle people to the south.

The first major penetration of the Eastbay was by Pedro Fages and Father Crespi in 1772. They found a large village at what is now Richmond, where they were given stuffed decoy geese in return for beads, and got as far as the Carquinez Strait, from which they could see "many villages" on the other side. All these Indians were friendly and hospitable.

They turned south through central Contra Costa, and found many more peaceful villages in the Danville-San Ramon area. South of there, the land was uninhabited.

As early as 1797, however, the Spanish were reporting troubles with these formerly friendly Eastbay Indians. Mission Dolores had been established in San Francisco, with Indians - drawn from a hundred different villages - running away, and fighting the soldiers sent to bring them back. There was a heavy battle with the Saclan Indians in present-day eastern Contra Costa County.

The Ohlones, who lived near Mission San Jose, remained friendly for a long period of time.


By 1818, the mission fathers had learned that Indians near Stockton were using horses. One padre wrote the governor that unless their horses were taken away, "California might in time become the theater of a second band of Apaches."

The Spanish, with their emphasis on missions, and the early Americans, with their interest in farming and gold, paid little attention to the Indians' way of life. Archeology can tell us much more.

Tribune photo by Bill Crouch
CONTRA COSTA COLLEGE ANTHROPOLOGIST GEORGE R. COLES JR.
At right, one of his excavations in shellmound on Brooks Island

Extensive research has been done at a number of sites. There is a shellmound on the Patterson Ranch, three miles south of Alvarado, near Newark, for example; Brooks Island, off the Richmond Inner Harbor, and Ellis Landing on the shore facing the island, and a mound beside Miller Creek Junior High School in Marin County. Sites like these supply many answers, but they also raise intriguing questions about the prehistoric Indians.

The Patterson mound yielded drilled bird bones and deer antler tines whose use may have been ceremonial but remains unknown. The Ellis Landing mound, dug in 1906-7 and long since vanished, had tools polished and detailed to a degree far beyond utilitarian needs. Both these sites contained bird bone whistles, sometimes bundled together to form Pipes of Pan,

CHARLES SLAYMAKER EXAMINES EXCAVATION
Miller Creek site has long history

The Miller Creek site, on Los Gallinas Road, is still being excavated by Charles Slaymaker, of San Francisco State College. He contends it was the central ceremonial village for Indians who lived all along the narrow valley.

It has dance houses, for example, which the other sites, all smaller, do not, and a large number of rich burial sites, in which many possessions were interred - a sign that the deceased was a shaman or headman or otherwise important in life.

Slaymaker says the Miller Creek structures will be restored and preserved, with tent-like coverings for protection, as a permanent outdoor museum which, with signs, would be self-explanatory.

Such a system, of ceremonial sites surrounded by smaller villages, seems also to have been the case among the Eastbay groups. Only the central settlement was occupied more or less continually.

Food was cooked in water-tight baskets, by dropping in heated stones. They made a poi-like mush, and a kind of cake or bread, of ground acorns or buckeye.

After grinding in wood or stone mortars, or on metates (flat stones), this flour was treated to a sophisticated leaching process, to remove the bitter tannic acid and - in the case of buckeye - poisonous hydrocyanic acid.

This produced a nutritious if tasteless meal, which was then salted with seaweed and flavored with dried deer or rabbit meat or the various seafoods.

In earliest times, hunting was done with a stone-pointed spear, propelled with an atlatl, or throwing stick. Later, the bow and arrow was introduced, and game became a larger part of the diet.

When wars were fought - feuds, really, rather than for territorial conquest - no prisoners were taken, and the slain were scalped or decapitated.

All mention of the dead was avoided, except in the heat of argument, when to say, "Your father is dead" was a supreme insult and required revenge.

U. C.'s Kroeber, who began in 1900 a lifetime of interviewing and studying the surviving Indians and became the definitive source on their life-style, was unable to determine much about the Eastbay groups.

He concluded, for example, that most of the Eastbay groups cremated their dead. But archeologists have found little evidence to support such a statement, since the great majority of burials they have uncovered show no signs of cremation.

Kroeber's misinformation probably came from the descendants of Eastbay groups, long since driven northward by Spanish and American activities in the Bay Area, who had modified their way of life as a result of being forced off their ancestral lands.

Today, the only remaining source of new information for anthropological analysis is the archeological dig. If we are to solve the puzzle of one of the most ancient and successful cultures man has devised, it will have to be by interpreting the bones, beads, stones and tools sifted out of the shellmounds lining the Bay


Many Puzzles in Bay Indian Life
shellmoundMany Puzzles in Bay Indian Life shellmound 29 Nov 1970, Sun Oakland Tribune (Oakland, California) Newspapers.com

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