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.
Read more about Cermeno's (Soromenho's) wreck, and the discovery of Ming Dynasty porcelain in the shellmounds of Drakes Bay
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.
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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,
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| 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
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