Incremation is almost universal in this part of California.[562] The body is decorated with feathers, flowers, and beads, and after lying in state for some time, is burned amid the howls and lamentations of friends and relations. The ashes are either preserved by the family of the deceased or are formally buried. The weapons and effects of the dead are burned or buried with them.[563] When a body is prepared for interment the knees are doubled up against the chest and securely bound with cords. It is placed in a sitting posture in the grave, which is circular. This is the most common manner of sepulture, but some tribes bury the body perpendicularly in a hole just large enough to admit it, sometimes with the head down, sometimes in a standing position. The Pomos formerly burned their dead, and since they have been influenced by the whites to bury them, they invariably place the body with its head toward the south.
MOURNING FOR THE DEAD.
A scene of incremation is a weird spectacle. The friends and relatives of the deceased gather round the funeral pyre in a circle, howling dismally. As the flames mount upward their enthusiasm increases, until in a perfect frenzy of excitement, they leap, shriek, lacerate their bodies, and even snatch a handful of smoldering flesh from the fire, and devour it.
The ashes of the dead mixed with grease, are smeared over the face as a badge of mourning, and the compound is suffered to remain there until worn off by the action of the weather. The widow keeps her head covered with pitch for several months. In the Russian River Valley, where demonstrations of grief appear to be yet more violent than elsewhere, self-laceration is much practiced. It is customary to have an annual Dance of Mourning, when the inhabitants of a whole village collect together and lament their deceased friends with howls and groans. Many tribes think it necessary to nourish a departed spirit for several months. This is done by scattering food about the place where the remains of the dead are deposited. A devoted Neeshenam widow does not utter a word for several months after the death of her husband; a less severe sign of grief is to speak only in a low whisper for the same time.[564]
Regarding a future state their ideas are vague; some say that the Meewocs believe in utter annihilation after death, but who can fathom the hopes and fears that struggle in their dark imaginings. They are not particularly cruel or vicious; they show much sorrow for the death of a relative; in some instances they are affectionate toward their families.[565]
CENTRAL CALIFORNIAN CHARACTER.
Although nearly all travelers who have seen and described this people, place them in the lowest scale of humanity, yet there are some who assert that the character of the Californian has been maligned. It does not follow, they say, that he is indolent because he does not work when the fertility of his native land enables him to live without labor; or that he is cowardly because he is not incessantly at war, or stupid and brutal because the mildness of his climate renders clothes and dwellings superfluous. But is this sound reasoning? Surely a people assisted by nature should progress faster than another, struggling with depressing difficulties.
From the frozen, wind-swept plains of Alaska to the malaria-haunted swamps of Darien, there is not a fairer land than California; it is the neutral ground, as it were, of the elements, where hyperboreal cold, stripped of its rugged aspect, and equatorial heat, tamed to a genial warmth, meet as friends, inviting, all blusterings laid aside. Yet if we travel northward from the Isthmus, we must pass by ruined cities and temples, traces of mighty peoples, who there flourished before a foreign civilization extirpated them. On the arid deserts of Arizona and New Mexico is found an incipient civilization. Descending from the Arctic sea we meet races of hunters and traders, which can be called neither primitive nor primordial, living after their fashion as men, not as brutes. It is not until we reach the Golden Mean in Central California that we find whole tribes subsisting on roots, herbs and insects; having no boats, no clothing, no laws, no God; yielding submissively to the first touch of the invader; held in awe by a few priests and soldiers. Men do not civilize themselves. Had not the Greeks and the Egyptians been driven on by an unseen hand, never would the city of the Violet Crown have graced the plains of Hellas, nor Thebes nor Memphis have risen in the fertile valley of the Nile. Why Greece is civilized, while California breeds a race inferior to the lowest of their neighbors, save only perhaps the Shoshones on their east, no one yet can tell.
When Father Junípero Serra established the Mission of Dolores in 1776, the shores of San Francisco Bay were thickly populated by the Ahwashtees, Ohlones, Altahmos, Romanons, Tuolomos, and other tribes. The good Father found the field unoccupied, for, in the vocabulary of these people, there is found no word for god, angel, or devil; they held no theory of origin or destiny. A ranchería was situated on the spot where now Beach street intersects Hyde street. Were it there now, as contrasted with the dwellings of San Francisco, it would resemble a pig-sty more than a human habitation.
On the Marin and Sonoma shores of the bay were the Tomales and Camimares, the latter numbering, in 1824, ten thousand souls. Marin, chief of the Tomales, was for a long time the terror of the Spaniards, and his warriors were ranked as among the fiercest of the Californians. He was brave, energetic, and possessed of no ordinary intelligence. When quite old he consented to be baptized into the Romish Church.