John Bruno Romero is a descendant of the Chu-Mash, once the largest and most powerful of Indian tribes, whose domain included all the islands along the California Coast, and, on the mainland, from the San Fernando Mission northwest to San Francisco and north-northwest to the High Sierras.

Mr. Romero was born in Santa Barbara, where he studied Spanish and Latin at the Franciscan School Mission, and attended the Sherman Institute, where he was a student of English and scientific subjects. He was later graduated from the Detroit Veterinarian College.

At one time, the Cahuilla Indians controlled the lands of California southward to the end of what is now the Mexican peninsula. When the Chu-Mash tribe, in its later years, had dwindled in numbers, Mr. Romero joined the Cahuilla tribe “to help fight the United States Government for our land treaty rights.” Today this tribe is the second oldest in California and the strongest in membership.

The author’s interests are wide. He is a director of Indian Affairs for seven Southern California counties, and while his principal hobby is medicinal botany, he is also a collector of minerals, stamps, books, and fossils, and dabbles in taxidermy. Fond of children, he has adopted and reared ten orphans. At one time or another, he has worked as a surveyor, explorer, geologist, and antho-botanist, and his home is a veritable treasure trove of interesting archaeological, geological, and botanical specimens which he has collected in the mountains and deserts of Southern California and Arizona—in sections where the white man has seldom traveled.

In 1933 he discovered, in the Trabuco Hills, in Orange County, near Los Angeles, the skeleton of a mastodon, one of the few uncovered in Southern California. Paleontologists at the Los Angeles Museum made varying estimates of the age of the bones, ranging from ten thousand to a million years.

In 1937, when the author was a junior geologist at the Santa Ana Museum, he deciphered the hieroglyphics inscribed on some rocks found on the Indian prayer grounds at the peak of a volcanic vent in La Piomosa range in Arizona, which have been instrumental in providing historical information about the life of the early Indians in the Southwest. The inscriptions revealed the location of food and water in the surrounding country and primitive conceptions of the supernatural.

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