2. The seaboard of Oregon and California is a succession of short, isolated valleys, abounding in fibrous plants, fruit, and fish. These are excellent conditions for the formation of little isolated ethnic groups; thus it happens that the Indians of this coast are divided into twenty-four or twenty-six distinct linguistic families.
Of these the principal, as we go from north to south, are: the Copehs of the right bank of the Sacramento; the Pujunnas or Pooyoonas of the left bank of the same water-way; the Kulanapans to the north of San Francisco; the Costanos to the south of that town; the Salinas, who formerly inhabited the valley bearing the same name, but of whom there remain but a dozen individuals; the Maripos or Yokuts (145 individuals) to the east of the last-named tribe; the Chumashes around the mission of Santa-Barbara, 35° N. latitude, of whom scarcely two score individuals still speak the language of their fathers; the Hupas, very primitive in their habits. Among most of these populations are found vestiges of the ancient custom of tattooing and the use of garments fashioned from vegetable fibres.
It is probably in this group that we must include the Yumas of the lower valley of the Colorado (Arizona) and of the Californian peninsula, of whom the principal tribes are as follows: the Mohaves (Fig. [4]) and the Yumas properly so called, in the valley of the Colorado; the Maricopas of the valley of the Gila; the Soris or Seris in Mexico, opposite to the Californian peninsula; lastly, in this peninsula itself the Cochimis in the north and the Periquès, now extinct, at the southern extremity of the peninsula; there is not, however, any direct evidence that these last spoke a Yuma tongue; further, they burnt their dead while all the other Yumas buried theirs. The population of lower California was very scattered (10,000 individuals in all); they gained a miserable existence from hunting and fishing, and could not even make canoes. To-day but few are left. To judge from the bones gathered at the extreme end of the Californian peninsula, the Indians who dwelt there (the ancestors of the Periquès?) were if anything of short stature; by this characteristic, as well as by their dolichocephaly, they would appear then to be allied to the Palæo-American sub-race.[616]
3. The name Pueblo Indians is sometimes given to the populations inhabiting the caves hollowed out of the sides of the deep cañons and the “pueblos” of the warm and arid table-lands of Arizona, New Mexico, and the adjacent parts of Utah, California, and Mexico.
Some of these populations, the Moquis (2000) for example, belong to the Shoshone linguistic family,[617] others perhaps to the Pima stock (see p. [535]); but there are three small groups of these cliff-dwellers whose languages present no analogy with one another nor with any other dialect. These are the Keres (3,560 individuals) and the Tanos (3,200 individuals), both in the upper basin of the Rio Grande, and the Zuñis, who to the number of 1,600 occupy the “pueblo” of the same name in the west of New Mexico.
In spite of the diversity of their dialects all the cliff-dwellers have certain physical characters in common, such as stature above the average, brachycephaly, etc.[618] It must not be forgotten that the cliff-dwellers are surrounded on all sides by immigrant populations of the Athapascan stock (see p. [524]).
III. The Indians of Mexico[619] and Central America may be divided, from the ethnographical point of view, into two great groups: the Sonoran-Aztecs, inhabiting the north of Mexico or what is improperly called the Anahuac plateau; and the Central Americans of Southern Mexico and the states situated more to the south as far as the Costa Rica republic.[620]