MARTIN A. BAUMHOFF
[INTRODUCTION]
In 1910 C. Hart Merriam, already well known as a naturalist, came to California and began the study of California ethnography which was to occupy him for the rest of his life. Almost every year from then until his death in 1942 Merriam spent about six months in the field, talking to Indians and recording their memories of aboriginal times. All this field work resulted in an immense collection of data on the California Indians, most of which has never been published (see Merriam's bibliography in Merriam, 1955, pp. 227-229).
In 1950 the greater part of Merriam's field notes was deposited at the University of California, with the intention of making them available for study and publication. One volume of papers has already appeared (Merriam, 1955), and the present study is part of a continuing program.
The California Athabascans were selected as the first group for study at the suggestion of A. L. Kroeber, the reason being that the Athabascans have been and still remain one of the least known aboriginal groups in the State. This is not because they were conquered early and their culture dissipated, as is true of the Mission Indians; there were scarcely any whites in the California Athabascan area before the 1850's. Indeed, as late as the 1920's and '30's there were many good Athabascan informants still available. The reason for the hiatus in our knowledge lies in an accident in the history of ethnology rather than in the history of California.
The early work among the California Athabascans was done by Pliny Earle Goddard. Goddard began his studies of the Athabascans in 1897 at the Hoopa Indian Reservation, where he was a lay missionary. He stayed there until 1900, when he went to Berkeley to work for his doctorate in linguistics under Benjamin Ide Wheeler, President of the University of California. Between 1900 and 1909 Goddard was associated with the University as student and professor and during this time he visited the Athabascans periodically, until he had worked with virtually all the groups considered in this paper.
During this same period A. L. Kroeber was engaged in gathering material for his classic Handbook of California Indians. Because of the scarcity of ethnographers in those years Kroeber could not afford the time to work in the Athabascan area and duplicate Goddard's investigations. Kroeber did study the Hupa and the Kato at either end of the Athabascan area but, except for a hurried trip through the region in 1902, he did not work with the other groups, and the responsibility for the ethnographic field work therefore devolved upon Goddard.
Goddard, however, was not primarily an ethnographer but a linguist, and he directed his chief efforts toward linguistic investigations. He has published an impressive body of Athabascan texts and linguistic analyses but, except for his Life and Culture of the Hupa (1903a), almost nothing on the culture of the Athabascans.
The net result is that the California Athabascans are virtually unknown, and Merriam's fresh data provide an opportunity to piece together the available evidence.