The Merriam files, deposited at the Department of Anthropology of the University of California, contain information on each of the tribes of California, some of it being information gathered by Merriam himself, the rest clippings and quotations from various historic and ethnographic sources. The primary and secondary materials are easily distinguished, since Merriam gave scrupulous citations to his sources.
Merriam's own data consist of word lists, ethnogeographical material, and random notes on various aspects of native culture. I have not used his word lists, since their usefulness is primarily linguistic and I am not competent to perform the necessary linguistic analysis, but all the random ethnographic notes which he recorded for the Athabascan groups are here included under the discussion of the appropriate tribes.
Most of the Merriam Athabascan material is geographic, consisting of lists of villages and place names, of descriptions and lengthy discussions of tribal boundaries. Obviously Merriam attempted to gather a complete file of this sort of information, and he was largely successful. His work provides a good basis for establishing boundaries and for locating tribelets and villages.
Another important source of information, serving the same purpose, is the Goddard material. Evidently Goddard very much enjoyed the long horseback trips he made with an informant, who could point out the village sites, landmarks, and other points of interest of his native territory. This information, carefully recorded by Goddard, has proved extremely valuable in the present work, the more so since it represents firsthand observation.
Goddard's ethnogeographic work for three of the California Athabascan groups has already been published (1914a; 1923a; 1924). Besides this, the present writer has been fortunate enough to have access to Goddard's unpublished notes, which contain information on several hundred additional villages in the area. These notes were in the possession of Dr. Elsie Clews Parsons, Goddard's literary executor, and on her death they were sent to the University of California by Dr. Gladys Reichard. They remained in the files of the University of California Museum of Anthropology until their use in the present work.
This unpublished material of Goddard's consists of a group of file cards, on each of which is typed the name, location, and any other pertinent data for a single village. Some of the lists are accompanied by maps, showing precise location of the villages. In the lists for which there are no maps but only verbal descriptions of the sites, the township, range, and quarter section coördinates are given. The township and range coördinates have been changed since Goddard's time, in accordance with the more accurate surveys of the last thirty years, but county maps of the appropriate period provide a perfectly adequate way of locating Goddard's sites within a few hundred yards.
It is clear, on the basis of internal evidence, that there is or was more Goddard material than is now accessible to the present author. For the Kato, for instance, Goddard says that he recorded more than fifty villages (Goddard, 1909, p. 67); all that remain in his notes are two village cards numbered 51 and 52 respectively. There may also be some data, once recorded but now lost, from the Lassik, Nongatl, and Shelter Cove Sinkyone. I have communicated with the American Museum of Natural History, where Goddard was a member of the staff, and with Indiana University, where some of his manuscripts are deposited, but neither of these institutions has any knowledge of the material in question.
The Merriam and Goddard material, taken together, provides a fair amount of information on the geography of the California Athabascan groups. We are now in the position of knowing a great deal about the location of the tribes, tribelets, and villages of these people, while we know very little about their way of life, except what can be gained by inference from the surrounding groups.
The author's thanks are due to Dr. A. L. Kroeber and Dr. R. F. Heizer, who gave their full coöperation throughout the preparation of the present paper. Dr. Henry Sheffé was kind enough to advise on the statistics used in the section on population.