The river received its rather lugubrious name at the hands of Captain Moraga, who led the first expedition up the Sacramento and San Joaquín rivers. In his diary, Moraga says that the river tribes fought against those of the Sierra for possession of the salmon in the stream, and that in one battle as many as three thousand were said to have been killed and left on the field. A great number of skulls, relics of this bloody conflict, were found by Moraga scattered along the creek bed, and caused him to give it the name of Las Calaveras. We find in Fremont a corroborating reference to the salmon as a cause of dissension among the Indians of that region: “This fish had a large share in supporting the Indians, who raised nothing, but lived on what nature gave. A ‘salmon water,’ as they named it, was a valuable possession to a tribe or village, and jealously preserved as an inheritance.”
SHORE OF LAKE TAHOE.
“ ... pearl among all lakes.”
Particular interest was aroused in the Indian relics of this county some years ago by the finding of the celebrated “Calaveras skull,” purporting to have been taken from the Tertiary deposit, a stratum in which no human remains had ever before been discovered. A close examination into the circumstances, however, caused scientists to look with great doubt upon the assertion that the skull had been taken from the Tertiary deposit. In the Handbook of American Indians, published by the Smithsonian Institute, the following reference appears: “Remains of aborigines are plentiful in this county, embedded in ancient river gravels, from which gold was washed. By some scientists these remains were thought to belong to the Tertiary Age, but their resemblance to the modern Indian makes this doubtful. The Calaveras skull, still preserved in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, at Cambridge, Massachusetts, was said to have come from the gravels of Bald Mountain, at a depth of 130 feet, but there are good reasons for suspecting that it was derived from one of the limestone caves so numerous in that region.”
TUOLUMNE
Tuolumne is the name of the county in the Sierras just east of Calaveras, and of the river which rises at the base of the Sierra Nevadas, and flows into the San Joaquín, twenty-five miles south of Stockton, a part of its course running through a deep canyon.
Here we have another of the river names ending in umne, already discussed under the heading of Cosumne. As stated before, umne probably means “people of,” and it is held by some authorities that the meaning of Tuolumne is “people of the stone houses, or caves.” Bancroft maintains this theory, holding that the name is a corruption of talmalamne, “a group of stone huts or caves, or collection of wigwams.” Objection has been raised to this theory on the ground that the Indians of California were not cave-dwellers, but universally lived in flimsy huts made of sticks and grass. This objection is cleared away in some measure by a very interesting paragraph in the diary of Padre Pedro Muñoz, who accompanied the Gabriel Moraga expedition of 1806 into that region. The passage in question relates: “On the morning of this day, the expedition went toward the east along the banks of the river, and having traveled about six leagues, we came upon a village called Tautamne. This village is situated on some steep precipices, inaccessible on account of their rough rocks. The Indians live in their sótanos (cellars or caves); they go up and come down by means of a weak stick, held up by one of themselves while the one who descends slips down. They did not wish to come down from their hiding-places, and for me the ascent was too difficult. This village probably has about two hundred souls, judging by the considerable mass which we repeatedly made out among the rocks and corridors [or ledges], in the manner of balconies, which the precipice made.” This meeting with the cave-dwellers occurred at a spot about six leagues from the Guadalupe River, after the expedition had left the Merced. It is not, of course, to be inferred from this circumstance that the California Indians were genuine “cliff dwellers,” but rather that, at least in the mountainous parts of the state, they may have had the habit of taking refuge in natural caves from inclement weather or attacks of enemies.