The total is 2,020 persons.
A baptism at any of the four missions constituted a net withdrawal of one person from the native community, since all converts from the immediate vicinity of the missions could be easily kept at the mission establishment or could be recaptured without difficulty if they escaped. Hence the total baptism number must very closely approximate the total population of the area over a period of forty years. But the wild population was undoubtedly decreasing owing to other causes from, say, 1790 to 1830. The presence of the Spanish soldiers or missionaries always introduced diseases and caused disruption of native society to such an extent that the death rate outran the birth rate. Hence the new converts were being drawn from a diminishing population.
Another factor is fugitivism. Intimate contact with the white man for a long period taught the native what to expect in the missions and on the ranches. Consequently there always was a fraction of the Indian community which eluded the best efforts of the missionaries and which made good its escape beyond the periphery of Spanish and Mexican influence. Many of these natives never returned to their original homes. Still other sources of attrition were the kidnaping of adults for labor on the ranches during the 1820's and the promiscuous killing of all sexes and ages during the frequent armed encounters between white men and red men.
Although for the Coast Miwok the above-mentioned causes of loss cannot be assessed numerically with any approach to accuracy, nevertheless their total effect must have been considerable. As a purely arbitrary but essentially reasonable guess we may say that they produced a one-third reduction in the net aboriginal population. Then, if the remaining two-thirds was baptized, the initial value would have exceeded 3,000. This is twice the figure selected by Kroeber (1925, p. 275) who says that "the Coast branch may have numbered 1,500." Yet it is difficult to see how, with a total baptism count of over 2,000, the aboriginal level could have been any lower than 3,000.
COAST MIWOK ... 3,000
THE WAPPO AND THE LAKE MIWOK
These two ethnic groups are combined, together with the small corner of the Wintun living in the lower Napa Valley, in order to complete this survey of the area north of San Francisco Bay.
Direct area comparisons between the territory here concerned and that held by the Pomo and the Coast Miwok can lead to only very tentative conclusions. If we use the region delineated by Barrett (1908) on his large-scale map, the peoples mentioned above occupied approximately 950 square miles of land surface. The density of population was reckoned for the Pomo at 8.0 per square mile and that for the Coast Miwok, with a population estimated at 3,000, comes to 3.4. The equivalent estimates for the Wappo and Lake Miwok would be respectively 7,600 and 3,260. There are no grounds for immediate decision whether either is too high or too low. Consideration of the character of the terrain is not very helpful since the Wappo-Lake Miwok habitat resembled that of the Pomo in some respects and that of the Coast Miwok in others. We must therefore turn to other devices.
In contrast to the Coast Miwok the Lake Miwok and the Wappo have been the subjects of ethnographic studies of direct value to the population problem, particularly those of Barrett (1908) and of Driver (1936). In considering these data, and also those furnished by the mission records, it will be desirable to split the region into six small areas along the lines indicated by the map given by Kroeber in the Handbook (1925, pl. 27, opp. p. 172). Hence we have (1) the Lake Miwok, (2) the Western Wappo, (3) the Northern Wappo, (4) the Central Wappo, (5) the Southern Wappo, and (6) the Wintun of Napa Valley. As a starting point we may select the Western Wappo.