[1] These treaties seem to have been concluded without proper authorization from the Federal government and were never ratified by the Senate. They were incorporated in Senate Confidential Documents, June, 1852, and remained unpublished for half a century. Finally they were ordered printed in 1905 as a Senate Reprint and are now available under the title of "18 California Treaties."
[2] This village list and all others herein referred to under the name of Merriam are part of the extensive file of personal manuscript material collected by the late C. Hart Merriam and deposited, through the kindness of his heirs, with the Department of Anthropology of the University of California, Berkeley. Merriam's village lists were very carefully compiled and for many regions of the state cannot be duplicated in any publications which have hitherto appeared.
[3] I am indebted to Professor Edward W. Gifford, of the Department of Anthropology of the University of California, Berkeley, for the privilege of examining his list of Central Miwok villages, which was obtained some years ago through an informant and has remained unpublished.
[4] Merriam's manuscript entitled "Yokuts List" mentions a report from Lt. N. H. McLean, dated July 12, 1853, to H. J. Wessels, on file in "Old Files Division," Adjutant General's Office, Washington, no. H369. As far as I am aware, this letter has never been quoted elsewhere.
THE ABORIGINAL POPULATION
In order to estimate the aboriginal population of the San Joaquin Valley it is necessary to rely very heavily on the accounts furnished by the colonial Spanish and Mexicans. These were primarily ecclesiastics and military men who entered the territory for purposes of exploration, to seek new converts to the missions, or to chastise stock raiders. The more responsible of these left circumstantial and, as a rule, fairly accurate narratives and diaries. Unless there is in a particular case some reason for doubt, their statements may be accorded considerable confidence.
At the same time two circumstances often render the interpretation of the data derived from these documents difficult. The first is the lack of consistent designations for places. During the process of opening up the area it was inevitable that rivers and villages should be assigned different names by one explorer after another and that the same name should be applied to more than one locality. The second is that during the early phases of exploration some localities were visited repeatedly, whereas others were overlooked perhaps entirely. Hence the information available to us is very uneven; it permits us to achieve a reasonably clear idea of the population of one region but leaves another almost completely blank. As a result extrapolation by area is almost unavoidable.
It must also be constantly borne in mind that the Spanish records themselves do not give us an absolutely undistorted picture of aboriginal conditions. It is very evident from the reports of the earliest official pioneers, like Garcés in 1776 and Martin in 1804, that from 1770 onward and perhaps even before white men had straggled into the valley and had consorted with the natives. There is reason to believe that these unknown interlopers may have introduced diseases which adversely affected the population and may have initiated a process of general social disruption. The best we can do is get as close to the prehistoric condition as the records allow.
Two other demographic consequences arise from this very early white contact. In the first place, the documentary record, if we ignore Garcés for the moment, runs nearly continuously from 1804 to approximately 1840. During this long period an uninterrupted change was going on among the native population: the population was continually decreasing. Hence later reports tend to deviate from earlier ones, and indeed may show an entirely new state of affairs arising within a very few years. In the second place, the deterioration in certain areas took place so rapidly in the first part of the nineteenth century that any information secured from informants alive since 1900 is completely useless. Unless very good documentary evidence is available for such areas, there is no recourse but to fall back on the method of extrapolation and area comparisons.