The Aboriginal Population of the San Joaquin Valley, California

by Sherburne Friend Cook

The principal Spanish accounts upon which we must rely include a few which have been published. Most of them, however, are to be found in manuscript form in the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Some of them were translated for an unpublished manuscript by the Late Professor Herbert I. Priestley and several were translated for Dr. C. H. Merriam. Merriam's translations are on file in his manuscript collection. The citations to these accounts, published and unpublished, are given in the manuscript section of the Bibliography. In this text they are referred to, without further citation, by the author's name and date.

THE TULARE LAKE BASIN

We may commence detailed consideration of the aboriginal population with the Tulare Lake Basin, which was inhabited in 1800 by three Yokuts tribes, the Wowol, Tachi, and Chunut (see maps [1] and [2], area 2). The first official visitor to the area was Father Juan Martin who entered the valley in 1804 in search of new mission sites. He found the principal village of the Wowol, which he called Bubal. This rancheria, he said, contained not less than 200 children. It was visited again in 1806 by Moraga, who found 400 inhabitants. Eight years later Father Cabot passed the site and found 700 people. Subsequently, it was visited by Ortega in 1815 and Estudillo in 1819 but these writers gave no population figures. Since no other village was ever recorded by name in the territory of the tribe, it is safe to assume that there was no other, at least of permanence and reasonably large size.

Gifford and Schenck (1926), in their discussion of the history of the southern valley, conclude that because the village was reported as having 400 persons in 1806 and 700 in 1814 there was a real increase in population during the intervening eight years. This they ascribe to fugitives from the coastal missions who entered the valley as refugees. The opinion expressed by these authors may serve as the starting point for discussion of certain general problems which are encountered in attempting to estimate the aboriginal population of the valley.

In 1804 Martin saw 200 children. If we knew the ratio of children to adults, we could easily compute the total number of inhabitants. The age of "children" was variously estimated in colonial New Spain, indeed all the way from seven to fifteen years. The early California missionaries used approximately fourteen years for males and twelve for females. In 1793, however, the system was standardized for doctrinal purposes. Indians, both gentile and converted, were designated as children if they were under ten years, i.e., in the age bracket from 0 to 9 inclusive. Hence all the clergy conformed to the method in so far as they were able and unless they specified otherwise.

There are certain data available which permit us to estimate rather closely what proportion of the population in California should be regarded as falling within the category of children. Within the missions the annual censuses enable us to compute with accuracy that the individuals under the age of ten years, between the dates 1782 and 1832 averaged 21.4 per cent of the total population (Cook, 1940). This value is relatively high and may not conform to gentile, or aboriginal, conditions. With regard to these we have information from archaeological sources. In the Museum of Anthropology at Berkeley there are several hundred skeletons excavated from habitation sites in central and northern California, the ages of which have been determined and which constitute a fair cross section of the native population during the centuries immediately preceding invasion by the white man. Of these skeletons 22.6 per cent represent persons dying under the age of twenty years, and perhaps 10 or 15 per cent persons dying under the age of ten.

Further light is shed by the baptism records of the missions San Jose and Santa Clara (these are discussed in greater detail in a later paragraph) which list gentile baptisms according to village and distinguish between men, women, and children. In the two missions, from approximately 1805 to 1833 there were baptized a total of 5,217 persons from villages in the valley region. Of these 930, or 17.8 per cent were children and 1,939, or 37.1 per cent were listed as men. The sex ratio is 0.826. Evidently the natives captured and brought to the missions do not give us a completely true picture of the composition of the aboriginal population, despite the large sample at our disposal. It is highly probable that (1) the natural sex ratio was nearly unity and (2) many of the men were killed in warfare or escaped the clutches of the convert hunters. Therefore we are justified in setting the number of men equal to that of the women. If we do this, the population represented by the 5,217 conversions was actually 5,626, of which men and women each constituted 41.8 per cent and children 16.4 per cent.

Finally, we have figures from Zalvidea (MS, 1806) with respect to villages at the extreme southern end of the San Joaquin Valley. (These are discussed subsequently in connection with the population of that area.) At two of these, after adjusting for disturbed sex ratio, he found respectively 13.5 and 9.6 per cent children. However, Zalvidea's account states specifically that in these villages he carries the age of childhood only through the seventh year. If he had counted as children those under ten years of age, the percentages would naturally have been higher.

The data just set forth render it abundantly clear that the children constituted between 10 and 20 per cent of the aboriginal population. Since the exact value can never be ascertained, it is wholly reasonable to establish the arbitrary figure of 15 per cent. If we apply this factor to Bubal the result is not less than an aggregate of 1,333 persons, much greater than the value set by Moraga in 1806.

With respect to the suggestion of Gifford and Schenck that the number of inhabitants of Bubal had been augmented between 1806 and 1814 by refugees from the missions the following points may be noted. In the first place, it has been possible to show (Cook, 1940) by means of the mission censuses that in 1815 the cumulative total of fugitives reported by all the missions in the colony amounted to 1,927 persons. Of these a great many who ran away in the earlier years were deceased. Many never went to the valley at all and the remainder were distributed from Sacramento to Bakersfield. It is highly unlikely that as many as 300 would be concentrated at one village such as Bubal. In the second place, the majority of the fugitives who did reach the village or its vicinity were former inhabitants of the locality who were merely returning to their old homes rather than coastal Indians, who would have constituted real refugees. On the whole, therefore, and this conclusion applies throughout the valley, true increase of population by immigration of foreign fugitives was negligible.