The Gold Coast

21

They lived here for over seven thousand years, and the only sign they left behind were some piles of shells around the shores of Newport Bay.

This is all we know of them, or think we know:

They came down from the plains east of the Sierra Nevada, wandering members of the Shoshonean tribes, setting up camps and then wandering farther to trade and gather food. When they reached the sea, they stopped and set up camp for good.

They had many languages.

They were what we call hunter-gatherers, and did no cultivating, kept no animals. The men made weapons and hunted with bows and arrows. The women gathered berries and edible roots, and made thistle sage into a porridge; but acorns and pine nuts were their staples. They had to leech the tannin out of their acorn flour, and used a fairly complex set of drains and pits to do it. I wonder who invented the method, and what exactly they thought they were doing, changing this white powder from inedible poison to the daily bread. No doubt it was a sacred act. Everything they did was a sacred act.

They lived in small villages, their dwellings set in circles. In the gentle climate they had little need for protection from the weather, and they slept out except when it rained. Then they slept in simple homes made of willow frames and cattail thatch. The women wore rabbit-pelt skirts, the men animal pelts thrown over the shoulder, the children nothing. Fur cloaks were worn in the winter for warmth.

They traded with tribes from every direction. Obsidian and salt were obtained from the people in the desert. Branch coral came up from Baja. The pelts of sea mammals came from the Channel Island people, who paddled over from the islands ten to a canoe.

They smoked tobacco, and carved stone figures of birds and whales and fish.

The political system was like this: most of the people in a village were family. A headman guided the village with the permission of everyone in it. They changed the headman occasionally.

Sometimes they fought wars, but mostly they were at peace.

They made some of the finest baskets in America, weaving intricate symbolic patterns into them.

They spent part of every day in a sweathouse, pouring water over hot coals and talking in the steam.

In the centers of the villages, they built circular chambers of willow and cattail and brush. The tribes to the north called this sacred sweathouse a yoba, the southern tribes called it a wankech. Here they held their major religious ceremony, the toloache ritual, where the young men drank a jimsonweed liquid, and saw visions, and were initiated as adults. Each sacred chamber held an image of their most important god, Chinigchinich, the one who had named things. The complete skin of a coyote or wildcat was removed from a body, then filled with arrows, feathers, deer horns, lions’ claws, beaks and talons of hawks, and sewn back up, so that it resembled the live animal, except that arrows came out of its mouth, and it wore a feather skirt. During the toloache ritual Chinigchinich spoke to the participants through this image, telling them the secret names of all things, which revealed their innermost identities, and gave humans power over them. And so the young became adults.

This is what we know of them; and we know that their village life went on, year after year, generation after generation, existing in an unobtrusive balance with the land, using all of its many resources, considering every rock and tree and animal a sacred being—for seven thousand years. For seven thousand years!

See them, in your mind’s eye, if you can, living out their lives on that basin crowded with life. Doing the day’s work in the steady sun. Visiting the neighboring village. Courting. Sitting around a fire at dusk. See it.

And then a band of men came by, looking kind of like crabs, wearing shells that they could take off. They could kill from a distance with a noise. They didn’t know any of the languages, but had one of their own. History began.

When these soldiers left, the Franciscans stayed. After Junipero Serra founded San Juan Capistrano, in 1776, and went on up “El Camino Real” to found the rest of the missions, a Fray Gerónimo Boscana stayed behind to help run the mission, and convert the locals to Christianity. Those around the mission were called Juaneños, after the mission; those farther north were called Gabrielinos, after the mission at San Gabriel. Fray Boscana wrote, “I consider these Indians in their endowments like the soul of an infant.”

And so he put them to good Christian work, cultivating the land and building the mission. Within fifty years all of them were dead. And all that went away.