MISSIONS AND MISSION INDIANS OF CALIFORNIA. 469 



nians ; though there was a multiplicity of tribes and an abundant 

 population, and hence ample cause for intertribal strife, their 

 warfare was in keeping with the rest of their character, and had 

 in it little of the aggressive fierceness which characterized other 

 Indians to the eastward. No better evidence of their pusillani- 

 mous spirits need be required than their abject submission to 

 mission rule, enforced as it was at each mission by the presence 

 of two or three priests and only a half-dozen armed soldiers. 



■ m 

 - - .. 





Fig. 2.— Ruins of Branch Mission op Pala, twenty-five miles east of San Luis Ret; 



established in 1816. 



Though the natives of southern California, as the result of living 

 under rather similar conditions of environment, conformed in a 

 general way in physical appearance and in their mode of life, it 

 must not be supposed that there were not very many distinct 

 tribes which differed in many minor particulars. Within the mis- 

 sion area there were scores, if not hundreds, of tribes — just how 

 many we can not tell — and they were divided among no fewer than 

 nine distinct linguistic families. Perhaps the linguistic differ- 

 ences that characterized these tribes formed the most remarkable 

 point of distinction, and it is doubtful if anywhere else in the 

 world within the same area have there ever been observed so many 

 distinct families of language and so many dialects as in Cali- 

 fornia. As Lamanon remarks, "It is the difficulty of learning 

 all the languages that consoles the missionaries for their not 

 knowing any." In point of fact, the language changed dialecti- 

 cally every ten or fifteen miles, while totally distinct linguistic 

 families succeeded each other in bewildering profusion. 



The California tribes were in no sense nomadic. That to 

 some extent they changed their place of abode with the season 

 is doubtless true, and in winter the tribes living immediately on 



