A NEW ORIGINAL VERSION OF BOSCANA'S HISTORI- 

 CAL ACCOUNT OF THE SAN JUAN CAPLSTRANO 

 INDIANS OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA 



By JOHN P. HARRINGTON, 



Ethnologist, Bureau of American Ethnology 

 (With Two Plates) 



When I first started to study the California Indians, I looked about 

 to see what had been recorded concerning- them in early times, that is, 

 during the period of Spanish occupation. I found that only one ac- 

 count of California Indians, or indeed of Indians of the Southwest, 

 worthy of being called an ethnological treatise had survived from that 

 period, namely Father Jeronimo Boscana's " Chinigchinich ", which 

 tells in several penetrating but all too short chapters of the life of the 

 Indians of the San Juan Capistrano Mission on the coast of southern 

 California. There was comparatively rich Spanish archival material 

 to be found, consisting of chronicles of voyages and land expeditions, 

 church records, etc., but no other good description of a tribe and its 

 customs, although certain writings on Lower California Indians con- 

 stituted the nearest second to the Boscana. And the Boscana treatise 

 was accessible only in a rather inadequate English translation published 

 by Alfred Robinson as an appendix to his Life in California.^ Persis- 

 tent attempts made in this country and abroad toward locating the all- 

 important Spanish original all resulted in failure. It was therefore a 

 gala day in my life, unparalleled by any other, when I recently dis- 

 covered the long lost Boscana original. 



The manuscript proves to be even more valuable than was expected, 

 since it is an 1822 variant version of the Historical Account that Rob- 

 inson translated, each version containing certain important data that 

 the other omits. It consists of 58 octavo pages written in a rather neat 



^ Giinigchinich : a historical account of the origin, customs, and traditions 

 of the Indians at the missionary establishment of St. Juan Capistrano, Alta 

 CaHfornia; called the Acagchemem nation . . . , by the Reverend Father Friar 

 Geronimo Boscana . . . New York, 1846. For a reprint of this work see 

 Boscana, Geronimo, 1776-1831, Chinigchinich (Chi-ni'ch-nich), a revised and 

 annotated version of Alfred Robinson's translation of Father Geronimo Bos- 

 cana's historical account, edited by Phil Townsend Hanna, annotations by John P. 

 Harrington, foreword by Frederick Webb Hodge, Santa Ana, Calif., 1933. 



Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections Vol. 92, N o. 4 



