THE CALIFORNIAN PENINSULA. ‘88 5 
them by the Californian and foreign militia, but they had also quarrels among 
themselves.* Yet these causes were less effective in their destruction than the 
loathsome diseases and ulcers by which they were visited, and amone the four 
hundred that now remain, only a few are free from the general malady and 
enjoy the blessing of sound health. 
On the other hand, be that grace of Heaven a thousand times praised, which, 
in our day also, inspires among the members of the Catholic priesthood, and 
especially in the Society of Jesus, men of superior courage who, without the 
slightest self-interest and for the sole purpose of propagating the Christian faith, 
not only brave all dangers to which they are exposed in wild countries and 
amidst barbarous tribes, but who also willingly give up their lives when occa- 
sion demands such sacrifices! For besides these two Californian missionaries, 
‘many others belonging to the same society have suffered death in the course 
of this century, while engaged in the conversion of heathen nations. Among 
the great number of these victims, I will only mention Father Thomas Tello, 
a Spaniard, and Father Henry Ruhen, a German from Westphalia, both Jesuits, 
who were killed as late as 1751, by the mutinous Pimas, on the other side of 
the Californian gulf. With Father Ruhen, I had crossed the Atlantic ocean a 
year before, and we made also in company the journey overland as far as the 
Pimeria, where he closed his days six months after his arriyal. 
CHAPTER VII.—THEIR TREATMENT OF THE SICK.—FUNERAL CUSTOMS. 
With all their poor diet and hardships, the Californians are seldom sick. 
They are in general strong, hardy, and much healthier than the many’thousands 
who live daily in abundance and on the choicest fare that the skill of Parisian 
cooks can prepare. It is very probable that most Californians would attain a 
considerable age, after having safely passed through the dangers of their child- 
hood; but they are immoderate in eating, running, bathing, and other matters, 
and thus doubtless shorten their existence. Excepting consumption and that 
disease which was brought from America to Spain and Naples, and from thence 
spread over various countries, they are but little subject to the disorders com- 
mon in Kurope; podagra, apoplexy, dropsy, cold and petechial fevers being 
, almost unknown among them. There is no word in their language to express 
sickness in general or any particular disease. ‘To be sick,” they signify by 
the phrase atemba-tze, which means “to lie down on the ground,” though all 
those in good health may be seen in that position the whole day, if they are 
not searching for food or otherwise engaged. When I asked a Californian what 
ailed him, he usually said, “I have a pain in my chest,” without giving further 
particulars. 
For the small-pox the Californians are, like other Americans, indebted to 
Europeans, and this disease assumes a most pestilential character among them. 
A piece of cloth which a Spaniard, just recovered from the small-pox, had given 
to a Californian communicated, in the year 1763, the disease to a small mission, 
and in three months more than a hundred individuals died, not to speak of many 
others who had been infected, but were saved by the unwearied pains and care 
of the missionary. Not one of them would have escaped the malady, had not 
the majority run away from the neighborhood of the hospital as soon as they 
discovered the contagious nature of the disease. 
In the month of April of the same year, 1763, a young and strong woman 
of my mission was seized with a very peculiar disorder, consisting in eructa- 
* This is the only instance in which the author alludes to wars among the natives in the 
body of his book, though the first appendix contains, on page 328, the following remark in 
refutation of a passage in the French translation of Venegas’s work: ‘‘ All that is said in 
reference to the warfare of the Californians is wrong. In their former wars they merely 
attacked the enemy unexpectedly during the night, or from an ambush, and killed as many 
as they could, without order, previous declaration of war, or any ceremonies whatever.” 
25 § 
