M ETHNO-BOTANY OF THE COAHUILLA INDIANS 



Already, in 1861, Mr. Alexander Taylor wrote of these letters of 

 Mr. Reid that they formed the &quot; only account of the Indians of that 

 country of any value,&quot; &quot; now out of print,&quot; and that &quot; this history of Mr. 

 Reid s is accounted of great value among the ethnologists of Europe 

 and America, who have repeatedly sent to this country for it without 

 avail, as no complete copies of it are now to be had in the state.&quot; 1 In 

 these letters is contained a vocabulary of the Indians about San Gabriel, 

 containing, including twenty-four numerals, about fifty words. Other 

 words and expressions scattered through these letters bring up the 

 linguistic material afforded by this writer to about seventy words. 



In 1857, Lieutenant Whipple, in charge of the surveying party for 

 a United States Pacific railroad, collected some Indian vocabularies, 

 which had much to do with settling the linguistic affiliations of the 

 Indians of southern California, and which are still among the best col 

 lections ever published from these localities. While still in Arizona, 

 at the junction of Bill Williams fork with the Colorado river, Lieu 

 tenant Whipple s party encountered the Chemehuevi Indians, whose 

 place in the treatment of the Coahuilla nation will be noted later. 

 These Indians Whipple considered &quot; a band of the great Pai Ute 



nation At night the chief furnished us with a vocabulary of his 



language. He drew also a sketch of this country, giving the Pai Ute 

 names of tribes and the rivers where they dwell.&quot; 2 This vocabulary 

 contains about 175 words, and is presumably the first ever published 

 of the Chemehuevi Indians. After crossing the Mojave desert and 

 entering the inhabited part of southern California, Mr. Whipple s party 

 stopped for a day at the Cucomonga ranch, about forty-five miles east 

 of Los Angeles. Here there was a rancheria of Coahuilla Indians, 

 apparently peons of the ranch. &quot; With them,&quot; says the narrative, &quot; is 

 an old Indian, dressed in an entirely new suit, in the style of a Cali 

 fornia ranchero, and he professes to have come from Jose Antonio, the 



general-in-chief of the tribe As he spoke Spanish we were 



enabled to obtain a vocabulary of his native tongue.&quot; This vocabulary 

 of the Coahuilla language, comprising about 150 words, is much the 

 best that has ever been published. The words and the pronunciations, 

 so far as I can judge, are in almost every case identical with the speech 

 of the Coahuillas at the present time. The words for parts of the body 

 in Mr. Whipple s collection have all the first-person possessive pro 

 noun, ne, affixed, a thing that almost invariably happens in getting 



1 California Farmer, Vol. XIV, p. 146. 



2 LIEUTENANT A. W. WHIPPLE, Report of Explorations for a Railway Route near to the 

 Thirty-fifth parallel of North Latitude from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean. Washing 

 ton, 1853-54. Part I, &quot; Itinerary,&quot; p. in. 



