72 ETHNO-BOTANY OF THE COAHUILLA INDIANS 



On the other hand, when the Spaniards discovered New Mexico, 

 they found the Pueblo Indians cultivating maize, beans, and squashes. 

 The Cocopahs and lower Colorado tribes are described by Don Jos 

 Cortez, 1 in 1799, as raising an abundance of the above vegetables. So 

 did the Mojaves, Chemehuevis, and Yumas when first seen by Ameri 

 can troops and explorers. On the banks of the Colorado irrigation 

 is not needed, neither is any preparation of the soil. The stream 

 simply overflows and leaves rich, damp, alluvial strips along its sides. 

 All that is necessary here is to press a seed down into the mud and 

 leave it alone. In places such as this agriculture will begin if any 

 where. Lieutenant Michler reported in 1851 that the Yumas even cul 

 tivated the &quot; seed grass &quot; for food, preparing the seed afterwards by 

 grinding it in a mortar of mesquite wood and kneading the meal into 

 cakes to be dried in the sun. 2 This cultivation was also carried on far 

 out on the Colorado desert along the channel of the New river, not 

 many miles north from the Hardy s Colorado where the Cocopahs still 

 raise abundant crops on land submerged each summer by the overflow. 

 Along the New river lagoons are village sites where many Indians 

 once lived on the crops they produced, but which have now been aban 

 doned, owing to the increasing aridity of the desert. Dr. Veatch, in 

 1857, entering the desert here from the California side, stopped at a 

 lagoon not far from the Salton basin, where his guide, a Diegefio 

 Indian, told him 



that this secluded spot was his early home. He was born here and the tribe 

 he now rules over here had their lodges and lived in abundance on the maize, 

 melons, and frijoles that he described as growing here with a luxuriousness 

 unknown to any place away from the so-called desert. 



These same facts are recorded by a correspondent in the Alta Califor 

 nia of November, 1858, and have been also related to me by Diegefio 

 Indians now living in Jacumba pass, just south of the American 

 boundary line in Lower California. Their retirement from the 

 desert seems to have been about seventy years ago, and was due to an 

 interruption of the overflow into the desert of the Colorado, which was 

 not regularly resumed until 1849. It would now be possible to resume 

 life once more along the New river channel, if there were Indians to 

 make the move. Now, it is only a few miles north from here, about 

 the base of the San Jacinto mountains that the Coahuillas have long 

 lived. Here they have cultivated maize and frijoles for certainly a 



1 Report, date 1799, translated in Pac. R. R. Nar., Report on Indian Tribes p. 117. 



2 EMORY, Mexican Boundary Survey, Vol. I, p. 112. 



