CHAPTER I. 



LINGUISTIC AND TRIBAL AFFINITIES OF THE COAHUILLA INDIANS. 



4. A systematic account of the Indians of southern California has 

 never yet been published. The work of Mr. Stephen Powers, The 

 Indians of California? considered no tribes south of the Santa Inez 

 mountains on the coast, or the San Joaquin valley in the interior. The 

 Indian tribes of California, south of these limits, fall into three 

 divisions : those of the Santa Barbara channel and islands, covering 

 the whole coast of Ventura county ; and two more groups occupying 

 the lower portions of the state. 



Any study of the first group must now be confined to the written 

 accounts concerning them and to the numerous archaeological remains, 

 since these Indians are either wholly extinct or mingled with the 

 present mestizo population. Of the latter two groups, however, sev- 

 eral thousand 2 are still living in some thirty different villages or small 

 reservations in San Bernadino, Riverside, and San Diego counties, and 

 are open to ethnographic investigations. 



5. The habitable portion of southern California is divided geo- 

 graphically by low mountain ranges into a number of spacious valleys. 

 In these fertile tracts, at that time well populated by Indians, the 

 Franciscan friars, under the direction of the Spanish government, a 

 century ago established their missions. Furthermost south, and the 

 first to be established, was the mission of San Diego (1769). It formed 

 a center for reaching the numerous bands of Indians about the bay 

 and scattered southward into Lower California, eastward to the desert, 

 and for thirty or forty miles northward on the hills and mesas of the 

 Coast Range. Forty miles north of San Diego, at the foot of the 

 beautiful valley of the San Luis Rey river, was established, in 1798, the 

 mission of San Luis Rey de Francia. Twenty-five miles up the stream, 

 near its headwaters, was the substation of Pala, in a narrow, hill- 

 surrounded valley. This branch was to reach better the Indians living 

 back from the coast in the fastnesses of inner canons and valleys. 



Near the coast, twenty-five miles north of San Luis Rey, was San 

 Juan Capistrano, commanding the populous valley of the Santa Ana. 



i" Contributions to North American Ethnology," Vol. Ill, Washington, 1877. 



2 According to a recent government report, 3,481. (Report of the Commissioner of Indian 

 Affairs, for 1894.) 



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