220. THE PATWIN. 
various excavations. Senor Pina, who was in the country ten years before 
the gold discovery, states that on Puta Creek the Indians lived in multi- 
tudes. They had an almost boundless extent of plains whereon to hunt 
game and gather grass-seed; before the streams were muddied they swarmed 
with untold myriads of salmon; and the broad tule swamps in winter were 
noisy with the quacking and screaming flocks. 
In addition to the modes of gathering and preparing food heretofore 
described the Patwin had some different processes. On the plains they 
gathered the seed of a plant called yellow- blossom (Ranunculus californicus), 
crushed it into flour with stones, then put it into baskets with coals of fire 
and agitated it until it was cooked and burned pot-black, when they made 
it into pinole. The Korusi and probably others had an ingenious way of 
capturing wild ducks. They set decoy-ducks, carved and colored very life- 
like, and when the living birds approached they rose from concealment and 
scared them in such a manner that they flew into nets stretched above the 
water. ‘The Suisun fashioned clumsy rafts of tule with which they cruised 
about in pursuit of water-fowl. When wild clover came into blossom they 
frequently ate it so greedily as to become distressfully inflated with gas, (a 
condition which when superinduced in his cattle by the same cause the 
farmer calls ““hooven”). A decoction of soaproot was administered for one 
remedy, and careful squaw-mothers kept a quantity of it on hand against 
any indiscretion on the part of their children. But a more frequent treat- 
ment was to lay the sufferer on his back, grease his belly, and let a friend 
tread it. A gentler way was to knead it. The Spaniards affirm that the 
Solano plains were well covered with wild oats as early as 1838, but the 
Patwin did not make very extensive use of it then. Wild sunflower and 
different kinds of grass were pulled or cut on the plains, thrashed out on 
smooth ground, winnowed in the wind, the seed beaten up and made into 
a kindof panada. Along the Sacramento they gathered many blackberries 
in the season. 
On the plains all adult males, and children up to ten or twelve, went 
perfectly naked, while the women wore only a narrow slip of deer-skin 
around the waist. In the mountains where it was somewhat cooler, the 
women made for themselves short petticoats from the inner bark of the 
