2 INTRODUCTION. 



like " herds of human animals". In consequence of this treatment they 

 hecame diseased, and the natural result soon followed.* 



To the ethnologist this degradation of the race is of interest in con- 

 sidering the inherent qualities which made it possible. 



Though Upper California had been discovered by Cabrillo as early as 

 1542, it was not until the expulsion of the Jesuits from Lower California, 

 in 17G7, that the Indians of the more northern portion were doomed, under 

 their "christianizers," the Franciscan Fathers, to an experience even worse 

 than those of the peninsula. 



Forbes f copies from Humboldt a list of eighteen missions which had 

 been established in Upper California between 1769 and 1798, and states 

 that in 1831 the number had been increased to twenty-one: The mission 

 of San Diego was that first established, and thence they were spread along 

 the coast, reaching as far north as San Francisco, where a settlement was 

 made ten years afterwards. 



The rapidity with which the deluded Indians were at first brought 

 into the missions, not always by gentle means, as shown by Beechey's 

 account of a prosecuting expedition, was probably very satisfactory to the 

 Fathers, and it tells its story of the natural condition of the Californians. 

 In 1786 La Perouse found the number of domesticated Indians at the ten 

 missions in Upper California to be about five thousand. Humboldt, twenty- 

 six years afterwards, gives the number at the eighteen missions then estab- 

 lished as between fifteen and sixteen thousand. At this date the rapid 

 increase at the missions falls off, probably in great part owing to the 

 increased death rate and the removal of the remnants of the wild tribes 

 from the immediate vicinity of the missions, for during the next twenty- 

 nine years the total number was only three thousand more, though 

 three additional missions had been established.! From this time the doom 

 of the race, settled at the first period of contact with the European, 



* To those who think this statement may be too strongly drawn, I simply refer to the work 

 of Venegas, and particularly to the carefully considered statements by Forbes (History of California), 

 pp. 210-234. 



t Forbes' History of California, 8vo, London, 1839. 



t Forbes gives the total number of domesticated Indians at the twenty-one missions in Upper 

 California as 18,683, and at that time there were less than five thousand inhabitants other than Indians 

 at the twenty-one stations. As showing the rapid decrease at the mission of Santa Barbara the follow- 

 ing note received from Dr. Yarrow is of interest: "In 1834 there were 1,200 Indians at this mission; in 

 1840 there were only 400." 



