420 WESTEEN LANGUAGES CLASSIFIED. 



EEMAEKS ON THE MISSION INDIANS OF CALIFOENIA. 



After the abolition of the order of the Jesuit Fathers, in 1767, the mis- 

 sions established by them in the Peninsula of California were abandoned, 

 and the order of Franciscans entrusted with the conversion of the natives in 

 Alta California, or what is now the State of California. From that epoch 

 down to 1833, the year of their secularization, twenty-six missions were 

 established by the Franciscans on the coast of Southern California, or at a 

 short distance inland. By persuasion and by military force they prevailed 

 upon the Indians of the vicinity and the interior to settle around the mission 

 buildings, and in concert with their families to work on certain days of the 

 week for their spiritual advisers. Some of the missions reached a high 

 degree of power, wealth, and influence, and the most flourishing of them 

 all was that of San Juan Capistrano. 



To render their christianizing efforts more efficacious, many of the 

 Fathers acquired the language of their numerous Indian converts, and to 

 some of them we are indebted for the preservation in writing of dialects 

 which seem to have disappeared since. They gathered Indians from many 

 districts of the interior ; herewith the ancient distribution of the languages 

 became disturbed and changes in the extent of their areas were produced. 

 We know that a Yurna dialect, probably the Comoyei, was once heard at San 

 Luis Rey and further to the north; that the whole aboriginal population has 

 now disappeared from Santa Cruz Island ; that Tatche" Indians of the Y6kuts 

 stock lived around San Antonio Mission; that Nopthrinthres Indians, also 

 of Y6kuts origin, were settled at San Juan Bautista, among the Mutsun 

 tribes; that the San Luis Obispo vocabulary is largely mixed with Mutsun 

 words,, and that the lexicon of the Mutsun tribes on the northern shore of 

 San Francisco and Suisun Bays became to some extent mixed with ele- 

 ments from the languages of the neighboring Indians. 



But though at the present time the reduced Indian population of these 

 tracts shows a mixture of languages and indistinctly traceable linguistic 

 areas, many other tribes have remained in their old homes and retained 

 their paternal dialects. This can be said of the Dieguenos, of most Indians 

 of the Kauvuya branch of Nunia, and of the natives at Kasua; and though 

 the -ancient order of linguistic distribution has been disturbed, the diction- 



