130 THE INDIANS OF CALIFORNIA. 
people who obtained a precarious subsistance in winter by 
digging through the snow for roots, and searching the rocks 
for lizards, and who had neither villages or numerical force, 
has been applied by the readers of Fremont's work to all 
the Indians of California.* 
The name was really applicable to those whom he first 
met with, but not to the Indians living on the other side of 
the mountains, who spoke a different language and were 
more provident than those living on the great plains east of 
the Rocky Mountains. The latter have been much more 
destructive to the whites in battle, having procured, at an 
early date, firearms from Indian traders. The gold excite- 
ment, however, settled California so rapidly that the Indians 
were in a hopeless minority after the first immigration 
crossed the continent, and excepting where their villages 
were attacked they had no wish to fight, for they had no 
surplus population to lose. 
That these same Indians were not wanting in courage 
or spirit I have had repeated proofs. 
They would attack the sturgeon when under water and 
drag him to the shore with their limbs bleeding from the 
sharp spikes. I have also seen Indians bearing the scars of 
conflicts with grizzly bears, and the frequent instances of 
white men scarred with wounds made by their arrows, shows 
that they contended courageously with the early settlers. 
The Indians of California, in 1849, were the more inter- 
esting to the ethnologist from the manner in which that 
country had been settled. The Jesuits, it is true, had been 
in Lower California for many years, and had established 
mission schools there, and a few Europeans had a short time 
before made scattered settlements in the Sacramento Valley, 
but the whole country was so remote from our frontiers, and 
inclosed by the intervening barriers of the Rocky Mountains 
* The Indian tribes of the section I am describing, called themselves respectively, 
Sesum, Hocktem, Yubum, Hololipi, Willem, Tankum 1 inhabited tl lley of north 
em California, dox " Qi "XD Aa and the Coast Range. 
n ar e 
