Marin County CA Archives History - Books .....I The "First Families" Of The Peninsula 1958 ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.rootsweb.com/~usgenweb/copyright.htm http://www.rootsweb.com/~usgenweb/ca/cafiles.htm ************************************************ File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by: Joy Fisher sdgenweb@yahoo.com April 11, 2007, 12:53 am Book Title: Shark Point - High Point I The "First Families" of the Peninsula IT HAS BEEN SAID that Marin County has the longest recorded history in the western part of the United States. The Indians who first settled here called themselves the Mewah (literally, "the people"). The Spanish explorers called them the Miwok, or Mewan. By the 1820s, when John Reed came into the area, the Indians were becoming civilized and many of these "first families" were living in and around the California missions provided by the Spanish" government. The Indians were given protection, clothing and an abundance of food. In payment for these things, they cultivated the land around the mission buildings. They raised corn, wheat, beans, peas, potatoes and numerous other vegetables, besides livestock. In winter, bands of Indians came from the nearby mountains to the missions. But in Spring the more adventurous ones left, for they felt dependent there. In the mountains, they returned to a free and independent, life, even though they had to eat rats, insects, snakes, and small edible roots. The California Indians (rather insultingly called "Diggers") were not skillful hunters or warriors. They had no permanent housing, being content with a huge rock or bush shelters. However, at the missions, under good care, they grew fretful and thin. The Indian children adapted to mission life more easily. They learned to make a coarse cloth from sheep's wool and fashioned it into rough clothing. They also were instructed in other trades Widows and orphans of dead Indians learned to spin and make rugs on handmade looms. The San Rafael mission was established in 1817 by the Franciscan order to which Father Junipero Serra belonged, though he himself never crossed the bay. The mission served the west bay Indians and was well known in this area at the time of John Reed's appointment as major domo in the late 1820s. In the twenty years after it was founded, the padres baptized 829 Indians, married 183 and held 830 converts on the church rolls. The Indians were a simple people whose chief delight was in feasting and dancing. Polygamy was general. All lived together easily, sleeping together "like sardines in a can" (according to an early settler) without regard for age or sex. There are later mission records which tell of crude huts (called wickiups), built near running water, woven of the ever-present tules. Their doctoring was primitive: local herbs and "sweat holes". "Sweat holes" were more accurately sweat houses or sweat caves, large enough for several men to move around the fires. All openings would be closed and the men would dance for hours in the stifling heat. Then the men would rush against the barriers, break through to the open air and roll in the mud or dive into cold water of the bay or a creek. Such treatments could kill or cure a sick man. The mission years do not tell the full story of Marin Indians. Indians lived on this peninsula thousands of years ago. They lived on plant life, primarily: buckeye, acorns. The acid which is in buckeye is tannic. It almost destroyed their teeth. But it wasn't poisonous to them and, when pounded, buckeye made a crude flour-starch for bread. It was soaked in salt water to "cure" the starch. Seaweed, roots, lily bulbs and (in a few instances) skunks furnished their choicest delicacies. Fish and shell fish rounded out their simple diet. They fished with nets and seines. They pounded up sedimentary rocks and heated them to cook their shell fish. They were not vague in their counting and barter (as earlier writers have sometimes supposed). They counted by the spaces between their fingers, one hand thereby meaning four. Their money system was based on the deep water shell, the dentalium. Other shells were used for various purposes. Vertebrae of fish have been found in the Belvedere mounds with holes drilled in them and covered with a crude type carving. So, apparently, the Indians in this area went in for art, too. In over 400 mapped mounds on the Tiburon Peninsula, the Indians buried their dead. Mostly the burials were in the soft shell mounds because the ground was too hard to dig with shell and wooden tools. The mounds were the garbage dumps of these tribes, not their dwelling places. Hammers and chisels of stone were rare here. Their best arrow heads were of obsidian, obtained in trade with the Lake County Indians, since no local stone would make good heads. They used local chert rock for spear heads. Their boats were a few rafts and canoe-like structures made out of tules or bulrushes. An Indian's rank in society was determined by the cost of his wife who would be the worker in the family. Indian names were simple and descriptive: Bear Rib, Buckeye One, Girl Afraid of Her Shadow. Where once the Miwok tribe numbered many thousands, today there are few traces of them except in a few Sonoma and Napa families. The San Rafael area Indians were mainly the Jouskionmes tribes, from which came such famous chiefs as Tamalpais and, one legend has it, Marin himself, El Marinero, hero of the wars against the Spanish in 1815. Christianized shortly after 1817, the chief became known as Marinero, "the Sailor" by the Franciscan friars, for he was skilled with the canoes and could get through the roughest waters of the bay. Quentin, one of his band, was never christianized or conquered by the Spanish. For the building of the Presidio at Yerba Buena, (the early name for San Francisco) tribes from the north were brought in. The Tamals, a Marin tribe, and the Sonoma tribes worked on the Presidio and Mission Delores. And here the Marin Indians may have had their most successful trading. Obsidian arrow heads came into more common use at this time. The building program of the Spanish meant a labor shortage, of course. This accounts for the recruitment of the more remote tribes who came to live in the mission. All of these Indians were obliged to attend church services, even the children. Among the Indians, the church doors were called "the mouth" since so few who went in once came out to leave the mission. The teachings of the missions were accepted without much difficulty by the Indians. One reason might be that their tribal religions also taught a peaceful ethic and a belief in life after death. The Indians were dark complected ("blackish as Ethiopians", one observer wrote in 1880). The usual clothing for the women was a scanty apron. The males wore no clothing at all, except in very cold weather when they smeared themselves with mud and sometimes wore fur capes. In sham battle, a skin helmet was added. For "dress" the men would wear an arrow through their hair or a string of shells around their necks. The white men brought many sicknesses to the native tribes, and severe fevers could wipe out a tribe in a short time. The tribe that lived in the area of present-day Hilarita was entirely wiped out by "the plague". A number of missions in Baja (Lower) California record how tribe after tribe was extinct by 1830. The same story is told by figures from San Rafael Mission, at a somewhat later date: (1833) (1842) 1250 Indians 20 3000 cattle none 500 horses none 4500 sheep and swine none 1500 bushels of wheat harvested none Today, many Indian tribes in the Californias do not exist as more than a racial strain. Besides disease, the so-called "Secularization Act" passed by the Mexican Government in 1833 contributed to Indian decline. Over a sixty-four year period in Alta (Upper) California, more than 80,000 Indians had come under the mission system. By the new law, the power of the priests was broken. Lay administrators ran the missions, leaving the priests little more to do than preach sermons and perform religious rites, like marrying and burying. The law provided that each Christianized Indian receive a share of Church properties, but this seldom happened. Most of the new administrators were selfish and kept the best land and livestock for themselves and their friends. This was the foundation of many great cattle ranchos. The poor Indians scattered out in the hills and "those spots which would have sustained and civilized our Indians were now merely their burial places. Starving Indians, having through their mission training lost in part their hardihood, perished so fast that often only the very old remained". This is a quotation from a wonderful book called "The Journey of the Flame". The author calls himself "Antonio de Fierro Blanco" but really his name was Nordhoff, the father of Charles Nordhoff. The journey began below La Paz in Lower California and ended at San Francisco Bay. It was made on muleback by a boy, eleven to thirteen years old, with flaming red hair, in the years 1810-11. "In the main", writes the author in the "Introduction", "every statement made therein is truthful, though some are founded on legends and family traditions". You might say that of "Shark Point - High Point". From our own peninsula come legends of Indian feud and romance. In the 1830s, the Indians of the Belvedere-Tiburon area were known as the Sharks (so-called by their Spanish conquerors because of their necklaces of sharks' teeth) and the Paradise Cove area tribe was the Coon (so named because of their headgear of raccoon skin). The squaws of the Sharks' rancheria decided to end the feud between the tribes. They sent out one of their fairest maidens to paddle past the Coon camp to be captured. The plan worked. One of the Coon chiefs fell in love with the Shark maiden who asked as her wedding gift the end of the feud. She ruled as Queen even after the death of the chief, and was buried in the old rock quarry on the Reed Ranch - above Paradise Cove. Additional Comments: Extracted from: Shark Point - High Point An Illustrated History of TIBURON & BELVEDERE IN MARIN COUNTY, CALIFORNIA BY EIGHTH GRADERS OF THE REED SCHOOL CLASSES OF 1954, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1958 PUBLISHED BY THE REED SCHOOL DISTRICT PARENT-TEACHER CLUB BELVEDERE-TIBURON MCMLVIII Designed by Lawton Kennedy, San Francisco 3000 Copies Printed by R. G. Fontana & Son, San Anselmo File at: http://ftp.rootsweb.com/pub/usgenweb/ca/marin/history/1958/sharkpoi/ifirstfa511nms.txt This file has been created by a form at http://www.genrecords.net/cafiles/ File size: 10.8 Kb