Arthur Walbridge North (1874-1943) traveled extensively in Baja California during 1905-1906. He wrote about his experiences, observations, and historical investigations in a series of articles and in two books, "Mother of California" (1908) and "Camp and Camino in Lower California" (1910). The following article appeared in the journal "American Anthropologist" in 1908.

Footnotes originally appeared at the bottom of the article's pages, but here they have been moved to the end of the article and numbered consecutively. The information enclosed within brackets, including page breaks, has been added by the editor -- Don Laylander.

The Native Tribes of Lower California

by Arthur W. North

"Baja California, until half a dozen years ago, possessed the doubtful honor to be almost the least known territory in the world, with the exception of the polar regions: and some; few deserts, and inland places, difficult and dangerous of access." Thus a noted geographer characterized the California peninsula in 1897, and thus I found it a few years later upon undertaking the compilation of its history and the exploration of its interior fastnesses. To-day, however, in consequence of the recent big-gun practice of the American men-of-war at Magdalena bay, and in view of the great commercial highway which the Panama Canal will open to its superb harbors, Baja California assumes a prominence that adds a popular interest to the ethnological value of all data concerning the native tribes of this little known Mexican territory.

Who first inhabited the peninsula?

On landing at the present site of the pueblo of La Paz, Hernando Cortés found a party of warlike Indians ready to oppose his advance into the interior. This was in the spring of 1534. A century and a half later Jesuit missionaries undertook the task of exploring, colonizing, and developing the country, and only their untimely expulsion by the Marques de Croix in 1767 prevented these untiring workers from achieving success in their difficult undertaking. Prior to the coming of the padres various conquistadores and buccaneers had visited the southern part of the peninsula and found it thickly settled by Indians. In their logs the voyagers characterized these natives as brave in combat, skilful in diving, unaccustomed to the wearing of clothes, habitually possessed by an abnormal hunger, and always welcoming sweetmeats with yells of delight.

The missionaries quickly discovered that these same southern natives were divided into two main tribes, the Pericues, reaching [/ p. 237] from Cape San Lucas almost to the Bay of La Paz, and the Guiacuras, disputing the northern territory of the Pericues and occupying the country northward for three hundred miles to Loreto, the early mission capital of the Californias. A third tribe, the Cochimis, roamed over the region immediately above Loreto. Their range extended northward hundreds of miles to the southern spurs of San Pedro Mártir sierra, the loftiest peak in the whole Baja California cordillera.

In the aggregate these three tribes numbered twenty-five thousand members. While they are said to have possessed, even prior to the coming of the padres, a traditional respect for a supreme being, their tribal life furnished no evidence of any recognition of governmental superiors. Indeed, their only class distinction seems to have been sexual: the men made war, hunted, and enjoyed themselves; the women did the necessary domestic drudgery. The Jesuits gathered readily enough such information concerning the early history of these Indians as the latter possessed. Their forefathers, they said, had lived originally in a country far to the north; having been driven thence by a fierce tribe, they had moved southward to the peninsula.

Doubtless the Cochimis were akin to the Yumas of Arizona and California, but the Pericues and Guiacuras seem to have been distinct from all other tribes. In 1862 Francisco Pimentel, the noted Indian philologist of Mexico, conceived the idea that the Pericues might be related to the Indians of the Mexican mainland, basing his theory on the ground that one of the subdivisions of that tribe was known as the Coras; but after making a comparison of the vocabulary of the California Coras with one prepared for the Cora tribes of Sinaloa and Jalisco, he frankly admitted the lack of any similarity between the two tongues. Indeed, there was nothing in common between the languages of the Pericues, Guiacuras, and Cochimis.

The three tribes were tall, healthy, and robust people. They had coarse, dry, black hair; white regular teeth; and well formed ears, eyes, and mouth. The skin of the coast natives was darker than that of the Indians farther inland. Among all, deformities were rare and drunkenness unknown. The men wore sparse beards. After the coming of the missionaries the women began to [/ p. 238] clothe themselves, but the men looked with disfavor on any personal application of the fashion. The Pericues soon had the best garments, a sort of skirt or long girdle made of fiber or of deer-skins being the principal article of their apparel.

The habitations of these people were of the rudest description, consisting of caves, excavations in the earth, circular pens of stones, and arbors of thatch. A pile of leaves, or even the bare ground, served in lieu of couches or beds. Essentially a pastoral people, they feared the chance cold and enjoyed the prevalent summery weather. Although fish-eaters and killers of game, the flesh of which they cooked by casting the raw slabs into the flames or upon the coals, they obtained most of their food supply from the cacti. Despite the frequent harvests of fruit gathered from the latter, the Indians were always more or less hungry. They killed game and went into combat with long bows, thick in the middle and tapering at the ends. Their arrows were more than a yard in length. The arrow-tips were hardened in hot ashes, and feathers were attached close by the notched ends; for hunting large game and for warfare, a long, fire-hardened tip with a flint point was attached to the shaft. These natives were children in their enjoyment of games and their distaste for work.

The first explorer to come in contact with the Indians in the northern section of the peninsula was Francisco de Ulloa, the discoverer of the Colorado. This was in the year 1539. In the following year Melchior Diaz, a captain under Coronado, found his way overland to the mouth of the treacherous stream and promptly christened it "Rio del Tison." In Castaneda's narration of Coronado's expedition it is written that "after going about 150 leagues, they (Diaz and his picked escort) came to a province of exceedingly tall and strong men -- like giants. They are naked . . . . On account of the great cold, they carry a firebrand (tison) in the hand when they go from one place to another, with which they warm the other hand and the body as well . . . . On this account the larger river which is in that country was called the Firebrand river."

Nearly two centuries and a half passed, however, ere definite knowledge was acquired concerning these people. Then, during [/ p. 239] the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the Dominican friars, having succeeded to the peninsular missionary field, established nine missions in the country to the north of the Cochimis, whose border subtribes they called Limonies. The unfortunate Dominicans early discovered that they had come among a people far more warlike and powerful than those in the southern part of the peninsula. Indeed, many of the friars lost their lives before the fury of these northern savages. In their scanty records the missionaries characterized their ungodly children as "unquiet, proud, fickle, quick-tempered, treacherous, warlike, and difficult to govern." Finally, the garrison soldiery undertook the solution of the Indian question by taking the most unruly members of the fiercest tribes and placing them among the more tractable groups; but at the same time these military representatives of Christian Europe spread broadcast the tainting diseases of civilization, and the decimation of the natives ensued. This was at the opening of the nineteenth century.

Roughly speaking, the Indians of the northern part of the California peninsula may be estimated at 20,000, at the close of the eighteenth century. On the timber-clad heights of San Pedro Mártir sierra lived the Kiliwas -- or, as they have been styled by the Mexican military authorities, the Cahuillas. These, however, are a Yuman tribe, and should not be confused with the Shoshonean Cahuillas of southern California. Along the western and northern spurs of this great range and reaching down to the mouth of the Colorado roamed the Pais, or Pai-pais. About Santo Tomás and San Miguel, near the modern pueblo of Ensenada, dwelt the Gimiels, doubtless a subtribe of the Yumas. About the mission of Santa Catarina, some fifty miles southwest of the mouth of the Colorado, was the main rancheria of the powerful Catarina Yumas, while between the Gimiels and the Catarinas, and extending to the present American border, swarmed the Diegueños, locally known as "Diggers." The populous settlements of the Cocopa tribe were scattered along the western bank of Hardy river and both banks of the Colorado, while its hunters traversed the intervening delta region.

While the Kiliwas, Gimiels, and Catarinas were primarily hunters and warriors, all these six northern tribes engaged more or [/ p. 240] less in agriculture, the Cocopas having the broadest fields under cultivation. The Cocopas, Pais, and Diegueños were peaceful by nature, the Yumas perversely warlike, the Kiliwas implacable when injured. The lance and the bow and arrow served all alike in their warfare; but the Yumas alone of the distinctively peninsular Indians employed the scalping knife. The Cocopas, Diegueños, and Pais seem to have gone innocent of clothing; the men of the other northern tribes wore fiber or deerskin moccasins, breech-clouts, and war-bonnets. In physique the members of all these tribes, excepting the Diegueños, surpassed those of the southern part of Baja California. I have seen Kiliwas and Pais well above six feet in height and of superb proportions. Indeed, though historians have regarded the Tisones of Melchior Diaz as Cocopas, I am of the opinion that they were Pais Indians.¹

[/ p. 241] The end of the Baja California Indians is near at hand. Although they were a healthy people at the time of the coming of the padres, they did not long remain so, for measles, smallpox, and even worse diseases came into California on the establishment of the Spanish presidios and spread with frightful virulence among the natives. In seventy years the southern Indians were reduced to a scant five thousand; by 1794 none was to be found about some of the southern missions, and thirty years later it was recorded that not a single pure-blood Indian was to be seen below Loreto. Those who escaped disease, however, lived to an extreme age. So, indeed, do the Mexicans of Lower California today, and one may meet at Loreto even yet centenarians who tell of the closing days of the Spanish regime when the soldiers branded with red-hot irons each new band of Indians herded into the presidio.

The Pericues and Guiacuras are now practically extinct. Of the former thousands of Cochimis perhaps a hundred still survive about the missions of San Xavier, Santa Gertrudis, and San Borja. I am inclined to believe, however, that those at San Xavier should be classed as Guiacuras. The Cochimis are a good-natured people, far more formally religious than the neighboring Mexicans, and far more reliable workers; but they dress in similar rags.

Of the northern Indians there survive today remnants of the Cocopa, Catarina Yuma, Kiliwa, Pais, and Diegueño tribes, but only the first named can muster more than a hundred individuals. Warfare and the evil diseases, -- tubercular not included, -- with the tinned foods of civilization, must account largely for the vanished thousands. Moreover, as these imported evils swept away women as well as men, the old custom of polygamy has become obsolete and the high birth-rate of early days no longer prevails.

Pozo Vicente, the main rancheria of the Cocopas, is situated on the west bank of Hardy river; the Catarina Yumas live at the site of the old mission of Santa Catarina; the Kiliwas have two rancherias, Hwanuk and Arroyo León, both on the northern slope of San Pedro Mártir sierra; the Pais also occupy two rancherias, one called Dolores, the other unnamed, both lying between the mission sites of Santa Catarina and San Vicente. Finally, the Diegueños have two small villages immediately south of the border. [/ p. 242] These latter Indians live, as did their kinsmen in Upper California, in temporary brush huts; the other northern tribes build more substantially of brush and stakes, roofed with earth and thatch. The shacks at Dolores are well constructed. In their agriculture the Diegueños, Pais, and Catarina Yumas have recourse to irrigation.

Among the Cocopas two types are seen: medium height, dark coloring, and stocky frame mark the prevalent type; fine bearing, greater height and less weight, handsome features, and a burnt-red [/ p. 243] coloring distinguish the other. The Cocopas wear their hair long, and of all the tribes have the strongest predilection for facial painting. The Kiliwas pay the least attention to clothing. The Yumas and the Cocopas have the most attractive little children. The early mission training of these natives is evidenced by their continued devotion to the Roman Catholic Church (except the Cocopas, who seem to disregard such matters) and by the presence in their rancherias of sacred utensils saved from the ruins of the missions. Opening the hives of wild bees, gathering piñon nuts, and fishing are popular with all the tribes. Although these people are great meat-eaters, they also consume quantities of cakes which the women make of a meal prepared by crushing on a metate the seeds of the mesquite and of other leguminous trees and plants. The Catarina Yumas, the Pais, and the Kiliwas all have a local reputation as ladrones, and the explorer may well be watchful when in their neighborhood. The native men and boys are adept in the use of long bows and arrows, but firearms are rarely seen in the villages. All are extremely fond of music. The following words are those of two songs of the Pais:

Hu-pa ma hup; sing ye a mi wai-sa.

A no-che, cheu spili pow-wow, cheu spili pow-wow,
Yu-i, myu-mai, chi-wamai ka-ka, chi-wami kaka.

The first line, again and again repeated, constitutes an old war song; the second and third lines are an ancient love song still in use among the Pais youth. In the Kiliwa language are found [/ p. 244] such long words as Pahamehamakaipa, an American; Marashripapchamakaipa, an American girl; chibiskwi-kwiro, wire. Other terms are: mezai, good; maha, meat. But before I can make report on the language or myths of these people, I have further work to do.

With the disappearance of the Baja California Indians the ethnologist will see but a repetition of the passing of the people that occupied the peninsula prior to the coming of the Indians of history. What people was this? For want of a better name I shall designate them the "Petroglyph Makers." According to the usual Indian tradition these men were giants, for time is ever prone to add to the stature of a superior people. To my personal knowledge five distinct groups of cliff writings bear evidence of these prehistoric inhabitants. Though modern writers have had no word to add concerning the Petroglyph Makers of Baja California, the Jesuits recorded their deep interest in them, and while some of their statements are exaggerated, due to the misunderstandings of the period, they are not entirely without interest. Turning to the work of Clavijero,² the eminent Jesuit historian of the eighteenth century, we find the following:

"Observing the few ancient vestiges that remain there, it is rational to conclude that the vast peninsula was inhabited at an earlier time by a people less barbarous than those found by the Spaniards. The Jesuits, in the latter years of their management there, discovered in the mountains between the parallels of 27 and 28 various caves largely excavated in the living rock, and in them painted figures of men and women decently clad, and of different species of animals. These pictures, although rough, distinctly represented the objects . . . . Not belonging to the savage and tribal natives who inhabited California when the Spaniards arrived there, these pictures and dresses, without doubt, belonged to a people more ancient and unknown to us. There is a tradition throughout the country that it was a gigantic people who came from the north. We do not claim credit for these traditions, but from various exhumations of human bones by the missionaries it cannot be doubted that formerly the country was inhabited by men of disproportionate size."

After describing certain remains found at the Rancho of San Joaquin, below the mission of San Ignacio, by Padre José Robea [Rodea] in 1765, the author concludes:

[/ p. 245] "Taking into consideration the magnitude of the cranium and the place occupied by the whole skeleton, and comparing the vertebrae with those of an ordinary skeleton, it is believed that the man to whom it belonged measured eleven feet in height."

According to Mallery,³ a missionary thus expressed himself on the subject in 1790:

"Throughout civilized California, from south to north, and especially in the caves and smooth rocks, there remain various rude paintings. . . . The colors of these paintings are of four kinds: yellow, a reddish color, green and black. The greater part of them are painted in high places, and from this it is inferred by some that the old tradition is true, that there were giants among the ancient Californians . . . . [One] inscription . . . . resembles Gothic letters interspersed with Hebrew and Chaldean characters . . . . It is evident that the paintings and drawings of the Californians are significant symbols and landmarks by which they intended to leave to posterity the memory, either of their establishment in this country, or of certain wars or political or natural triumphs. These pictures are not like those of the Mexicans (Aztecs), but might have the same purpose."

Bancroft, in his Native Races, discusses the anonymous account, last cited, locating the writings as made on a cliff near the old Jesuit mission of Santiago, some leagues below La Paz, and concludes with the statement that "the only accounts of antiquities relate to cave and cliff paintings and inscriptions which have never been copied and concerning which, consequently, not much can be said."

I will now submit in outline such new and additional data relating to the petroglyphs as I have thus far been able to gather during my explorations. I shall present three new groups, as follows:

1. The San Fernando Petroglyphs

An old Mexican directed me to these jeroglificos, as he termed them, in February 1906. At that time I was visiting the ruins of the Franciscan mission at San Fernando, founded by Junípero Serra in May 1769, immediately prior to his departure for Upper California and his notable career in that favored region. San Fernando lies on the 30th parallel of north latitude. A short half-mile north-west of the mission ruins there are several high cliffs facing the [/ p. 246] east, and on these the petroglyphs are found.^[4] According to the native legend these jeroglificos were made by a race of great stature who inhabited the country long before the coming of the Indians.

The design or character which appears by itself at the right hand of the group and resembles a Roman numeral is identical with one of the characters in the Santiago group. At the very top of the cliff I deciphered certain letters, perhaps intended either for the Spanish cruz, or the Latin crux -- a cross, anyway. It is said that these were added by the padres to dispel the evil inherent in the inscription below!

2. The San Pedro Mártir Petroglyphs

This group is situated about a hundred miles north of San Fernando, in an arroyo opening out upon the northern side of the [/ p. 247] Sierra de San Pedro Mártir. As their existence is unknown even to the Indians, and as I discovered them at a time when the heat was so intense that even my Mexican muleteer shortly deserted me, I experienced some excitement in coming upon them. This was in August 1906. The group consists of four successive sets, all of them facing the east.

The first set occurs on a bowlder not more than fifty paces from the bed of the arroyo. The design of this petroglyph is that of a conventional human heart enclosing characters. The others are near together and occur about a hundred paces up-stream from the first, on bold granite cliffs high above the bed of the arroyo. One of the last-named sets represents several persons approaching two pine trees. As the only pines in the neighborhood are on the crest of the sierra in the direction taken by the figures, this petroglyph may possibly be regarded as a guide-post of the ancient people.

Clavijero, in recounting the San Joaquin discovery, mentions that in one of the caves paintings were found representing "men and women with garments similar to those of the Mexicans, but they were entirely barefoot. The men had their arms open and somewhat elevated, and one of the women had her hair hanging loose down her back and a tuft of feathers on her head." Oddly enough [/ p. 248] the figures of this group are not those of nude Indians of the peninsula, but of people "with garments."

On a cliff just above the pine-tree cliff are two figures either of persons with broad head-coverings or of a quadruped with human head and shoulders. Beyond this set there is a panel of figures on a broad and wide cliff, and, at the farther side thereof, a sharp design shaped like an hour glass (fig. 72).

Each of these last three se[t]s of petroglyphs are more than four feet in height, cut in outline in the granite rock and the incision smeared with an unfading yellowish paint. Distance plays strange pranks with them, for at first glance they seem plain and accessible, but after one has worked his way laboriously toward them their inaccessibility becomes disappointingly apparent. Indeed, the people who marked these cliffs either had an abundance of rope ladders at their disposal or else lower buttresses of the crag have crumbled away.

3. The Arroyo Grande Petroglyphs

These petroglyphs are pecked on a rock at a distance of less than fifty miles north of the last preceding group. The Arroyo Grande is an immense dry river-bed that debouches into the desert immediately southwest of the mouth of the Colorado river. It is a deep chasm in the midst of an excessively barren region. In one of the many rocky gorges that intersect the Arroyo Grande from the northwest there are eight or nine tinajas, or natural cisterns, where rainwater -- when there is rain -- collects, and the petroglyphs are cut shallowly into the face of a dark granite bowlder set above the largest of the tinajas. In the lower right-hand corner of the cliff there appears a figure which may have been intended to represent a human being. Aside from this it would seem as though the scribe had attempted to make an inscription rather than to delineate [/ p. 249] human or animal figures. The design that at once catches the eye, however, is the rain sign so characteristic of the Hopi of Arizona -- conventional clouds from which lines representing rain depend. Two other characters of interest are the M and the which stand out from the center of the group. Here, moreover, as at San Fernando, are designs so far resembling the Phenician characters representative of Bh and N as to explain the classification of the California petroglyphs by the unknown chronicler of the eighteenth century as inscriptions of the Chaldeans and other ancient peoples, although, of course, they have no relation whatever.

These Arroyo Grande petroglyphs, though barely exceeding in any instance a height of eighteen inches, with the exception of three or four characters not included in the accompanying sketch, stand out distinctly.

4. Other Evidence of the Petroglyph Makers

In addition to the cliff writings there are other signs in Lower California that bear testimony of the presence of a prehistoric people. Down the peninsula, just off the 27th parallel of north latitude, lies San Joaquin, the rancho at which the early Jesuit missionary found the "gigantic" remains and the cave with the "painted figures of men and women, decently clad." Near San Joaquin is the old mission [/ p. 250] town of San Ignacio, the junction of numerous caminos dating back to the days of the padres. Some of these highways are said to antedate the Spanish conquest and to be relics of the skill of the Petroglyph Makers. Certainly a combination of many laborers with a remarkable knowledge of the art of road-building must have been essential for their construction.

To the north of San Ignacio a hundred miles lies the little mining pueblo of Calmalli, and only a few leagues to the west of the pueblo may be heard the booming breakers of the Pacific. On the cliffs of an arroyo near the shore appears a petroglyph showing unusual skill for this region, since the human figures and the designs represented are extremely well executed and enduringly elaborated with pigment.

A hundred miles still farther northward there rises a lofty barren range of granite mountains, and along the crest of one of its ridges a prospector recently found the remains of an ancient road cut in the rock. Before he had followed the road any great distance, the prospector's canteen failed him, compelling his retreat without having ascertained its objective. It would be interesting to explore this range, -- and with relays of Indians to convey water, exploration would be possible, -- for its course might disclose further traces of the ancient inhabitants. In this region and also in the vicinity of the Arroyo Grande tinajas, I found pottery similar to that made in the Hopi country of Arizona.

Walton, New York.

¹ Under the name Pipi this tribe is mentioned by James 0. Pattie in the Personal Narrative of his adventures and travels in 1824-1830, reprinted in Early Western Travels, edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites, vol. xviii, pp. 200-201, Cleveland, 1905. The editor mistakenly regards them as probably the Pimas.

² Storia della California, 1789.

³ Mallery, Picture Writing of the American Indians, Tenth Ann. Rep. Bur. Ethnology, 1893, p. 132.

[⁴ Cf. Johnson 1978.]