Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/512

494 branches shelters its population rather from sun than cold. In the middle of each tepee smolders a little fire, kindled by twirling a stick quickly about in a piece of rotten wood. The inhabitants eat bread made from white-oak acorns, from buckeye and laurel nuts, and, best of all, from manzanita berries. From these same nuts and berries they make pinole, a veritable mush, of which the early Spanish explorers constantly speak. They take the bitterness out of the acorns and nuts by soaking them long in water and then allowing them to dry in the sun, spread out on tule mats; then they grind them in their big stone mortars. To the mush and bread they add clams, fish, ducks, deer, and small game; they season their food with salt made from a certain root, and sweeten it by the addition of little sugar cakes, which they buy from the tribes of the mountains, who make them from the sap of some tree. Then there are thimbleberries, chokeweed berries, and in their season the madrona berry; and the tarweed grain made a pleasant variety in their mush and bread. After a feast of clams, tarweed mush, and thimbleberries, they lie about their fires and smoke coyote tobacco from wooden pipes, or dance to the music of their rude bone whistles.

Their dress is a simple apron or short skirt of buckskin, tule, or rabbit skin, with fringes and feathers for adornment, and longer for women; but their ornaments are their chief glory—bracelets, earrings, and necklaces of abalone shells, long, bone bodkins in their thick hair, to which were attached brilliant feathers; and Donna Maria's vivid pantomime shows us how their feathers dance above them as they dance, while their abalone pendants shake about their wrists and necks.

Their weapons are bows, arrows, and spears made of wood, and pointed with bone or flint, bound to a wooden shaft by rawhide, or the tough, sinewy fibers of a shrub which grows up in the mountains.

They made no pottery, but all their grinding, cooking, and carrying was done in stone or basketry; of the latter Donna Maria gave us for the museum a beautiful ancient specimen from one of these very rancherias. It is made of split roots woven so close as to be water-tight, and ornamented by a simple and even classic pattern. Often these baskets were patterned with lines and groups of little feathers, and then they were precious indeed.

When an Indian died, he was wrapped up in a blanket obtained from the missions, and buried in the rancheria itself, but not under the tepee. Before he was buried, the other Indians came and gave gifts and mourned.

A kindly, inoffensive tribe, they lived by hunting, fishing, and the natural nuts and grains of their environment. They ground their food and cooked it, loved music and personal adornment,