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California Indians, Historians, and Ethnographers (18 pages)
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Page: of 18
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Former mission Indian Dona Perfecta Encinales (center) and family (ca. 1900), who helped in the later
restoration of Mission San Antonio. CHS/Ticor Collection, University of Southern California.
fortunate that the Indians were usually willing and
eager to trade.
After Juan de Onate led a 1604 expedition up the
Colorado River, there followed over one hundred
and fifty years when, to the outside world, ‘California’ was only a far away place with somewhat
romantic overtones. True, the Spanish galleons
sailing from the distant Philippines to Mexico
probably glimpsed the fogbound coast from time
to time. Perhaps they sometimes landed when in
one kind of trouble or another. But they left no
written accounts, had no effect on the Native
Californians that can be proved. Scholars theorize
that disease organisms from the outside world may
have begun their devastating demolition of the
California populations from the earliest contacts,
but neither archaeologist nor statistician has yet
been able to prove it.
It was little more than two hundred years ago that
the Spaniards took the first step that would bring
the culture, technology, religion, and diseases of
the outside world to California, a step that also
made it possible for California’s people to return
contributions of considerable value to that outside
FALL 1992 325
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