THE University of California has been delving into the history, as far as possible, of the various tribes of Indians in the West, and especially those that are almost, if not quite, extinct. Among these is the tribe of the Salinan Indians, a century ago numbered by the thousands; but only forty-one remain alive to-day, and of these only twenty-nine can speak their ancestral language. Nowhere else in the world is there a living being who can speak Salinan, a tongue which it is thought is wholly unrelated to any other living speech, and as different from the nineteen other Indian language-stocks of California, or from any other language in the world, as English is from Hebrew or Chinese. Dr. Mason's account of it has just been published as a part of the tenth volume of the University of California publications in American archeology and ethnology.
Agriculture was wholly unknown to this tribe. People lived by hunting and fishing, and from the wild products of the earth, using a vast variety of native foods, we are told, “which the present inhabitants of California allow to go to waste,” such as rattlesnakes and other serpents (which were roasted in ashes), lizards, toads, horned lizards, ground-squirrels, chipmunks, rats, mice, the owl, the eagle, and the hawk. Among vegetable foods was a soup of the seeds of wild oats, clover eaten from the stalk, buckeyes, after the poison had been leached out, acorn mush, and bread baked from acorn flour, Christmas berries, seaweed, and various seeds.
Tobacco is highly esteemed, and thought to possess magical powers, we presume from its intoxicating or chemical effects. They seem to have lost entirely the knowledge of God. The dead, it was understood, journeyed to a distant island of the ocean, and in due time would be born again. The eagle and the kingfisher were credited with the creation of the world. Yet having lost the knowledge of God and almost everything with which they had to do, more or less perverted, they still have the tradition of the Deluge. We wonder whether the idea of the eagle-creator did not come from the same source as the eagle-headed deity of Assyria, and back of this from the cherubim idea in the form of eagles.
