The Evening News. November 15, 1916

38. The Shadow People

One of the race tragedies is the disappearance of the California Indian under the Spanish and American conquests. Occasionally hunters meet a survivor of the old tribes living alone in the mountains, but for the most part the Indians about San Jose are a shadow people.

The origin of the Olhones, like that of all the other Californian Indians, is a mystery. Their language was made up of dialects. At one time nineteen different dialects were spoken amongst the converts at the Mission Dolores, San Francisco. At the same time there were forty dialects at the Mission San Jose.

The California Indians have been incorrectly called Diggers, but the Digger Indians were very few in number. They lived on roots dug from the ground.

Many records have come down to us describing the appearance of the Indians in the Santa Clara Valley. They were tall, erect, light brown in color. They had high cheek bones and fine straight noses. If we insist that our kind of beauty is the highest, these Indians had considerable beauty. In fact their features were not unlike ours.

The Indians in the Santa Clara Valley were worshippers of the sun. They felt that they had to propitiate an evil spirit who followed their actions. When an Indian died friends or relatives decorated the corpse with feathers, flowers, beads, bows and arrows. They cremated the body amid shouts and exclamations like our prayers.

Until the Spanish came to this valley there were neither dressmakers or tailors. When Mrs. Indian roamed along the banks of the Guadalupe her only garment was a loose wrapper around the waist. On cold days Mrs. Indian appeared with an otter or deer skin in place of the cotton garment. In hot weather Mrs. Indian wore only an apron of tules or rushes. Sometimes Mrs. Indian Chief wore a close fitting skirt woven and plaited with feathers of a water fowl so as to give a downy surface to both sides.

The clothing of the men and children was even simpler. In summer they were naked. In winter they plastered themselves with mud to keep out the cold.

The Indian women were fond of decorating their bodies. Some tattooed their skin. Others wore earrings of wood, strings of shell beads, bands of feathers around the head. The birds most in vogue for self adornment were black eagles, golden winged wood peckers and crests of mountain quail. To obtain a band of wood peckers' feather was not easy. A suitable band cost the lives of not less than two hundred and fifty birds. There were five hundred feathers in a band, and one wood pecker could supply only two. Even today the fastidious lady of fashion in San Jose would hardly demand the slaughter of two hundred and fifty birds for one garment, and so Mrs. Indian in some respects was more difficult to please than Mrs. San Jose.

Transcribed by Kitty LaFavor, for the Santa Clara Co. CAGenWeb Project. 2008