The Ethno Botany of the Coahuilla Indians of Southern California

in the interior. The Indian tribes of California, south of these limits, fall into three divisions: those of the Santa Barbara channel and islands, covering the whole coast of Ventura county ; and two more groups occupying the lower portions of the state. Any study of the first group must now be confined to the written accounts concerning them and to the numerous archaeological remains, since these Indians are either wholly extinct or mingled with the present mestizo population. Of the latter two groups, however, several thousand are still living in some thirty different villages or small reservations in San Bernadino, Riverside, and San Diego counties, and are open to ethnographic investigations. 5. The habitable portion of southern California is divided geographically by low mountain ranges into a number of spacious valleys. In these fertile tracts, at that time well populated by Indians, the Franciscan friars, under the direction of the Spanish government, a century ago established their missions. Furthermost south, and the first to be established, was the mission of San Diego (1769). It formed a center for reaching the numerous bands of Indians about the bay and scattered southward into Lower California, eastward to the desert, and for thirty or forty miles northward on the hills and mesas of the Coast Range. Forty miles north of San Diego, at the foot of the beautiful valley of the San Luis Rey river, was established, in 1798, the mission of San Luis Re...