Athapascan Indians; Indians of North America -- California
Another important source of information, serving the same purpose, is
the Goddard material. Evidently Goddard very much enjoyed the long
horseback trips he made with an informant, who could point out the
village sites, landmarks, and other points of interest of his native
territory. This information, carefully recorded by Goddard, has proved
extremely valuable in the present work, the more so since it represents
firsthand observation.
Goddard's ethnogeographic work for three of the California Athabascan
groups has already been published (1914_a_; 1923_a_; 1924). Besides
this, the present writer has been fortunate enough to have access to
Goddard's unpublished notes, which contain information on several
hundred additional villages in the area. These notes were in the
possession of Dr. Elsie Clews Parsons, Goddard's literary executor,
and on her death they were sent to the University of California by
Dr. Gladys Reichard. They remained in the files of the University of
California Museum of Anthropology until their use in the present work.
This unpublished material of Goddard's consists of a group of file
cards, on each of which is typed the name, location, and any other
pertinent data for a single village. Some of the lists are accompanied
by maps, showing precise location of the villages. In the lists for
which there are no maps but only verbal descriptions of the sites,
the township, range, and quarter section coördinates are given. The
township and range coördinates have been changed since Goddard's time,
in accordance with the more accurate surveys of the last thirty years,
but county maps of the appropriate period provide a perfectly adequate
way of locating Goddard's sites within a few hundred yards.
It is clear, on the basis of internal evidence, that there is or was
more Goddard material than is now accessible to the present author. For
the Kato, for instance, Goddard says that he recorded more than fifty
villages (Goddard, 1909, p. 67); all that remain in his notes are two
village cards numbered 51 and 52 respectively. There may also be some
data, once recorded but now lost, from the Lassik, Nongatl, and Shelter
Cove Sinkyone. I have communicated with the American Museum of Natural
History, where Goddard was a member of the staff, and with Indiana
University, where some of his manuscripts are deposited, but neither of
these institutions has any knowledge of the material in question.
The Merriam and Goddard material, taken together, provides a fair amount
of information on the geography of the California Athabascan groups. We
are now in the position of knowing a great deal about the location of
the tribes, tribelets, and villages of these people, while we know very
little about their way of life, except what can be gained by inference
from the surrounding groups.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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