South of the Tuolumne are the Merced River, Mariposa Creek, and the Chowchilla River, all within the territory of the southern Miwok (see maps 1 and 4, areas 5E, 5F, 6). The earliest of the midcentury counts pertaining to the region is probably that of Savage (Dixon, MS, 1875) who put 2,100 persons on the Merced but omitted reference to any other stream between the Tuolumne and the upper San Joaquin. Ryer, in a bill submitted July 31, 1851, claimed to have vaccinated 695 persons along the Merced, principally on the lower course of that river. The value, corrected according to the system adopted previously, is 977. McKee, Barbour, and Wozencraft in a report on May 15, 1851 (Wozencraft, 1851) described the proposed reservation No. 1 between the Tuolumne and the Merced and estimated the total number of Indians on both rivers as 2,000 to 3,000, or let us say 1,250 on the Merced alone. The map of Adam Johnston, dated in early 1852, shows 500 persons on the Merced, but these were reservation Indians. The state census of 1852, as cited by the Sacramento Union for November 17, 1852, gave 4,533 persons for Mariposa County, a figure which no doubt included all the natives from the Tuolumne to the Fresno River. H. W. Wessels on August 21, 1853, wrote that there were 500 to 700 Indians on the Stanislaus and Tuolumne, 500 to 600 on the upper San Joaquin and that the entire area contained 2,500 to 3,000 (Wessels, 1857). The Merced-Fresno region therefore accounted for somewhere between 1,000 and 1,700. A rough average for all these rather haphazard estimates would be 1,000 natives on the Merced watershed and another 1,000 on the Mariposa and the Chowchilla, or 2,000 in all. We may now turn to the village lists. Unfortunately, Gifford did not work south of the Tuolumne but we have the list given by Kroeber in the Handbook (1925) for the southern Miwok and two manuscript lists of Merriam (entitled "Mewuk Village List" and "Indian Village and Camp Sites in Yosemite Valley and Merced Canyon"). For the middle Merced Valley, from a point some ten miles below El Portal to the base of the foothills, Kroeber and Merriam both list 14 villages, to which Merriam alone adds another 10. From El Portal to a point six or seven miles downstream Merriam has found no less than 15 villages. In Yosemite Valley itself he has located 33 villages, of which 12 are qualified as either camps or summer villages, leaving 20 which he presumes are permanent. On the upper Merced, above Yosemite, and the headwaters of the Chowchilla, Kroeber has found the name of one village and Merriam one. Clearly this area has never been investigated exhaustively. For the well-known portion of the river, therefore, there are 59 located villages.