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closeJuan Rodriguez Cabrillo was probably the first European to observe the early residents of the Central Coast.
Cabrillo was sailing north along what is now the Santa Barbara County coast in autumn 1542.
His diary describes them as wearing animal skins and tying their hair in cords with tiny daggers of bone, flint and wood embedded in the braids.
They knew about “oep” (American Indian maize or corn), but did not raise it.
Some of the natives reported that there was oep in the interior hinterlands, along with “cae” (cattle or elk).
They sailed great distances in their “pizmo” or “brea” (tar) caulked tomols (canoes).
Cabrillo first encountered the Chumash off Santa Catalina Island, nearly a hundred miles from their nearest population center on the mainland.
Just off Gaviota, they offered to exchange sardines for the glass trading beads and other gifts that they apparently knew were carried by Spanish mariners.
This suggests that word of Cabrillo’s earlier encounters with native Californians further to the south had reached the Central Coast before the Spanish arrived.
Cabrillo made several attempts to round wind-swept Point Conception, but ultimately returned to the Goleta slough, where he was hosted by the Chumash over the All-Saints Holidays (Oct. 30-Nov. 1, 1542).
The feasting Chumash fed the Spaniards pinoles (pine nuts) and acorn mush cakes that Cabrillo said were very much like tamales “and good to eat.”
More than 200 years later, Juan Gaspar de Portolá’s “Sacred Expedition” marched overland from San Diego, in search of Monterey Bay.
Frey Juan Crespi, the principal diarist of the journey, visited a Chumash village on what is now the Santa Barbara coast:
“(The chief) showed us over his whole village, where all the house roofs were piled thick with barbecued fish, or in other cases fish of the sorts they had brought us, being dried ... some houses (were) large enough to house 60 or more persons.
“Women (were) grinding, toasting foods and making baskets and bowls. All villages have 3 or 4 chiefs with one head (chief who had) multiple wives.
“(They wore their) hair long and supplemented with false hair intertwined with cord and strings of shell beads; looking like they were wearing turbans.
“Chiefs wear a long flint knife attached to a stick on heads. (I) observed shrines and well made goods: flutes, pipes, bowls, boats, baskets.
(They were) well behaved, generous heathens, very much given to dances, bequeathing chains of shell beads upon Spanish and much food.”
Some of the Spanish “soldados” such as Lt. Pedro Fages, the future military governor of Alta California, had a somewhat different view of the reported pacifist nature of the Chumash.
Their view is confirmed by archaeological evidence of sporadic violence. But this violence seems less connected to wars of territorial conquest than to periodic, but cataclysmic, food shortages and breaches of what might be called “the honor code.”
These were the people who would build the Franciscan missions from San Buenaventura to San Luis Obispo.
On Saturday, Janet Potter, who has dedicated her life to bringing the experience of the American Indians in the California Missions to hundreds of school classrooms, will discuss “Chumash in the Mission Environment” in the Youth Center at Mission San Luis Obispo.
The program is free and open to the public. It’s part of the mission’s ongoing docent education program, but you don’t need to be a docent to attend the presentation.
Dan Krieger is a professor emeritus of history at Cal Poly and president of the California Mission Studies Association.
Learn about chumash at the mission
At 9:30 a.m. Saturday, Janet Potter, who has dedicated her life to bringing the experience of the American Indians in the California Missions to hundreds of school classrooms, will discuss “Chumash in the Mission Environment” in the Youth Center of Mission San Luis Obispo.
The program is free and open to the public. It’s a part of the mission’s ongoing docent education program.
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