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The First Californians
WHEN on June 17, 1579 "it pleased God" to send Francis Drake's Golden Hind into the "faire and good bay" north of the Golden Gate, he encountered "the people of the country, having their houses close by the water's edge." Overawed, they supposed the bearded, white-skinned sailors who bestowed on them "necessary things to cover their nakedness" to be gods and "would not be persuaded to the contrary." The men, their faces painted in all colors, left their bows behind on a hill and came down to the shore bearing presents of feathers and tobacco. The women remained on the hill, "tormenting themselves" in some sacrificial frenzy and "tearing the flesh from their cheeks." Their king, "clad with conie skins and other skins," arrived with a retinue of "tall and warlike men," bearing a sceptre. After much singing, dancing, and speech making, they begged Drake to "take their province and kingdom into his hand and become their king."
In the interior Drake's men found other villages. Up and down California, if they had traveled farther, they would have discovered others, for the Indians of California were widely but unevenly scattered over the State's fertile regions. The estimated native population of almost one inhabitant to each square mile was comparatively large; the Central Valley was probably more densely populated than any other part of North America at that time.
For an unknown age before the white man first stumbled upon them in the sixteenth century, the Indians of California had dwelt in their scattered bands, walled off from the rest of the aboriginal world
