One Thursday in November 1856, a Marysville Herald reporter visited the native people of Yuba City, California. It is not necessary for us to speak of their filth, and other circumstances connected with their miserable condition, he wrote. We would rather ask, is there no method by which they could be made to improve themselves? In their council hall, as it is called, but more properly a deep dirty pit, with poles for bunks, and everything else in keeping, we saw three chiefs, and a dozen or more captains, large, muscular men, squatted on the ground by bowls of acorn mush, lazily lying in their bunks, with a few unraveling a red comfort, to bedeck themselves for some imbecile fandango. There is to us something so utterly abhorrent in the thought that they must waste away life like that in inactivity, or by the more speedy process of dissipation, to which they are becoming addicted. Could not those who live among us by some law be required to bind out their children to farmers and others, for a given period, so as to make them useful, and thus induct them to habits of cleanliness and industry?
While twentieth-century anthropologists emphatically reject the reporter’s moral judgments, until recently they did agree that California’s natives were no farmers. They held that California, like most of North America during neolithic times, was for millennia a wilderness populated by hunter-gatherers. Before Columbus landed, they believed, American agriculture was confined to southwestern and eastern tribes, who cultivated beans, corns, and squash. California’s natives neither sowed nor reaped. They appeared to fit the hunter-gatherer profile precisely, subsisting entirely on what nature offered them--grass seed, salmon, game, and acorns.
But recent research suggests that California’s natives weren’t waiting for the manna of acorns to fall from the trees into their hands. Instead, anthropologists and ethnographers increasingly view the state’s first inhabitants as agriculturists. True, they didn’t plant grains or vegetables or cultivate fruit trees, but they employed intensive horticultural practices to ensure that oak trees would flourish. In their own way, they farmed oaks.
Anyone who has ever nibbled on a raw acorn might doubt that the things are edible, let alone worth cultivating. But once the nuts have been processed to remove their tannins, which are responsible for the acrid taste, acorns are an impressive source of nourishment. With up to 18 percent fat, 6 percent protein, and 68 percent carbohydrate, depending on the species, they compare favorably with modern grains--wheat and corn register about 2 percent fat, 10 percent protein, and 75 percent carbohydrate. The acorns’ richness and abundance made them the staff of life for California’s natives.
