In the San Jacinto Mountains, 127 years ago, “I sat one evening in the Coahuia [Cahuilla] valley and watched an old Indian woman prepare her evening meal,” David P. Barrows wrote in the March 1896 Land of Sunshine magazine.1
“Between her knees, as she sat on the ground, she held her basket-mortar, and with the heavy pestle, used with both hands, she ground to a beautiful fineness her wheat and chia seed. Occasionally she threw in a handful of grain and a little additional chia; and at last, to reduce it very fine, a few spoonfuls of iron-pyrites picked by her patient fingers out of the sandy creek bottom.
“Her head was covered with a conical basket-hat or yumu-wal, and her grizzled hair, abundant as when she was a maiden, waved about her neck in the soft evening breeze. Her wide chin was tatooed with pretty, wavy lines running downward from the lower lip; a design drawn first with charcoal paint and then pricked in forever with a cactus thorn. Between the pauses in her work she laughed and chatted with cheery good nature, and stirred a mess of wild elderberries stewing in an earthen olla over the fire.”
Photo accompanying “The Coahuia Food-Gatherer,” by David Barrows in The Land of Sunshine: A Magazine of California and the Southwest, March 1896, Vol. 4, 4:164-168. The caption reads, “Grinding on the metate.” Photo by D.P. Barrows.
“… The dark mountains about her, the rocky little valley in which was her home, the white, arid desert below, had afforded her all her living,” David Barrows wrote. “She had but to throw her great packing basket over her back and explore cañon or plain to return with it full.
Gathering
“ … Early in the morning, as the first rays of sunshine strike the pines on the top of Coahuia mountain, little wreaths of smoke begin to ascend from the silent jacales; and a woman with a great earthen olla on her back comes noiselessly down the hill to the rock-walled spring for water,” he wrote.
Photo accompanying “The Coahuia Food-Gatherer,” by David Barrows in The Land of Sunshine: A Magazine of California and the Southwest, March 1896, Vol. 4, 4:164-168. The caption reads, “Coahuias winnowing wheat.” Photo by Herve Friend.
“And from another lowly home an old woman starts out over the brushy hills followed closely by a big, gaunt dog. She has gone to gather a breakfast for her family, and in an hour or two she comes back over the dim trail with her basket full. Perhaps she has found a mess of elderberries which will make a sweet sauce; or a lot of green, sticky pods from the dry stalk of the yucca palm to be roasted among the coals. Or perhaps she has taken with her her yi-kow-a-pic or seed fan, woven of willow wands and rawhide and shaped like a light tennis racket, and with this has beaten her basket full of seeds, sámat (chia) or á-sil or ák-lo-kal, beautiful masses of brown, red or grey, nutritive beyond belief, and easily ground and sifted into a fine meal.
“Whatever season it is, she never returns empty handed. Her patient search, her knowledge of every plant and its locality reward her with abundant food. In that hard and trying country about the desert, everything that purposes to survive must be adapted for abundant reproduction. Every plant literally runs to seed. We find no luscious fruits, pulpy, juicy masses of sweetness, but only little withered bags of skin, filled with quantities of seeds, hanging from some dry and leafless stalk; or huge, disproportionate pits, surrounded by juiceless pulp.
Delicious and nutritious meals
“But the Coahuia foodgetter is unbaffled.
“She beats the seeds from the stony fruits and pounds them up into flour. She casts aside the deceitful pulp of the wild plum and cherry and saves the pit. This she grinds in her wonderful mill; and if it is bitter and unpalatable, she drains away its bitterness with water. For this purpose she has ready a wide willow basket filled with sand, smoothed into a concave surface. On this the meal is piled and the water is poured through. Sometimes a hole, scooped in a sand-bed on the creek bottom, suffices.
“Acorns from many different species of oaks are sweetened in this way. … The pine cones, too, yield their oily nuts. At Santa Rosa village, high among the pines on Torres mountain, a great harvest of these can be gathered.”
Photo accompanying “The Coahuia Food-Gatherer,” by David Barrows in The Land of Sunshine: A Magazine of California and the Southwest, March 1896, Vol. 4, 4:164-168. The caption reads, “Gathering seeds.” Photo by David Barrows.
“But the foods that come from the desert fairly amaze us. The characteristic plants of the sandy Southwest are the mesquite and the mescal [desert agave]. The mesquite has at least two bean-bearing varieties, the algaroba or honey mesquite and the screwbean. The mesquite sometimes grows to the height of a tree, and from its prickly branches centals of pods can be gathered. The white expanse of Coyote cañon is dotted with trees bearing food for an army. The beans are dried and then pounded into flour.
“But the mescal [desert agave, amul in Cahuilla] is the wonder of the desert. It first appears above the sand as a round ‘cabbage head’ of succulent layers; it finally shoots up a stalk, sappy with sugared juice, and from this stalk break out clusters of gorgeous, yellow blossoms. Every part of this wonderful plant yields food. The cabbage head and stalks are roasted in a pit of hot stones and will then keep for a year or two ; dark pieces of sweet, fibrous food. The blossoms are picked when in full bloom, are boiled and dried and kept for future use. The fibres beaten from the spines are woven into twenty useful articles, ropes, cordage, brooms, sandals, and saddle mats. From the sugary head may be distilled a fiery brandy, and fermented a wine, the mescal and pulque of Mexico.”
In 1996: The late Daniel McCarthy using a traditional stick made from mountain mahogany to uproot an agave plant for the Malki Museum’s second agave harvest and roast. He helped establish the agave roast. (Courtesy of Malki Matters newsletter, Summer 1996, p. 4)
Editor’s note: 127 years later, you can taste delicious roasted agave and other Native foods at the Malki Museum’s annual agave roast, Saturday, April 8, 2023, from 10 am to 3 pm at the museum, 11-795 Malki Road, on Morongo Reservation. It’s one of our favorite Malki events. MORE INFO HERE.
And … A little about David Prescott Barrows (1873-1954)
Eighteen-year-old David Prescott Barrows was camping with his family around the year 1891 in Strawberry Valley in the San Jacinto Mountains when he first attended a Native American Cahuilla celebration. As a Pomona College student he returned frequently to study Cahuilla culture. His consultants included members of the Lubo, Lugo, and Costo families, and he especially befriended the Costos, according to a biographical account by the late Harry Lawton. The young Barrows shared a few of his experiences (as shown here) in The Land of Sunshine, a monthly 1890s magazine that boosted the wonders of Southern California. Barrows then wrote an ethnobotany for his 1897 doctoral dissertation at University of Chicago, which the university published in 1900. Malki Museum Press republished Ethno-Botany of the Coahuilla Indians in 1967 with essays by Harry Lawton, Lowell Bean, and William Bright.
Thank you!
Thanks for reading along. Thanks for supporting our nonprofit Dorothy Ramon Learning Center, led by Elder Ernest Siva (Cahuilla-Serrano), now in its 20th year of saving and sharing Southern California’s cultures, languages, history, and traditional arts. And as always, thanks from Center leaders Ernest and June Siva and Editor Pat Murkland for reading, liking, subscribing, and sharing News from Dorothy Ramon Learning Center, your FREE online weekly newsletter. EMAIL. March 30, 2023.
Excerpt from David P. Barrows, The Land of Sunshine: A Magazine of California and the Southwest, “The Coahuia Food-Gatherer,” March 1896, Vol. 4, 4:164-168.