in abundance, and were much relished. A
sugar was extracted from a certain reed of the tulares."

Acorns, seeds, mesquite beans, and dried meat were all pounded up in a
well made granite mortar, on the top of which, oftentimes, a basket
hopper was fixed by means of pine gum. Some of these mortars were hewn
from steatite, or soapstone, others from a rough basic rock, and many of
them were exceedingly well made and finely shaped; results requiring
much patience and no small artistic skill. Oftentimes these mortars were
made in the solid granite rocks or boulders, found near the harvesting
and winnowing places, and I have photographed many such during
late years.

These Indians were polygamists, but much of what the missionaries and
others have called their obscenities and vile conversations, were the
simple and unconscious utterances of men and women whose instincts were
not perverted. It is the invariable testimony of all careful observers
of every class that as a rule the aborigines were healthy, vigorous,
virile, and chaste, until they became demoralized by the whites. With
many of them certain ceremonies had a distinct flavor of sex worship: a
rude phallicism which exists to the present day. To the priests, as to
most modern observers, these rites were offensive and obscene, but to
the Indians they were only natural and simple prayers for the
fruitfulness of their wives and of the other producing forces.

J.S. Hittell says of the Indians of California:

"They had no religion, no conception of a deity, or of a
future life, no idols, no form of worship, no priests, no
philosophical conceptions, no historical traditions, no
proverbs, no mode of recording thought before the coming of
the missionaries among them."

Seldom has there been so much absolute misstatement as in this
quotation. Jeremiah Curtin, a life-long student of the Indian, speaking
of the same Indians, makes a remark which applies with force to these
statements:

"The Indian, _at every step_, stood face to face with
divinity as he knew or understood it. He could never escape
from the presence of those powers who had made the first
world.... The most important question of all in Indian life
was communication with divinity, intercourse with the spirits
of divine personages."

In his _Creation Myths of Primitive America_, this studious author gives
the names of a number of divinities, and th