“Of the Vegetable articles of diet the acorn was the principal one.  It was deprived of its bitter taste by grinding, running through sieves made of interwoven grasses, and frequent washings.  Another one was Chia, the seeds of Salvia Columbariae, which in appearance are somewhat similar to birdseed.  They were roasted, ground, and used as a food by being mixed with water.  Thus prepared, it soon develops into a mucilaginous mass, larger than its original bulk.  Its taste is somewhat like that of linseed meal.  It is exceedingly nutritious, and was readily borne by the stomach when that organ refused to tolerate other aliment.  An atole, or gruel, of this was one of the peace offerings to the first visiting sailors.  One tablespoonful of these seeds was sufficient to sustain for twenty-four hours an Indian on a forced march.  Chia was no less prized by the native Californian, and at this late date it frequently commands $6 or $8 a pound.

“The pinion, the fruit of the pine, was largely used, and until now annual expeditions are made by the few surviving members of the coast tribes to the mountains for a supply.  That they cultivated maize in certain localities, there can be but little doubt.  They intimated to Cabrillo by signs that such was the case, and the supposition is confirmed by the presence at various points of vestiges of irrigating ditches.  Yslay, the fruit of the wild cherry, was used as a food, and prepared by fermentation as an intoxicant.  The seeds, ground and made into balls, were esteemed highly.  The fruit of the manzanita, the seeds of burr clover, malva, and alfileri, were also used.  Tunas, the fruit of the cactus, and wild blackberries, existed 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.