From Ahogado to Zorrillo: external causes of mortality in the California missions

Abstract

In recent decades, the literature on virgin soil epidemics has dominated scholarly discussions of Indian population decline in colonial America. Illness and disease – and the high mortality and low fertility that accompanied them – go a long way towards explaining the dramatic decline of the Indian population in Alta California after Spanish colonization began in 1769. But, there are myriad other factors that contributed to Indian depopulation in Spanish and Mexican California, and these have largely escaped the study of historians. Death cause information listed in the burial registers of the California missions and now available through the Early California Population Project suggests that Indian population decline in California before 1850 was accelerated by external factors, such as acts of violence, natural disasters, dangers associated with animals and insects, as well as work- and transportation-related mishaps. These external factors do not in themselves explain Indian population decline, but they add considerably to our understanding of life and death in early California and by extension other corners of colonial America, and they give us a richer understanding of how Indians lived, worked, died, and even prayed in Spanish and Mexican California.

Keywords:

• California
• mortality
• external causes
• Native Americans
• sacramental registers
• virgin soil epidemics
• Franciscan missions
• Early California Population Project

Acknowledgements

Early drafts of this paper were presented at the USC-Huntington American Origins Seminar, the Bay Area Early American History Seminar, and the Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association. The author would like to thank two anonymous reviewers who read this article for this journal and provided unusually helpful guidance, J. David Hacker who provided encouragement and insight at an early stage of this investigation and Seth Archer and Rebecca Wrenn who helped prepare the article for publication.

Notes

^1. Scholarship that invokes the concept of the virgin soil epidemic is immense and growing. For the seminal article, see Crosby (1976); for a recent restatement of the argument see, for example, the synthesis of Calloway (1997, pp. 33–41). Among the earliest and most enthusiastic proponents of the concept is Dobyns (1983).

^2. Few if any scholars doubt the occurrence of virgin soil epidemics – there are no virgin soil epidemic deniers – but an increasing number of historians has sought to refine our understanding of the concept. Some scholars have suggested that ‘indirect episodes’ associated with virgin soil epidemics are in fact more important to population decline than the epidemics themselves. See, for example, Thornton (2002). James Rice (2009) and Paul Kelton (2007) have forced us to rethink the timing of virgin soil epidemics and their methods of introduction and transmission in the New World. Robert McCaa (1995) has helped us to understand both the intensity and chronology of the epidemics that hit colonial Mexico in the sixteenth century. Suzanne Austin Alchon (2003) has placed in a larger context the epidemics that affected Native Americans after Europeans arrived in the New World. She makes a convincing case that virgin soil epidemics were not unique to the New World but were particularly virulent because Indians often experienced multiple epidemics at the same time or within a few years. David S. Jones (2003, 2004) – an M.D. and Ph.D. – has criticized what he sees as scholars' casual and unthinking references to Indians as immunologically defenseless in the face of European diseases and virgin soil epidemics. He has urged us to remember that Indians were without adaptive immunity to only some diseases, such as smallpox and measles, and that Indians had ‘deficient immunity’ to these maladies only when compared to Europeans, who might have contracted them as children. But defenseless, Indians were not. According to Jones, virgin soil epidemics were exceptionally lethal in the New World because of ‘disease synergy’ – the outbreak of many diseases at once – and because epidemics were often intensified by other blows Indians absorbed during the colonial period, namely, malnutrition, poverty, dispossession, and mental stress. In his work, Jones has urged us to understand Indians' susceptibility to disease within the context of Indians' subjugation, rather than vice versa. Along similar lines, scholars have also begun to reassess the degree to which Indians were susceptible to tuberculosis; see McMillen (2008).

^3. Emphasis here is mine.

^4. Estimating the Indian population of California is difficult and speculative. While scholars debate the size of the pre-contact population, most agree that more than 300,000 Indians lived in what is now the state of California in 1769. Sherburne F. Cook's (1976a, 1976b) work is still considered by many to be the most reliable. Cook estimated the precontact population of California in 1769 at 304,000. The population began to decline after 1769, and by 1845 the Indian population had fallen by half, to about 150,000.

^5. Population estimates are for 1820. There is an extensive literature on Indian population decline in California. Among the most important works are Hackel (2005, pp. 65–123), Cook (1976a, 1976b), Jackson (1994), and Cook and Borah (1979, pp. 177–192). Cook (1976a, pp. 1–251) and Jackson and Castillo (1995, pp. 41–72) concentrate on disease, nutrition, sanitation, overcrowding, overwork, and psychological dislocation as factors that contributed to Indian depopulation in California. In his recent work, James A. Sandos (2004, pp. 111–127) emphasizes syphilis and infertility as important factors of Indian population decline in California.

^6. According to the World Health Organization's International Classification of Diseases (ICD), the External Causes of Morbidity and Mortality are typically used as supplementary classifications that are to be paired with classifications found in earlier chapters of the ICD. But California missionaries did not provide enough information to allow this sort of classification. For example, they might state that a man died when he was struck by a falling tree branch, but they would not state where the branch had hit him or the type of injuries sustained.

^7. I examined the burial records of the California missions held at several institutions. The Santa Barbara Mission Archive-Library has photocopies of all of the mission registers. The Henry E. Huntington Library has microfilm copies of the majority of the burial registers. And microfilm copies of most of the burial registers are available through the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints' Family History Centers. Furthermore, in my capacity as General Editor of the Huntington Library's Early California Population Project (ECPP) – an online database of all of these records – not only have I examined copies of all of the original records but I have worked extensively with the database that now encompasses them.

^8. My research was not confined to the online database. See note 7 above. The ECPP is intended as a source for a range of researchers, many of whom will certainly ask questions that cannot now be anticipated. Thus, the database includes a wide range of fields designed to allow for the capturing of all of the information contained in the mission registers. The result is a wide and flexible range of fields designed to allow data entry to expand in relation to the amount of information contained in a given record. In its current form the ECPP database has more than eighty-two fields related to individual baptism records, ninety-two covering the marriages of individuals, and forty-seven concerning burial information. An electronic Guide to Users aids researchers in searching. Information has been transferred directly from the original registers as it appears in the original records. For more information on the ECPP, see Hackel (2006) and Hackel and Reid (2007).

^9. The ECPP is available through the website of the Huntington Library, its host and sponsoring institution. See: http://www.huntington.org/Information/ECPPmain.htm

^10. For a similar study of death causes in mission records, see Landry and Lessard (1996). Landry and Lessard examine causes of death in 4,587 certificates between 1625 and 1799 as drawn from the Programme de Recherche en Démographie Historique (PRDH). This represents 2.2% of the total 208,876 death records in the PRDH during that period. Despite the tremendous differences between Québec and Alta California, death cause records in the two regions are remarkably similar with a few notable exceptions.

^11. These records have gone unexamined not because they are not of interest but because before the ECPP, there was simply no way to efficiently review them in aggregate or to classify them in any meaningful manner. To wade through all the death records for the California missions in search of death cause information would have required years of work. Furthermore, without the linking of records that is at the heart of the Early California Population Project, it would have been nearly impossible to interpret and contextualize information gleaned from the records.

^12. See note 10.

^13. Perhaps, in New France, Jesuit missionaries granted more Indians last rites and thus the link found by Landry and Lessard between a death cause record and the absence of last rites.

^14. For this study I consulted the online version of the ICD-10, Version 2010. See http://apps.who.int/classifications/icd10/browse/2010/en. See Appendix 2 for a guide to how I mapped the death causes recorded by the missionaries onto the modern ICD taxonomy. Since various forms of ‘unknown’ are part of the ICD system of categorization, I have kept the 681 ‘unknown’ records in this tabulation. There are methodological challenges inherent in a study that tries to use archaic and colloquial terms to classify causes of death according to a modern taxonomy. And there is, of course, the problem that in the past deaths were often attributed to what we now see as symptoms, not disease. For example, missionaries often wrote ‘fever’ or ‘pain’ as the cause of death. On this point, see Alter and Carmichael (1996). Despite the methodological challenges, there is a great deal we can learn about life and death in Alta California from these records, especially since they supplement what we can learn through other sources and other methodologies. The ICD has thousands of classifications for disease, representing twenty-one broad categories, not all of which were relevant to Alta California. In this study I divided the death cause records into more than 100 causes that the ICD placed into sixteen broad categories. When the figures for Indians and non-Indians are combined, the figures are close to those of Québec as shown in the work of Landry and Lessard (1996). Infectious disease, Alta California = 24.5%, Québec = 6.0%; Pregnancy, Alta California = 1.93%, Québec = 2.2%; Symptoms, Signs, and Ill-defined Conditions, Alta California = 41.9, Québec = 43.7; Injury and External Causes, Alta California = 28.9, Québec = 45.8. The differences between the figures for infectious diseases in the two provinces have to do with the fact that in Québec only 202 deaths were attributed to smallpox and measles, whereas in Alta California those diseases were blamed for the deaths of 658 people. And the figure for injuries and external causes is much higher for Québec because in Québec some 1,302 individuals drowned in Québec's waterways; there was no comparably dangerous activity in Alta California.

^15. While evidence suggests that nearly all missions in North America were lethal to Indian populations over time, missions in colonial Paraguay may have actually allowed Indian populations to recover and survive (Jackson, 2008; Livi-Bacci & Maeder, 2004).