Yokuts

Two thousand years before Moses appears in the historical record, people were living in the Lake Buena Vista area of California's Central Valley, as noted by archaeologists studying the area. The fragmentary evidence that has been found suggests that nomadic groups plied the area in search of big game almost 8,000 years ago. These individuals may have [Page 729]been the distant ancestors of the Yokuts people of today. Between 600 and 2,000 years ago these aboriginal hunters and gatherers began to acquire the skills necessary to maintain a permanent settlement, and they gradually moved from a nomadic to semi-nomadic and finally to a fixed existence. So attached did the Yokuts become to the land that would be their homeland that even when a tribe member died miles from their home village, extraordinary efforts would be undertaken to return the body to familiar territory. Central to this fundamental shift was the acquisition of knowledge regarding the processing of acorns. Acorn processing had spread throughout most of California's tribes by 1000 CE and allowed early native people the ability to more consistently provide for their nutritional needs. As the competition for food became less acute, these hunters and gatherers formed into groups that would eventually develop into the ancestors of the Yokuts of today.

The territory enjoyed by the Yokuts, according to Alfred Kroeber, once accounted for a “full tenth, possibly an eighth of the area of the state” of California. The area they held was bordered on the west by the Diablo Coastal Mountain Range and on the east by the Sierra Nevada. In the south it extended to the Tehachapi Mountains and in the north to the mouth of the San Joaquin River. In all about 22,000 square miles was claimed by the California Yokuts. Because of the vastness of their lands, the Yokuts have traditionally been divided into three categories to best describe their placement in the valley: the foothill Yokuts, whose territory skirted the foothills of the Sierra Nevada; the valley Yokuts, whose territorial boundaries occupied the floor of the valley to the west of the Sierra Nevada, and the northern Yokuts, who occupied land from the Fresno River northward. Despite the vast territory they claimed, most of the Yokuts people lived on the east side of the valley where rivers and streams drained from the Sierra Nevada Range.

Only two tribes can be confirmed to have resided in the whole west side of the valley, the Tulamni and the Tachi. Because of the aridity of this area, these tribes often made summer pilgrimages to Tulare Lake in search of small game, fish, and relief from the unrelenting heat. In the extreme north of the valley, an accurate count of the Yokuts villages has been lost to history due to incursions from Europeans in the early 19th century. Archaeological evidence, however, indicates that the northern Yokuts were relative latecomers to the northern valley.

In all, an estimated 25,000 native people occupied California's San Joaquin Valley prior to European contact. These people were divided into as many as 50 subtribes, with each band averaging 350 people. According to Alfred Kroeber in his 1925 study of the Indians of California, the Central California tribes were more independent than their Californian neighbors in the development of a unique tribal culture that was not a diffusion of traits garnered from surrounding tribes. This development made the Yokuts unique among California tribes in that they were divided into “true tribes.” Each tribe possessed its own name, dialect, and territory. Despite this delineation of their native territories, Yokuts did not have a martial tradition and cooperatively shared land with other Yokuts tribes.

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