mention and use. They do not believe that these Indians had tribal names, tribal chiefs, or organizations.
These Indians, then, were greatly scattered in villages. Many of these villages spoke the same language, and in this case the group might be said to form a tribe. For instance, one dialect was spoken by the Indians on the east side of the Sacramento Valley, from the American River on the south to Chico Creek on the north, and eastward to the summit of, or perhaps in some places beyond the summit of, the Sierra Nevada Mountains, thus covering a territory of about ninety by fifty miles. From 1840 to 1850 there were from eighty to one hundred villages on that side of the Sacramento Valley, and an Indian population of seven or eight thousand. Yet, though the area and population were large, they had no tribal name, as far as any of the old settlers could ever learn, nor have I been able to trace one in my own researches with Indians belonging to that tribe; I therefore conclude that there was an entire absence of any tribal feature other than language, and that we have here an unconscious, unborn tribe, possibly on the verge of conscious tribal union.
As for the villages, many of them bore the name of the creek on or near which they were situated: for example, Nem-Sa-Win (Nem meaning "good," and Sawin "stream") was the Indian name for Butte Creek, Sulam-Sa-Win for Chico Creek, and Tem-Sa-Win and Kem-Sa-Win for other creeks. An Indian village was situated on each of these streams, and bore the name of the stream.
The majority of the old Indian villages were inhabited between the years 1840 and 1860, and probably a few as late as 1865 or 1870. Most of these villages, it will be seen, had a population of from one to four hundred, excepting Colus, which, according to General Bidwell, had, as late as the year 1845, a population of a thousand or twelve hundred, and which would seem to have been a sort of capital city for the Sacramento Valley Indians. Upon the site of this old rancheria is located the present town of Colusa, which took its name from the Colus village. Many instances of this change of population are to be found throughout the State of California. Thus in the particular region above referred to are to be found the towns of Yuba City, Butte City, and Princeton, all built upon the sites of former rancherias. The city of Marysville, situated not far from the above-named towns, is located between two very old Indian villages, and the town limits even now are impinging upon one of them.
The Indians of this region were dependent upon the streams for existence, their villages being found only upon the banks of the Sacramento River and its tributaries. There were good fishing and hunting along these streams while the fertile soil of the
