A Californian Messianic Movement of 1801 among the Chumash

AMERICAN ANTHROPOWGIST [N. s., 43, 1941 A CALIFORNIAN MESSIANIC MOVEMENT OF 1801 AMONG THE CHUMASH Recently while engaged in a search through the Spanish California Mission archives of the Bancroft Library of the University of California, I happened upon an interesting, very brief account of a messianic movement. Because its availability may be of future value, I reproduce it in translation below.! So far as I know, this is the earliest historical record of such a movement in California, and is chiefly of value by reason of its early date. Although much has been written on the Ghost Dance in California,2 we have li,ttle or no knowledge of defeatist cults which originated in the State. It is possible that this type of reaction, explainable as a desperate expedient to seek relief from oppression, was fairly com­ mon in the mission district of California in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. There are certain indications that the major revolt, in 1824, of the Santa Barbara Channel missions is explainable in these terms. It is to be hoped that the mission archives will some day be searched for evidence of this sort. The account, given below, is an excerpt of a letter from Fr. Estevan Tapis to Jose Joaquin Arrillaga, Gobernador de la N. California, March 1, 1805. It may be found in the Bancroft Library, University of California, in the Archivo de la Mision de Santa Barbara, Papeles Miscelaneos VI: pp. 33-34. In the year 1801, when an epidemic of pneumonia and a waist ailment [pleu­ risy?] caused the death of many pagans and Christians, a single female neophyte succeeded in deceiving the Christian Indians of Santa Barbara. It happened that after a pretended trance she said that Chupu (an idol worshipped in the Channel region)3 appeared to her and told her that the pagan Indians were to die if they were baptized, and that the same fate was to befall the Christian Indians who would not give alms [offerings] to Chupu, and who would refuse to wash their heads with a certain water. At the very time it occurred, that is to say midnight, the news of the revelation spread immediately through all the houses of the Mission; almost all the neophytes, the alcaldes included, went to the house of the visionary to present beads and seeds, and to go through the rite of renouncing Christianity. The particular point of the intrigue, and that which matters, is that the fashion extended to all the Indian settlements of the Channel and of the Sierra, and that the missionaries did not know about it. Chupu had revealed at the same time that all those who would report 1 I wish to express my indebtedness to Dr A. Metraux for assistance in translating this rather difficult passage. 2 Cora Du Bois, The 1870 Ghost Dance (University of California Anthropological Records 3, No.1, 1939) has treated this cult in detail. See also A. H. Gayton, The Ghost Dance of 1870 in South-Central California. (University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 28, pp. 57-82, 1930.) • A. L. Kroeber, Handbook of the Indians of California (Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 78, 1925, p. 567) mentions a god Achup or Chupu whose worship a missionary report of 1810 describes as being broken up among the Purisima natives. In the 1824 revolt the Purisima neophytes were the worst offenders. All this may indicate a persistent antagonism among the Chumash toward the Spanish.