THE REVEREND STEPHEN BOWERS

PIONEER CALIFORNIA ARCHAEOLOGIST

Arlene Benson, an archaeologist, was a long-term resident of Simi Valley. Her masters thesis was on the field notes of the Rev. Stephen Bowers, a Methodist minister and an early archaeologist who excavated throughout the Chumash Indian area from 1875 through 1889. In 1997 she published The Noontide Sun: The Field Journals of the Reverend Stephen Bowers, Pioneer California Archaeologist, Ballena Press Anthropological Papers No. 44. The Rev. Bowers’ work was largely financed by the Smithsonian Institute and the U.S. Department of Interior, under John Wesley Powell. His intent was to salvage the best Chumash artifacts for our national museum before private collectors and foreign archaeologists could get to them. In the end, much of what he collected was traded to foreign museums for materials from those countries. Besides artifacts, human skulls were of great interest to science at the time. While the Rev. Bowers’ work did not involve modern field methods, indeed, it generally can be characterized more as the robbing of historic period graves, it must be remembered that the field of archaeology and the methodology we now know did not exist in the 1870s. Indeed, an educated person of the time would not have recognized the word “archaeologist”. So, the Rev. Bowers was a pioneer in his profession.

His field notes, letters and unpublished manuscripts were copied by the Rev. Arthur Harrington from materials in the possession of De Moss Bowers on behalf of his uncle, John Peabody Harrington, the now famous linguist, archaeologist and anthropologist, who singlehandedly collected more information about north American Indians than all of the other anthropologists of his time. His brother and Art Harrington’s father was Robert Harrington, a prominent pioneer farmer in Simi Valley. Art Harrington served the local Methodist community until his retirement. His daughter and her family still live in the Robert Harrington house on Wilson Road, just off of Harrington Road.

Rev. Bowers was deeply puzzled by what had happened to the Chumash Indians. He recognized that the ship logs of  Juan Rodriques Cabrillo, who explored the coast in 1542, left the impression that the Santa Barbara Channel Islands and the Santa Barbara and Ventura county coasts were densely populated. Cabrillo and subsequent explorers describe coastal area that literally swarmed with Indians. He never came up with a satisfactory answer to his question.

What Rev. Bowers could not have known and what has only recently become understood in science is that the Indians of the new world lacked the immunity system to combat the effects of eastern hemisphere diseases. An infection as innocent as the common cold would impact an Indian more seriously than the person of European or of part European descent from which they contracted the disease. By the time the next two or three Indians had contracted the common cold, it became a killer disease – more deadly with each subsequent infection. More serious ailments, such as smallpox, diphtheria, measles, and influenza carried an even higher mortality. The reason for this high mortality is now understood. The effect, throughout both north and south Americas was a 75-80 percent mortality after the first sustained contact with persons of western culture. This same effect is still seen when the tribes of the Amazon River Basin are contacted and exposed to eastern hemisphere diseases. The inevitable result of the contact of people from the eastern hemisphere with the peoples of the Americas was the near extermination of those people. This holocaust, which devastated the indigenous peoples of the new world, would have happened even if the old world peoples had been content to only establish trade relations with the peoples of the new world. To a large extent it probably was the single most important factor that enabled the success of the invasion and conquest of the new world.

In his own words:

What has become of this once populous race? In Cabrillo’s day they swarmed in multiplied thousands on the islands south of Santa Barbara Channel and on the shore of the mainland. Intermediate voyagers confirm Cabrillo’s statement. Their numerous village sites tell the same story. But now not one is left to tell the story of existence. The whole have melted away before the light of another civilization, as the snow melts before the noon-tide sun.

                                                                        March 1878

The Rev. Bowers interviewed an old Indian, named Omset, who had been removed from Santa Rosa Island some 60 years before. Omset told him that the Indians on Santa Rosa Island were call Chumas. Bowers’ use of the name Chumash in his publications seemed to have resulted in the name being applied by others to the peoples of the entire linguistic group.

                                                                                    Mike Kuhn

11-25-04