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THE BOTANICAL LORE OF THE CALIFORNIA INDIANS
byJohn Bruno Romero(Ha-Ha-St of Tawee)
Rare Indian lore collected and interpreted by a full-blooded Chu-Mash Indian, who grew up among members of the Cahuilla tribe, is revealed in this unique book. Written by a man who is anxious to share his ancestral knowledge of the treasures in the Great Field of Nature, this volume describes 120 medicinal herbs and gives recipes for their preparation, their uses, their English and Latin names, and where they may be found.
The collection presented here was hand-picked from 500 specimens gathered by the author on a plant-hunting expedition on the Pacific Coast and in Arizona. Only twenty-eight, it is said, are known to modern medical science.
For more than one hundred years, the Indians have kept to themselves their profound knowledge of medicinal herbs and their application. Meanwhile, if the Indian, with his intelligent and extraordinary attachment to nature, had not preserved and replanted a large number of these herbs, many of them would now be extinct.
A close collaborator of the historical department of the Santa Ana Museum in his native California, the author is known as a botanist of such high order that some years back the British Museum sought his assistance in assembling a remarkable collectionof Pacific Coast specimens of medicinal herbs and Indian artifacts.
Mr. Romero, whose Indian name is Ha-Ha-St of Tawee, presents his material in highly entertaining manner, and his remarks, some of themsotto voce, are extremely apropos. Adding to the color of the book is a wonderful legend written by the author’s father, Chief Als Pablo, Chief of Police of the Indian reservations in the Southwest at the turn of the century.
The book is dedicated to the memory of the author’s uncle, Chief William Pablo of Guana-pia-pa, medical herbalist and medicine man. It is a unique treasury of authentic Americana, fortunately preserved for our time.
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VANTAGE PRESS, INC.120 W. 31st St., New York 1
JOHN BRUNO ROMERO
John Bruno Romero
John Bruno Romero is a descendant of the Chu-Mash, once the largest and most powerful of Indian tribes, whose domain included all the islands along the California Coast, and, on the mainland, from the San Fernando Mission northwest to San Francisco and north-northwest to the High Sierras.
Mr. Romero was born in Santa Barbara, where he studied Spanish and Latin at the Franciscan School Mission, and attended the Sherman Institute, where he was a student of English and scientific subjects. He was later graduated from the Detroit Veterinarian College.
At one time, the Cahuilla Indians controlled the lands of California southward to the end of what is now the Mexican peninsula. When the Chu-Mash tribe, in its later years, had dwindled in numbers, Mr. Romero joined the Cahuilla tribe “to help fight the United States Government for our land treaty rights.” Today this tribe is the second oldest in California and the strongest in membership.
The author’s interests are wide. He is a director of Indian Affairs for seven Southern California counties, and while his principal hobby is medicinal botany, he is also a collector of minerals, stamps, books, and fossils, and dabbles in taxidermy. Fond of children, he has adopted and reared ten orphans. At one time or another, he has worked as a surveyor, explorer, geologist, and antho-botanist, and his home is a veritable treasure trove of interesting archaeological, geological, and botanical specimens which he has collected in the mountains and deserts of Southern California and Arizona—in sections where the white man has seldom traveled.
In 1933 he discovered, in the Trabuco Hills, in Orange County, near Los Angeles, the skeleton of a mastodon, one of the few uncovered in Southern California. Paleontologists at the Los Angeles Museum made varying estimates of the age of the bones, ranging from ten thousand to a million years.
In 1937, when the author was a junior geologist at the Santa Ana Museum, he deciphered the hieroglyphics inscribed on some rocks found on the Indian prayer grounds at the peak of a volcanic vent in La Piomosa range in Arizona, which have been instrumental in providing historical information about the life of the early Indians in the Southwest. The inscriptions revealed the location of food and water in the surrounding country and primitive conceptions of the supernatural.