Puhú (''Payómkawichum'': “its arrow place”) was a major residential village in the

Santa Ana Mountains The Santa Ana Mountains are a short peninsular mountain range along the coast of Southern California in the United States. They extend for approximately southeast of the Los Angeles Basin largely along the border between Orange and Riversid ...

shared by the

Tongva The Tongva ( ) are an Indigenous peoples of California, Indigenous people of California from the Los Angeles Basin and the Channel Islands of California, Southern Channel Islands, an area covering approximately . In the precolonial era, the peop ...

Acjachemen The Acjachemen () are an Indigenous people of California. Published maps often identify their ancestral lands as extending from the beach to the mountains, south from what is now known as Aliso Creek (Orange County), Aliso Creek in Orange County, ...

, Payómkawichum, and Serrano near Santiago Peak. The village resided approximately 600m above sea level in the upper areas of the Black Star Canyon. The village was at its height from the years 1220–1770. The village retained its multi-seasonal occupancy and economic and political systems up until its destruction and a communal massacre in 1832. The Puhú site is listed as a

California Historical Landmark A California Historical Landmark (CHL) is a building, structure, site, or place in the U.S. state of California that has been determined to have statewide historical landmark significance. Criteria Historical significance is determined by meetin ...

as the ''Black Star Canyon Indian Village Site'', registered in 1935 and named after the Black Star Coal Mining Company that operated in the area in the late nineteenth century. The village site is north of the town of Silverado.

Village life

Several archaeological excavations of Puhú were conducted from the 1930s onward and found that it featured "17 bedrock milling/

rock art In archaeology, rock arts are human-made markings placed on natural surfaces, typically vertical stone surfaces. A high proportion of surviving historic and prehistoric rock art is found in caves or partly enclosed rock shelters; this type al ...

features surrounding a single mounded habitation

midden A midden is an old dump for domestic waste. It may consist of animal bones, human excrement, botanical material, mollusc shells, potsherds, lithics (especially debitage), and other artifacts and ecofacts associated with past human oc ...

." The nearby

village of Pamajam was located near Puhú in a meadow in a small valley with a body of water and marsh, or ''cinega'', with a view of the

Channel Islands The Channel Islands are an archipelago in the English Channel, off the French coast of Normandy. They are divided into two Crown Dependencies: the Jersey, Bailiwick of Jersey, which is the largest of the islands; and the Bailiwick of Guernsey, ...

. San Gabriel Mission records referred to Christian converts of this village as Pamaibit, which was derived from the word ''pa'ajvar'', meaning "above." This village was located near what is now referred to as

Corona, California Corona (Spanish language, Spanish for "Crown") is a city in northwestern Riverside County, California, United States, directly bordering Orange County, California, Orange and San Bernardino County, California, San Bernardino counties. Its curre ...

. For meat supply, the village primarily subsisted on

mule deer The mule deer (''Odocoileus hemionus'') is a deer indigenous to western North America; it is named for its ears, which are large like those of the mule. Two subspecies of mule deer are grouped into the black-tailed deer. Unlike the related whit ...

. Other animals, such as bears, ravens, and mountain lions were not consumed, likely because of their position as "animal ancestors/deities within Chinigchinich religion." Shell ornaments were likely an important crafting resource for the village. The village had trade connections with the

San Joaquin Valley The San Joaquin Valley ( ; Spanish language in California, Spanish: ''Valle de San Joaquín'') is the southern half of California's Central Valley (California), Central Valley. Famed as a major breadbasket, the San Joaquin Valley is an importa ...

Great Basin The Great Basin () is the largest area of contiguous endorheic watersheds, those with no outlets to the ocean, in North America. It spans nearly all of Nevada, much of Utah, and portions of California, Idaho, Oregon, Wyoming, and Baja Californi ...

, and

Colorado River The Colorado River () is one of the principal rivers (along with the Rio Grande) in the Southwestern United States and in northern Mexico. The river, the List of longest rivers of the United States (by main stem), 5th longest in the United St ...

regions.

Destruction

By 1810, the village was becoming closer to private ranch allotments, such as

Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana was a Spanish land concession in present-day Orange County, California, given by Spanish Alta California governor José Joaquín de Arrillaga in 1810 to Jose Antonio Yorba and his nephew Pablo Peralta. The grant ex ...

, given out by Spanish colonial authorities. After a claim that the village residents had stolen horses and other livestock (cattle, sheep, goats, pigs) for a period of several months to subsist on due to alleged food shortages in 1832, the village was massacred by American and Mexican fur trappers, led by William Wolfskill. In a recount of the event, it was claimed that "the Indians were very fond of horseflesh" and that they were "feasting on juicy horseflesh" at the time of the raid on the village. According to the account, only a few villagers survived the raid by escape.

Memorialization

After a publication of the story in 1931, the story of the massacre became part of Orange County folklore and textual history.Acebo Nathan Patrick Barbara L Voss Ian Hodder Li Liu Lee M Panich Michael V Wilcox and Stanford University. 2020. �
Re-Assembling Radical Indigenous Autonomy in the Alta California Hinterlands : Survivance at Puhú.
�� Dissertation Stanford University. Stanford University. As a result, this memorialization urged interest in excavation of the area. From 1936 to 1937, the village site was poorly excavated by the

Works Progress Administration The Works Progress Administration (WPA; from 1935 to 1939, then known as the Work Projects Administration from 1939 to 1943) was an American New Deal agency that employed millions of jobseekers (mostly men who were not formally educated) to car ...

(WPA), which took 200 kg of artifacts from the site without cataloguing or analyzing them. The artifacts were spread throughout various museums, while others were cast off as too fragmented to preserve or study. The WPA mischaracterized the village as a small hunting and acorn-processing camp, rather than a large village.Acebo, Nathan P. 2021. “Survivance Storytelling in Archaeology.” In The Routledge Handbook of the Archaeology of Indigenous-Colonial Interaction in the Americas, edited by Lee M. Panich and Sara L. Gonzalez, 468–85. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429274251. The narrative of the villagers memorialized has since been critiqued based on in-depth research, both in relation to the size of the village and the activities of the villagers. The claim that villagers were consuming horse flesh has been identified as a common trope promoted by Spanish colonial authorities, particularly in the

Alta California Alta California (, ), also known as Nueva California () among other names, was a province of New Spain formally established in 1804. Along with the Baja California peninsula, it had previously comprised the province of , but was made a separat ...

region. Scientific analysis of the village's

in 2021 found that no horse or European livestock remains were present.

References

{{Coord, 33.8025, -117.6558, display=title Santa Ana Mountains California Historical Landmarks Former Native American populated places in California History of Orange County, California Tongva populated places Serrano populated places

Village life

Destruction

Memorialization

See also

References