ACORNS WERE FOOD THEN

The Indians of California lived off the land. The only Indians who grew food were the Yuma and Mojave Indians, who lived along the Colorado River. The Yuma planted corn, squash and beans. The other California Indians fished and hunted, of course, and gathered plants. The most accomplished fishermen were the Chumash, who lived along the coast in southern California. The Indians that lived in the Great Basin area, where it was hot and dry, hunted small game and they ate insects. Catching grasshoppers was great sport.

However the most important source of food for most natives was the acorn, which was full of nutrients, and plentiful.

Before the arrival of the Europeans, California was full of natural orchards of oaks, particularly in central California where 60% of the natives lived. . Each tribe had its own oak groves within their territory. A single large oak tree produced an annual acorn crop of 500-1000 pounds per year. An oak starts to produce acorns after it is about 20 years old, and a tree can live to be over 200 years old.

An oak grove with good proportion of producing trees could yield over 100,000 pounds of acorns for a village in a good year.

Oaks produce flowers between February and May. In white oaks, the flowers become acorns in three months. They are harvested in the fall when they have reached maturity and can be shaken from the trees.

It was the job of the women of the tribe to gather the acorns.

The Indians built granaries, typically large storage baskets hung from poles to hold the acorns.

Before the acorns could be eaten they had to processed to remove the tannins (a bitter tasting brown substance also found in grapes).

The process took time. The women removed the acorn meat and ground it into flour, using a flat stone, Then, they placed the flour in a shallow depression and rinsed it repeatedly with hot water. It often took 7-8 rinsings to remove tannin.

The flour that resulted was sometimes made into a flat piece of bread and baked but usually it was combined with water and eaten as a kind of porridge. Sometimes the Indians mixed in berries or honey.

After the Indians began to move into the missions they learned to grow crops, and their diet changed. However many of the early neophytes never lost their love of acorns. In the fall they would return to their village oak groves to gather a new supply to process.