Population
Further information: Population of Native CaliforniaEstimates for the pre-contact populations of most native groups in California have varied substantially. The anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber thought that the 1770 population of the Chumash might have been about 10,000. Alan K. Brown concluded that the population was not over 15,000. Sherburne F. Cook at various times estimated the aboriginal Chumash as 8,000, 13,650, 20,400, and 18,500.
Some scholars have suggested that Chumash population may have declined substantially during a "protohistoric" period (1542–1769 CE) when intermittent contacts with the crews of Spanish ships—including those of Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo's expedition who wintered in the Santa Barbara Channel in AD 1542-43—brought disease and death. But the Chumash appear to have been thriving in the late 18th century when Spaniards first began actively colonizing the California coast. Whether the deaths began earlier with the contacts with ships' crew, or only later with the construction of several Spanish missions at Ventura, Santa Barbara, Lompoc, Santa Inez, and San Luis Obispo, the Chumash were eventually devastated by Old World diseases such as influenza and smallpox, to which they had no immunological resistance. By 1900, their numbers had declined to just 200. Estimates of Chumash people today range from 2,000 to 5,000.
Read more about this topic: Chumash People
Famous quotes containing the word population:
“The paid wealth which hundreds in the community acquire in trade, or by the incessant expansions of our population and arts, enchants the eyes of all the rest; the luck of one is the hope of thousands, and the bribe acts like the neighborhood of a gold mine to impoverish the farm, the school, the church, the house, and the very body and feature of man.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Like other cities created overnight in the Outlet, Woodward acquired between noon and sunset of September 16, 1893, a population of five thousand; and that night a voluntary committee on law and order sent around the warning, “if you must shoot, shoot straight up!””
—State of Oklahoma, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most. The power which the sea requires in the sailor makes a man of him very fast, and the change of shores and population clears his head of much nonsense of his wigwam.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)