Population
Estimates have varied as scholars struggle to determine the pre-contact populations of most native groups in California. (See Population of Native California.) Alfred L. Kroeber put the combined 1770 population of the Serrano, Kitanemuk, and Tataviam at 3,500 and the Serrano proper (excluding the Vanyume) at 1,500. Lowell John Bean suggested an aboriginal Serrano population of about 2,500.
As noted, smallpox epidemics and social disruption reduced the population. The 1880 census reported only 381 Serranos, a number Helen Hunt Jackson thought was too low as it did not account for those who were living in remote areas. Kroeber estimated the combined population of the Serrano, Kitanemuk, and Tataviam in 1910 as 150.
Read more about this topic: Serrano People
Famous quotes containing the word population:
“The population question is the real riddle of the sphinx, to which no political Oedipus has as yet found the answer. In view of the ravages of the terrible monster over-multiplication, all other riddle sink into insignificance.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“[Madness] is the jail we could all end up in. And we know it. And watch our step. For a lifetime. We behave. A fantastic and entire system of social control, by the threat of example as effective over the general population as detention centers in dictatorships, the image of the madhouse floats through every mind for the course of its lifetime.”
—Kate Millett (b. 1934)
“O for a man who is a man, and, as my neighbor says, has a bone in his back which you cannot pass your hand through! Our statistics are at fault: the population has been returned too large. How many men are there to a square thousand miles in this country? Hardly one.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)