This
people had no burial ceremonies, no notion of a life hereafter, no word
for soul, spiritual existence, or vital principle. They thought that
when they died, that was the last of them. The Catholic missionaries who
undertook the unpromising task of converting them to Christianity, were
at first obliged to depend upon the imperfect translations of half-breed
interpreters. These "made the idea of soul intelligible to their hearers
by telling them they had a gut which never rotted, and that this was
their living principle!" Yet even they were not destitute of religious
notions. No tribe was more addicted to the observance of charms, omens,
dreams, and guardian spirits, and they believed that illness and bad
luck generally were the effects of the anger of a fabulous old
woman.[234-1] The aborigines of the Californian peninsula were as near
beasts as men ever become. The missionaries likened them to "herds of
swine, who neither worshipped the true and only God, nor adored false
deities.
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