Towards a New Population History of California: Mortality and Fertility among Indians and Colonists in Alta California, 1769-1850

Steven Hackel, University of California, Riverside
Jacques Renard, Sorbonne Universite

Since the 1930s, historians and historical demographers have written extensively about Indian population decline in colonial California, and in this work they have placed a special emphasis on the role of infectious disease. This work, however informative and influential, largely has been based on aggregate data and thus it cannot always address the intricacies of population change. A different tradition of scholarship has also observed the population growth among the colonial population of Spanish and Mexican settlers in Mexican California and the relative absence of disease among colonists. But the majority of this work has been imprecise and anecdotal. None of this work on population change in colonial California has sought to understand side by side the diverse population trajectories and disease outcomes of California's Indigenous peoples and the colonists who moved north into California from Northern New Spain. By contrast this paper will present preliminary results from an analysis of new data involving the family reconstitution of more than 105,000 Indians and settlers who lived in California's 21 missions, 4 presidios, and 3 pueblos between 1769 and 1850. The core of this research is a recently completed database thirty years in the making. The exploitation of the data is the result of a decades-long partnership between the two presenters. We look forward to sharing our results and placing them in the context of the historical demography of other colonial regions and early modern communities.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 72. Fertility, Mortality, Plagues and Epidemics