Vanyume Erotic

The Vanyume were the desert branch of the Serrano, a small Native Californian people who lived along the Mojave River in what is now San Bernardino County until the early nineteenth century, when mission recruitment, disease and frontier violence emptied their villages. They did not survive as a separate community, but their descendants are counted among the Serrano today, including families at the San Manuel reservation. The name comes from their Mohave neighbors. The Franciscan traveler Francisco Garcés, who walked through their country in 1776, wrote it as Beñemé, and scholars now often say simply Desert Serrano.

Their world was a river that barely behaves like one. The Mojave runs north and east out of the San Bernardino Mountains into open desert, traveling underground for most of its length and surfacing only where bedrock forces it up: the narrows at present-day Victorville, stretches near Barstow, Afton Canyon. Then it dies in the dry lakes around Soda Lake. Vanyume villages sat at the wet places, rarely more than a hundred people each. They gathered mesquite and screwbean pods, seeds and pinyon nuts, hunted rabbits, tortoise and bighorn sheep, and got acorns from kin upstream in the mountains. Garcés noted blankets of rabbit and otter skin and snares made of wild hemp, and recorded that one village welcomed him by scattering acorns and shell beads over him.

The welcome made sense. The river was the one watered corridor between the Colorado and the coast, and the Mohave trade trail ran straight along it, carrying shell beads inland and Mohave travelers to the ocean. The Vanyume lived as hosts on that road. Alfred Kroeber, working from Mohave memory a century later, reported that they stayed on good terms with the Mohave and Chemehuevi even while the mountain Serrano counted both as enemies. Their speech was a dialect of Serrano, a Takic language of the Uto-Aztecan family, closest to Kitanemuk and kin to Cahuilla and Tongva, bordered on the desert side by Numic and Yuman languages. It was never recorded at length. Mission registers show marriages and clan ties running up into the mountain villages, which suggests the same Serrano order of clans, hereditary leaders and mourning ceremonies.

The end came fast. From the 1790s into the 1820s river people were baptized at Missions San Gabriel and San Fernando. A Spanish military column pushed down the river in 1819 in pursuit of the Mohave, and its chaplain, Joaquín Nuez, listed the villages by name as he passed. By the 1830s, when Old Spanish Trail caravans followed the same route, those villages were largely deserted. Kroeber counted the Vanyume extinct. Later work in the mission records, notably David Earle's, has traced the survivors into Serrano families that are very much alive.