Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo

Another description reports some as wearing "deerskins and possibly deerskin sandals similar to those worn in Mexico." Later on during the voyage, mid-October and further northward about the Santa Barbara area, Indians were clothed in skins, tying their hair in cords, "with little daggers of flint, bone, and wood stuck into the braids." When the ships returned to these Indians at the beginning of November, some were "painted and decorated themselves with beads and daggers of bone and stone and shell. Colorful feathers were stuck here and there in their coiffures, as style and taste dictated... Canoe owners and the leading chiefs wore capes of elk hide or bear-skin, but most of the people wore nothing at all." During an especially long and festive party of Spaniards and Indians alike, "Indian musicians brought out their pipes and rattling reeds... Dancing and feasting began."

Indian dwellings are described as being round, "made of reeds tied to a wooden framework over a dirt floor." Cabrillo documented "one village where fifty Indians lived in one house." "In the middle of each village there was usually "a great plaza," surrounded by a plank fence and a stone curbing three palms high. Inside the enclosures were mastlike posts covered with paintings. The Indians danced around the enclosures in such a way as to lead the Spaniards to conclude they were of great religious significance, though no one could determine their exact meaning."

Although records are limited of what California was like during the 1500s, it is intriguing to see references to the Indians that lived along the Pacific Ocean from a Spanish captain's log. The accounts show that large portions of the coast were heavily populated with Indians and that these groups stretched back far into the interior of the New World. Some of them possibly in or near what is now known as Temescal Valley, California. The amount of attention the region would inevitably get after this initial visit by the Spaniard Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo would begin to open up the 'mysterious north' to the rest of the world and create overwhelming change for its people and landscapes.