Trail Shrines and Survey Mounds:
Ritual Stone-Piling in Palm Valley, California

A paper presented at the Western Humanities Alliance conference
"The Pious and the Profane: Religion and Public Culture"
at the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities

October 12-14, 2000

Around the turn of the century, indigenous Cahuilla Indians, and white settlers and officials, found themselves in close proximity in the environs around Palm Springs, California, as a result of federal land policies. As these groups struggled to make sense of the new socio-spatial terrain that was taking shape, finding ways to mark safe paths through this confused and contested space was paramount. Before the arrival of whites, Cahuilla had created a complex network of trails running through the area, and ritualistically erected piles of stones to guide travelers, claim space, and appease threatening forces. In the decades after 1877, white surveyors found themselves performing similar rituals, constructing elaborate "corners" of stone and wood to demarcate boundaries and establish territorial claims.

In this paper I examine and compare these practices, and assess the process by which older Cahuilla rituals became denegrated as "superstition" while the equally arcane rituals of government surveyors received acceptance as "science." By so doing I explore not only how ritual legitimizes, but how it is itself legitimized.