Stephen Powers

During the American Civil War years, Powers served as a Union Army correspondent for the Cincinnati Commercial newspaper.

Powers observed and documented their adaptations to circumstances from a hundred years of homeland invasions by Spanish, Mexican, and European-American immigrants settling on their land, and the resulting consequences.

Stephen Powers published his diverse ethnographic studies in a series of articles, which appeared primarily in the Overland Monthly journal from 1872-1877.

Stephen Powers subsequently reworked his Tribes of California articles, notes and other material for a book's publication.

It was published in 1877 as part of the federally sponsored Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region series edited by the renowned western geologist John Wesley Powell, then Director of the Geological Survey of the Department of Interior, as well as the Bureau of Ethnological Studies at the Smithsonian Institution.