Collection: Directories and Documents > Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection

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Title: Free Soil, Unfree Labor [Cave Johnson Couts] Collection Type: Directories and Documents Collection Name: Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection # of Pages: 20 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

Date Scanned: 2024-09-03 22:09:00 OCR Software Version #: tesseract 5.4.1 Item Sourced From: PDF First Created: 2025-03-17 03:17:31 Last Updated: 2025-03-17 03:17:31

Original Held At: Searls Historical Library Location: 161 Nevada City Hwy, Nevada City, CA 95959

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352 Pacific Historical Review i ranchero elite, the situation was urgent. The continued wealth and power of the Californios depended upon their ability to maintain control of their Native American labor force, which, under Mexican rule, they had forcibly bound to their estates through a brutal coma bination of legalized debt peonage and convict leasing, backed by extralegal slave trading and conscription.* Preoccupied with the overwhelming task of maintaining law and order amid the chaos of the Gold Rush, the provisional U.S. military government did little to disturb labor relations on the ranchos. The advent of a permanent civilian government officially opposed to slavery, however, posed a grave threat to the rancheros. Without some legally recognized means of preserving the status quo, the rancheros faced the\grim prospect of relying upon free wage labor, which gold rush conditions rendered prohibitively expensive and thoroughly uncontrollable. Fortunately for the rancheros, the first California legislature came to their rescue in 1850 by passing the ironically named Act for , the Government and Protection of Indians. Authored principally by assemblyman Elam Brown, a Contra Costa County ranchero who had arrived in California just four years earlier, the Indian Act effectively preserved the Mexican rancho labor system in toto. Taking full advantage of the two loopholes in the state constitution’s antislavery clause, the new statute legalized the procurement of Native American workers as bound prisoners, custodial wards, or, later, as 4. See Michael J. Gonzalez, “Searching for the Feathered Serpent: Exploring the Origins of Mexican Culture in Los Angeles, 1830-1850” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1992), 179-213; John Davies Francis, “An Economic and Social History of Mexican California, 1822-1846: Volume I: Chiefly Economic” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1935), 505-509; Cook, The Con/lict Between the California Indian and White Civilization, 201-207, 222-225, 250-251, 310, 456-457; Richard Dillon, Fool’s Gold: The Decline and Fall of Captain John Sutter of California (Santa Cruz, Calif., 1981), 197-200. For a fuller discussion of my usage of the terms “Anglo” and “Hispanic,” see note 29 below. 5. Elam Brown's principal co-authors included state senators David F. Douglass, a Tennessee native who came to California in 1848, and Gen. Mariano Vallejo of Sonoma, a wealthy ranchero who had been one of the most powerful men in California under Mexican rule. See Rawls, Indians of California, 86-89. Another key participant in the senate deliberations was John Bidwell, owner of Rancho Chico in Butte County. Bidwell, who attempted to craft a much more equitable and humane Indian code, saw most of his innovations rejected by his legislative colleagues. Ironically, Bidwell has often been mistakenly identified by historians as the primary architect of the 1850 Indian Act. On Bidwell’s interesting but misunderstood role, see Hurtado, /ndian Survival on the California Frontier, 129-131, and Michael J. Gillis and Michael F. Magliari, John Bidwell and California: The Life and Writings of a Pioneer, 1841-1900 (Spokane, Wash., 2003), 249-253, 291-293. Cave Couts and Indian Labor indentured “apprentices.” It also established the necessary conditions for preserving debt peonage and opened the door to outright enslavement. Indeed, thanks to Brown's legislation, no key aspect of the old regime was overthrown by the new and “free” American state of California, which also continued the Spanish and Mexican custom of flogging recalcitrant Indians. Over the course of the next fifteen years, the Indian Act would play a vital role in sustaining the rancho economy while, in the brief but critical period between 1850 and 1854, it proved essential for launching California’s commercial grain industry. In fact, as one scholar has argued, “it is unlikely that grain farming could have taken off when it did” without the 20,000 Native American men, women, and children eventually bound under the law’s various provisions.® Perhaps the most familiar and notorious of those provisions was Section 3, which allowed employers to obtain custody of Native American children and to keep them until they reached the age of majority, which the law defined as eighteen years for males and fifteen for females. Employers were required to secure the consent of a child’s “parents or friends” and to appear with them before a justice of the peace, who would then issue a certificate of custody. Section 4 of the law obligated certificate holders to clothe, feed, and care for their Indian wards properly and made inhumane treatment punishable by “a fine not less than-ten dollars.” In extreme cases, mistreatment could result in the forfeiture of the child. Unfortunately, these written protections were, at best, only haphazardly enforced. In actual practice, Section 3 quickly led to a flourishing ‘trade in Indian children kidnapped from their parents or seized as the spoils of war by California militiamen who campaigned throughout the state during the 1850s and 1860s. According to one estimate, “between three and four thousand children” would eventually fall victim to kidnappers supplying the Indian labor market.’ Rather than repeal Section 3 in light of these abuses, the leg6. For quote, see Jim Gerber, “The Origin of California’s Export Surplus in Cereals,” Agricultural History, 67 (1993), 52. For estimate, see Robert F. Heizer, “Indian Servitude in California,” in Wilcomb E. Washburn, ed., History of IndianWhite Relations (Washington, D.C., 1988; vol. 4 of William C. Sturtevant, ed., Handbook of North American Indians [17 vols., Washington, D.C., 1978-—2001]), 415. 7. The Statutes of California Passed at the First Session of the Legislature, 1849-1850 (San Jose, Calif., 1850), 408; Cook, The Conflict Between the California Indian and White Civilization, 314-315. 353