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

About This Item:

Title: Indian Rancherie on Dry Creek [Miwok] Collection Type: Directories and Documents Collection Name: Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection # of Pages: 12 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

Date Scanned: 2024-09-03 14:14:28 OCR Software Version #: tesseract 5.4.1 Item Sourced From: PDF First Created: 2025-03-17 03:21:14 Last Updated: 2025-03-17 03:21:14

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

Page: of 12  

Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology . Vol. 28, No. 1 (2008) . pp. 63-74 REPORTS “Indian Rancherie on Dry Creek”: An Early 1850s Indian Village on the Sacramento and \ San Joaquin County Line CHENN FARRIS California State Parks \ Albert Hurtado published an intriguing picture in his book Indian Survival on the California Frontier that portrayed an Indian village on Dry Creek, near the present-day town of Thornton. After becoming fascinated by the image and the story that went with it, I tracked down some additional background information on the village and on an attack that it sustained from the neighboring whites. Aspects of the village shown in the drawing— including a mixture of what appear to be conical tule houses mixed with slab-sided tent-like dwellings, and what looks like a wooden stockade wall—suggest a mixed community with some background in European warfare. After consulting contemporary newspaper accounts and census records, additional details came to light on the incident. This article thus becomes a useful case study on the complicated Indian/White interactions, often leading to violence, of the 1850s. The early 1850s saw the Gold Rush in full swing, with the foothill country of the Sierra Nevada swarming with miners. The impact of these thousands of men was most heavily felt by the Indian population. An article published in 1857 (under the title “California Indian Chiefs”) included the reminisces of a 49er who had evidently known five chiefs who led tribes in the gold country in the area between the Cosumnes and Merced Rivers, and noted that all of them had been killed one way or another by about 1851 (Sacramento Daily Union [SDU}, 31 January 1857:4). The first governor of the State of California, Peter Burnett, stated in his annual message of January 1851 “(t}hat a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the two races until the Indian race becomes extinct, must be expected..” (Heizer and Almquist 63 1977:26). However, the lack of domestic labor in the early days of the Gold Rush meant that Indians were still valued by some members of the white population. Many Indians were forced off of the gold-producing lands and had to find other places to live. Often, Indian families would attach themselves to ranchers who needed their labor and were willing to offer them a level of protection (Hurtado 1988). A number of Indian people moved into the Central Valley, to areas that had formerly been the abode of Indians who had been drawn into the missions, most of whom would never return or had died during the devastating Central Valley malaria epidemic of 1833. At the same time, some of the gold seekers decided that they could do as well, if not better, by filling such support functions for the miners as farming, becoming merchants, or running ferries to cross the many rivers snaking down to the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers. It was inevitable that conflicts would develop in the new sanctuaries that the Indians thought they had found. This paper deals with one such village, which was located on Dry Creek, not far above its confluence with the lower Mokelumne and Cosumnes rivers. This may have been a village made up of members of different tribes who had been pulled together as refugees from the destruction of their original native villages. It does not appear to have yet attached itself to one of local white ranchers, and so may have been one of the last surviving independent villages. The location of the village places it in the traditional territory of the Sonolomne tribelet of the Plains Miwok (Bennyhoff 1977:98; Milliken 2008:Fig. 2). However, it seems unlikely that in the year of our focus, 1853, it was a purely Plains Miwok village. People from villages in this area were noted as having been taken first to Mission San José, especially during the period from 1820 to 1834, and of then being involved in uprisings against John Sutter which were soon put down (Bennyhoff 1977:98; Milliken 2008). The land between the Cosumnes River and the Mokelumne River was referred to as Arroyo Seco (Dry Creek) after the main drainage in its middle portion; a petition for a land grant of eleven square leagues, bounded on the west by the “road from Sacramento” and