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Jose Panto, Captian of the Indian Pueblo of San Pascual (15 pages)
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Page: of 15
Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology
Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 149-161 (1994).
?
José Panto, Capitan of the Indian Pueblo
of San Pascual, San Diego County
GLENN J. FARRIS, California Dept. of Parks and Recreation, 2505 Port Street, Sacramento, CA 95691.
The history of San Diego County has been sorely deficient in recording the account of a remarkable man. José Panto, the capitan of the Indian pueblo of San Pascual, led his people over a
period of at least 37 years through the last decade of the Mexican rule of California and into the era
of American dominance. By turns a fighter and a peacemaker, Panto was a highly respected man,
both by his own people and by the dominant power of the time, whether it be a Mexican governor
or an American Indian agent. As later history has been written, Panto has been largely ignored, perhaps because he did seek the way of peace rather than rebellion. His trust in the authorities was
sadly misplaced, as the onslaught of the American frontier prevailed to destroy his village and rout
his people from their land.
Woauen secularization of the missions of
California occurred in 1833-34, Missions San
Diego de Alcala and San Luis Rey established
Indian pueblos populated and run by former
mission neophytes. Three such pueblos were
organized: San Dieguito, Las Flores, and San
Pascual.' Two of them (San Dieguito and Las
Flores) soon failed, but the third, San Pascual,
lasted as a viable community into the American
period, at which time it lost the protection of
Mexican law, becoming prey for squatters and
suffering the white ‘‘justice’’? which did not
permit Indians to testify in court.
The success of San Pascual was apparently
due to the leadership of a remarkable man
named José Panto, who throughout his tenure as
capitan of the pueblo did his best to protect his
people and their rights as granted by the Mexican government. He managed to avoid the
limelight and thus did not achieve the same
fame as did Gregorio and Tomas, two betterknown Southern California Indian leaders of his
day (Phillips 1975:passim). He cooperated with
the Mexican authorities and thus permitted his
people a degree of noninterference for at least
the duration of Mexican rule. With the arrival
of the Americans, Panto again sought to cooperate, giving aid to General Kearny at the
Battle of San Pasqual and later to Admiral
Stockton for his march on Los Angeles. But, in
the end, despite individual expressions of
sympathy, the anti-Indian sentiment of the new
immigrants permitted the inexorable destruction
of the once-promising Indian pueblo of San
Pascual.
THE EARLY YEARS AND THE
ESTABLISHMENT OF THE PUEBLO OF
SAN PASCUAL
According to Panto’s daughter, Felicita,
there was an Indian village by the laguna in San
Pascual Valley (Fig. 1), where she and her
people lived before the establishment of the
pueblo:
at this time [ca. 1835?] the tule huts of our
village stood thick on either side of the river, for
the mission at San Diego was no longer prosperous, and many Indians had come to our valley
from that place [Roberts 1917:22].
This laguna may have been near San Bernardo (E. Roberts, quoted in Peet 1949:89) at the
western end of the valley. Also known as