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Man Behind Cuyama Valley Indian Massacre (12 pages)
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Page: of 12
VOLUME12/NO. 3 THE CALLFORNIANS P AG E 2.9
JFRIESIIDIE [FOLIKILOIRIE
The Man Behind the
Cuyama Valley Indian Massacre
Alejandro Godoy or Alexander Godey:
a murderous lost soul, heroic frontiersman, Indian lover or all three?
By Theresa Colwes
ntroduction. About 60 miles west of
Bakersfield, California, lies the beautiful Cuyama (Kwe-am-a) Valley where
my mother grew up. As a child, whenever
we traveled through this valley I would ask
many questions about her life there. There
were stories of my grandfather's life as a
ranger in the Los Padres National Forest;
how they lived in a four-room cabin with
no electricity, and how Grandma would
drive all the children on the mountain to
the one-room school house every day. To
me this life seemed so intriguing and simple; I loved listening to these stories over
and over again. But one story sparked my
imagination beyond any of the other stories: the massacre of Indians on the old
Cuyama Ranch No. 2.
My grandmother knew the ranch well, as
she lived there in the mid 1920s for several
years before my grandfather got a job as a
forest ranger. When my _ grandparents
moved from Santa Barbara to the Cuyama
Ranch, Grandma’s Uncle Joe Blanco, the
foreman, arranged for them to stay in an old
Chinese hut near a long adobe house on the
ranch. Just below the hut lay an old unmarked graveyard. Her Uncle Joe told her
a remarkable legend about this graveyard,
a very sad legend to Grandma as she was of
Spanish-Chumash heritage. The following
story, presented in my grandmother's voice
as she told it to me, is one of several versions that circulate in the Cuyama valley.
Teg barbecue. “Some time in the 1850s
or 60s, a man by the name of Alejandro e P
Godoy lived on the Cuyama ranch. . was Alex Godey or Alejandro Godoy, rancher, squatter, squaw man,
= mailt the long adobe house there. Indian fighter — a quiet-spoken man who when he spoke “left no
‘4 to be one of the first white . 0™ for question of any sort” — and a reputed mass murderer.