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California Indians and the Workaday West (10 pages)
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Page: of 10
Miwok Indians working on the McFarland Ranch near Galt in the late nineteenth century.
Indians performed many tasks, both menial and skilled, on the ranchos. This posed scene
shows a variety of activities being carried out. The female population, which began to
decline during the Gold Rush, is reflected in the woman kneading bread and the old
woman in the background. Courtesy California State Library.
many as ten thousand Indian workers labored in
California at the time of the Mexican War.° Jobs for
individual Indians, however, did not necessarily
benefit Indian society. Employment took men away
from their rancherias and left women, children,
and old people unprotected. Anglo, Indian, and
Mexican marauders ravaged these vulnerable communities. By the end of the Mexican era, interior
Indian communities were in decline, the result of
disease, demands for labor, and vulnerability to
attack.?”
As Sutter’s native army illustrates, Indians also
served in military forces under white command.The
conquest of the American West required soldiers
as well as farmers. From colonial times through the
nineteenth century, Indian allies had fought with
both European and United States armies. 18 California was no exception. Some one hundred Indians
“assisted the United States’ conquest of Mexico by
enlisting in John Frémont’s California Battalion.
As scouts, fighters, and rustlers of Mexican horses,
they contributed to American success in an isolated theatre of frontier warfare. The United States
might well have prevailed without Indian help, but
in 1846 Lieutenant Colonel Frémont, Commodore
Robert F. Stockton, and General Stephen Watts
Kearny could not know that. They gladly relied
on the tested practice of enlisting Indian allies in
the American cause.??
Demography substantially shaped the role of
Indian labor in peace and war. Until the Gold
Rush, Indians constituted the largest part of Cali,
fornia’s population, outnumbering non-Indians by
more than ten to one.*° Within a few years of the
gold discovery, however, the ratio of Indian to
whites would be inverted, as whites hastened to
the gold fields and Indian death rates accelerated.2!
Despite this historic shift, Indian labor remained
evident in fields and mines in the 1850s. Not surprisingly, Mexican and Anglo rancheros took their
workers to the mines in 1848 and 1849, capitalizing
on their control of Indian labor. Sutter became an
Indian labor contractor, hoping to profit from his
New Helvetia experience by supplying Indian miners to white employers. In the first flush of the
Gold Rush, Indian miners were ubiquitous, and
many whites who employed them reaped substantial profits.”
6 CALIFORNIA HISTORY