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

About This Item:

Title: California Indians and the Workaday West Collection Type: Directories and Documents Collection Name: Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection Author: Albert L. Hurtado Source(s): California History 1990 # of Pages: 10 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

Date Scanned: 2024-08-27 14:51:01 OCR Software Version #: tesseract 5.4.1 Item Sourced From: PDF First Created: 2025-03-17 03:11:52 Last Updated: 2025-03-17 03:11:52

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

Page: of 10  

Thus, even as they traded with white merchants on a more equal footing, they became increasingly dependent on the new economic order that governed California. On the whole, mining had many of the same effects on Indian society that farm labor had: depleted communities, fragmented families, women and children at risk. Anglo Saxon racism added a new dimension to the already formidable perils of California Indian and white relations. Many white miners came to California with ideas about White farmers sometimes permitted women to glean their fields after the harvest. Other women found jobs as cooks and domestics in homes and hotels, or toiled at washboards in commercial laundries.”? Proximity to white settlements left Indian women vulnerable to physical and sexual exploitation. According to white observers, it was common for white men to rape Indians in the 1850s.*° The damage to Indian women and their communities from xsuch assaults can only be guessed at, but some Indians shaped by generations of pioneering. They ;,~", observers claimed that much of the conflict between believed that the presence of Indians and settled‘” life were incompatible. Free white miners were hostile towards an Hispanic labor system they regarded as akin to slavery. Hating Indians, fearing competition, and committed to white racial dominion, ruthless miners quickly drove Indian workers from the mines. In 1849, Oregonians, who were especially embittered by the 1847 Cayuse War, began to kill Indians and threaten whites who tried to protect them. Often hunting parties opened fire on defenseless men, women, and children alike wiping out entire rancherias. Such brutal attacks continued through the 1850s.”° As a result of white violence against them, native miners abandoned this type of labor. Some Indians did remain near the mining camps, working as day laborers when they could, living when desperate on the offal from slaughter pens.”” If mining became off-limits for Indians, other forms of native labor were in demand. Some Indian women, poverty stricken and defenseless, resorted to prostitution to feed themselves and their children. More fortunate women lived with lonely white miners who had to cope in a land where there were very few marriageable white women. These liaisons were often temporary arrangements that men abandoned when they left the mines or when white women arrived on the scene. In the meantime, Indian women did the necessary domestic work that Victorian culture decreed to be woman’s lot—cooking, cleaning, and child rearing. In these employments, Indian women shared much with their white sisters, though they remained racial and social worlds apart. Not all Indian women found employment in prostitution or domestic arrangements. Some worked placer mine tailings, panning out the remnant gold that had escaped from white miners’ sluices. 8 CALIFORNIA HISTORY ‘the races resulted from sexual violence.*! Moreover, interracial sexual contact of all kinds resulted in the spread of syphilis, a great killer of Indians throughout California. General debility brought on by malnutrition, infectious diseases, syphilis, and bad living conditions combined to lower Indian birth rates and increase infant mortality. Most tragically, in a population in rapid, prolonged decline, Indian women died at a faster rate than men. By 1860 women represented only forty percent of the Indian population. The scarcity of women meant that Indians would have a difficult time forming families, restoring former population levels, and surviving in California. The destruction of the female Indian population accordingly contributed perceptibly to the decimation of the native people of California. The exploitation of women in the work force, moreover, tended to exacerbate the forces that worked against them. Thus work and Indian population decline were closely related in California.*? Shut out of mining jobs and marginalized in the booming gold rush economy in the 1850s, Indians found agricultural employment to be the only significant opportunity left for them in the “free” market economy. Indeed, in 1850 demand for agricultural labor was so high that whites sought legal means to retain Indian workers. One of the earliest acts of California’s first state legislature was to pass a law “for the government and protection of the Indians,” legislation that provided little protection for Indians but that served well the state’s white agricultural interests.*? This statute provided that justices of the peace could indenture Indian orphans and adult loiterers to white farmers. Children served until the age of majority and adults for a term of service determined by justices of the peace. This law was subject to outrageous abuse, aE SE ad Sea I ay a a Piet Lane. Bae FDS POAT LAWL,