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

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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

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particularly in far northern and southern California. In the north, slave traders killed Indian parents and sold the children. California Indian Superintendent Thomas Henley reported in 1855 that kidnapped Indians fetched fifty to two hundred fifty dollars each.** The town of Los Angeles held weekly auctions of Indian vagrants.*° These extremes aside, it appears that the 1850 law was not enforced in much of California. The historical record is full of examples of Indian vagrants who were not apprehended—even in farm country— and free Indians continued to work as wage earners.*° Moreover, white employers had to treat their workers with care because abused Indian laborers sometimes exacted reprisals from their masters. Near Red Bluff in 1859 an irate Indian servant set fire to the house of E.A. Stevenson, completely destroying the residence and killing Stevenson’s wife and children. The Indian escaped to the Sierra Nevada, where he joined other Indians, many of whom had been brought up by whites. According to the pioneer reminiscences of Irvin Ayres, these Indians were the most dangerous in the country. They selected their targets for the sake of vengeance, sometimes attacking victims in the heart of the settlements.*” Given the increased demand for foodstuffs generated by the Gold Rush, farm labor seemed to offer a chance for survival to Indian workers, freemen and bondsmen alike. But for most Indians, this prospect was illusory. The era of the Gold Rush was also an age of rapid mechanization in agriculture. Labor was still required, but machines replaced many human hands.*°Steam-powered combine harvesters, horse-driven headers, reapers, and threshers marched across the fertile valleys, pushing Indian workers out of the fields.*? The wheat harvest on one large farm, for example, that once required scores of Indians, in 1860 employed only twenty-two. Furthermore, many white farmers in the 1850s were newcomers with no experience or sympathy toward Indian labor. Many white laborers, pushed out of the gold districts as mining became more complex and capital intensive, entered the agricultural work force, a circumstance that white landholders found to their liking. At wages of more than a dollar per day, however, whites were nearly twice as expensive as Indians." Even so, in 1856 Sutter claimed that he could employ whites more cheaply than Indians. Perhaps exaggerating, he asserted that whites were more dependable and ate less than Indian workmen.* Without an economic advantage even in the mind of a longtime Indian employer, there was little reason to hire native workers. In the 1850s, as miners and farmers pushed them off their traditional homelands, California Indians’ employment opportunities steadily evaporated. The federal government, vested with jurisdiction over Indian affairs, did little to improve the situation. Faced with local opposition to any plan that would set aside permanent Indian reservations, the national government instead established temporary reserves that were closed on demand from white settlers. Equipped with an experienced Indian labor force, administrators reasoned, temporary reservations could be self-sustaining, but poor land, inept management, and inadequate congressional appropriations doomed this policy. The stopgap temporary reserves ministered to only a fraction of the California Indians; the majority were left to the mercy of the marketplace. With plain evidence of the failure of the temporary reserves in hand, the federal government closed most of them in the late 1850s. In 1860 the Commissioner of Indian Affairs urged California agents to find employment for reservation Indians with farmers and tradesmen, but the time when the California economy could absorb more Indian labor had long since passed.“ Substantially abandoned by the federal government and progressively forced out of the work force, California Indians were in desperate circumstances. Onlya minority survived the Gold Rush. In 1848 they numbered more than one hundred thousand; by 1860 about thirty thousand remained.® Impoverished and dispossessed, many of the survivors became vagabonds who found work in seasonal farm labor or in whatever employment was offered. Some farmers permitted small Indian communities to live on their land. And a few remnant bands retreated to the mountains where they eked out a precarious existence. he tragic history of California Indians in the mid-nineteenth century offers some sobering insights into the workaday West. Conventionally viewed as an era of economic opportunity that encouraged individualism, freedom, and 10 CALIFORNIA HISTORY apace Meet apres SLATE RII “agnasaters SP RLOREAT AGA. RR TP se