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California Indians, Historians, and Ethnographers (18 pages)
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Page: of 18
Yokuts horsemen in typical we
-boy dress, Tule River Reserv:
Porterville, ca. late nineteent
From the days of the missions t
tieth century, California Indie
adapted to Euro-American agri
livestock herding, livelihoods
used to support themselves in
munities throughout the state.
Collection, University of Southern
Indians should be given reservations, since incoming settlers were driving them from their traditional lands. In the mid-1870s, lands were beginning
to be set aside for a number of southern California
bands by executive order of presidents. These were
subtracted from and added to in the 1880s, a decade in which the land base of the new reservations
was generally eroded by non-Indian squatters, who
settled on the best lands, usually those with water
resources. The fact that the government was slow
to survey the townships in which the reservations
were set aside made it easier for squatters to establish claims to the best lands of those set aside. In
remote areas, agents had often incorrectly identified
the lands on which the Indians were living, so that
lands almost unusable were set aside, while squatters took over fields where Indians had been successfully farming. Reformers Helen Hunt Jackson
and Abbot Kinney were sent to study the situation
in southern California in the early 1880s, and wrote
a report to Congress (1884) that is one of the best
sources of information on the southen
situation during this decade.’ The repo
agents and inspectors, and advocates
such as Joseph Painter of the Indian Ri;
ation, are also useful. These, the Jack
report, and Jackson’s novel Ramona (18.
in the government's ordering squatte
reservations to be forcibly moved off
ings. The public outcry that followed an
of legal action moved Congress to a
three-man Mission Indian Commission
ervations of southern California and to1
a solution to the problems that had deve
recommendations of the Mission India
sion (1891), accepted with little or no
Congress, resulted in the establishme
new reservations and the consolidatio
often ironically with the loss of conside
In northern California, many Indian
living in small enclaves at the edges of si
on farms and ranches, and in other
330 CALIFORNIA HISTORY