A crew of hunters on San Nicolas Island off the California coast come upon an Indian woman sitting with her dog outside a house she constructed from whale bones. The woman has lived alone on the island for 18 years. She was accidentally left behind when the rest of her people, the San Nicolas Chumash, were moved to the mainland by mission priests. All have since died of non-Indian diseases.
The hunters take the woman to Santa Barbara, where she is baptized as Juana Maria and dies of disease seven weeks later. Her story will be told in several works of fiction, most notably Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins, a young-adult novel that will win the 1960 New-bery Award.
The United States compels land cessions from northern Indian Territory tribes.
In order to clear land for the construction of a transcontinental railroad through the Great Plains, Commissioner of Indian Affairs George W. Manypenny negotiates land cessions from tribes relocated to lands in Indian Territory above 37 degrees latitude. The Indian groups affected include the Lenni Lenape (Delaware), Kickapoo, Miami, Omaha, and Shawnee. Reporting that their leaders have dealt with him “without enthusiasm,” Manypenny notes that many of their tribes “have been removed, step by step, from mountain to valley, and from river to plain, until they have been pushed halfway across the continent.”
United States makes the Gadsden Purchase.
Diplomat James Gadsden negotiates the Gadsden Purchase, in which Mexico agrees to sell for $10 million a 45,000-square-mile tract south of the Gila River in what is now southern New Mexico and Arizona. The agreement settles boundary disputes left unresolved by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (see entry for FEBRUARY 2, 1848). It also provides the United States with lands needed to construct a railroad route through the Southwest. Indian groups living in the area, including the Chiricahua Apache and the Papago (now known as the Tohono O’odham), are not consulted in the negotiations and will refuse to acknowledge the new international boundary.
World History
