During the first few decades of statehood no ethnic group received worse treatment at the hands of whites than Native Americans. Rejecting victimhood, California’s Indian bands did what they could, at times waging war, to retain some of their lands and simply survive.
The decimation of the Indian population during the first few decades of the American takeover indicates how fatal the confrontation with the Anglo settlers was for the state’s First People. In 1845, on the eve of the U. S. conquest, about 150,000 Indians inhabited the province. By 1870 their number had dropped to approximately 30,000. That figure had nearly halved by 1900. Most deaths were due to disease; starvation and physical attacks by whites accounted for the remainder of the casualties.
The first state legislature passed a law contributing to the tragic plight of Native Californians. In 1850 that body approved the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians. Accordingly, unemployed adult Indians were subject to prosecution for vagrancy, in which case the courts could hire them out. Indian boys until 18 and girls until 15 could be apprenticed to employers under conditions similar to enslavement, beginning with the bidding at auction for the services of these youths. A worker for the U. S. Mail Department in northern California affirmed: “Indians seven or eight years old are worth $100.” Ten years later that law was amended to extend the time period during which employers could have custody and control over the earnings of Indian apprentices. Usually, those entrusted with their custody used the children to perform household chores such as washing, cleaning, and child care. In some documented instances, Anglos kidnapped and sold Indian girls into sexual slavery. In December 1861 the Marysville Appeal newspaper reported that young females served both the “purposes of labor and lust.” At times the kidnappers murdered both of the parents before stealing the children. California’s indigenous peoples retaliated by killing whites, some of whom had not been involved in this horrific commerce. Anthropologist Sherburne F. Cook and other authorities estimate that as many as 4,000 Indians, and possibly more, were victims of these legal measures and the practices that ensued.
Worse for the Indians, whites acquired most of the aboriginals’ land. In 1851 and 1852 federal agents negotiated 18 treaties with 139 California Indian bands, providing 11,700 square miles of reservation space for the natives. The treaties were rejected by the U. S. Senate in the latter year, largely because whites wanted much of the allotted real estate. Congress approved an alternative policy in 1853, the handiwork of the superintendent of Indian affairs for California, Edward F. Beale. His plan put Indians on smaller reservations that would also function as army posts. The first and largest of these settlements was established in the Tehachapi foothills at Tejon. There conditions grew so bad that in 1858 the Indians revolted. Soldiers suppressed the uprising and its leaders were punished with severe whippings. The reservation system, begun in California, soon spread throughout the West, where it was administered by incompetent, corrupt officials for decades afterward. In California as in the western region, famine and starvation often followed in the wake of Indians losing their land. Desperate, the displaced natives sometimes stole cattle and other stock simply to survive, which resulted in army and white paramilitary attacks on Indian
Settlements. Overall, whites killed 100 Indians for every Anglo death resulting from these interracial clashes. William H. Brewer, a participant in the Geological Survey of California, wrote in 1862: “as yet I have not heard a single intelligent white man express any opinion but that the whites were vastly more to blame than the Indians.”
One of the most lethal white attacks in the state’s history occurred on Indian Island in Humboldt Bay and at nearby villages on February 26, 1860. On that fateful morning a gang of whites armed with axes, hatchets, and knives butchered and hacked to death 60 Indians, nearly all women and children. This massacre was unprovoked, for the victims constituted “a band of friendly Indians,” according to Major G. J. Raines, commander of Fort Humboldt at the time. Viewing the carnage in the aftermath, writer Bret Harte observed: “Here was a mother fatally wounded hugging the mutilated carcass of her dying infant to her bosom; there a child of two years old, with its ear and scalp torn from the side of its little head.” Two more massacres in the immediate area that same day brought the total Indian deaths to 188. This was merely one among many other unprovoked and brutal white assaults, which included scalpings, on California’s First Peoples.
Amid such massacres and land losses, the Modocs in northeastern California fought the last Indian war against whites in the state in 1872-3. Expulsion from the Modocs’ ancestral lands along the Lost River was at the root of their problem with white officials. In accordance with the federal reservation policy, in 1864 the Modocs were relocated from their California homeland to southern Oregon, where they were forced to share a reservation with their enemies, the Klamaths. In Oregon the Modocs split into two groups, one of which - led by Kintpuash (often called Captain Jack) - returned to the Lost River area. As negotiations for a reservation there bogged down, Kintpuash and a clique within his band thought that their bargaining power would be increased if they made a show of physical force by killing the whites with whom they were conferring. The American officials knew of the danger yet attended the meeting of April 11, 1873 unarmed. General Edward Canby and a Methodist missionary were killed, while an Indian agent was severely injured by Modoc warriors, who then fled to the nearby lava beds and outcroppings. Disagreements split these Modocs into two groups, one of which was captured by U. S. Army troops. In return for the promise that they would not be tried, the prisoner group helped the American forces pin down and defeat the remaining contingent of Modocs. A trial was held and four of the Indian leaders, including Kintpuash, were hanged; two other defendants were sentenced to prison.
While the Modocs survived the war, other Indian groups - such as the Yahi - were pushed by whites into extinction after the 1870s. Living in the Mill Creek area south of Mount Lassen, the Yahi people were hunted like game by gold-seekers. In 1911 the last known survivor of his tribe wandered into Oroville hungry and emaciated. The survivor’s story is briefly recounted in Chapter 1’s Pacific Profile.
World History
