CHAPTER 16: California Statehood and Federal Administration

Copyright 1998 by Tad Beckman, Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, CA 91711

On the other hand, in San Francisco or Los Angeles or Sacramento, the streets are vacant of statues, signs, or memories of California's Indians. It is the overland immigrant who is celebrated, also the 49er with his crumpled hat and gold-sluicing pan. Most people ask whether there even were Indians in California and hear the answer with surprise. It is nothing that the State takes very seriously or feels inclined to ceremonialize. Even the State Indian Museum is difficult to find, hidden as it is in back of Sutter's Fort.

Oddly enough California can claim more tribes, more languages, more reservations, and more total Indian population than any other state in the union. Why, then, is the State so ignorant of its own indigenous origins? Or is it, rather, an intentional neglect?

By the time that California had become a state, in September 1850, the rush for gold had brought hundreds of thousands of people into the territory and California Indians, for the first time ever, had become a minority. The intruding population of gold-seeking miners pushed Indians aside wherever they were encountered. Their extensive presence in the Sierras began a process of profound environmental degradation that affected indigenous food resources. And, of course, the wave of Gold-Rush immigration brought a new burden of European diseases to which the aboriginal population had no immunity. American settlement of California was hostile to Mexicans and to Indians, alike, from the very beginning.

As easy gold strikes were depleted, most people turned to farming, ranching, or logging. The environmental impact on the state was overwhelming. While the pre-mission population of 310,000 indigenous people had dropped to 200,000 during the mission period and dropped to 150,000 or fewer by the end of the Mexican period, it plummeted to less than 30,000 in the twenty years of Gold-Rush California, to 1870. Meanwhile, the population of non-indigenous people, still a minority in 1848, had shot to 700,000 by 1870. In the aftermath, many California tribes were declared extinct and none had successfully preserved their cultural ways of life. For most, even the retention of a cultural memory, for traditional purposes and social order, was close to impossible.

As constituted, the State of California made no recognition of Indians as citizens with civil rights; nor did the new state treat Indians in any way as sovereign people; indeed, a majority in the State hoped for the early removal of the Indian population. The attitude of California citizens and governors was shaped by a combination of early Spanish assumptions and Anglo-European beliefs imported from the East. For the Spanish, Indians were merely a part of the natural scene and only marginally human; for Anglo-Europeans California Indians in particular were the most primitive and pitiful savages yet discovered. While the Spanish had rationalized their conquest in terms of the right of possession and rule by discovery, the Anglo-Americans viewed their own sweeping displacement of Indians as "manifest destiny" in the inevitable movement of a superior culture. As late as 1873, the special Federal agent John G. Ames, sent to investigate the condition of the Mission Indians of Southern California, expressed the situation in the following terms.

"The assumed Indian title [by traditional possession] has always been disregarded by the land-officers of the Government in this district and by settlers. As expressed by the present registrer of the land-office, the location of an Indian family or families on land upon which a white man desires to settle is, in law, no more a bar to such settlement than would be the presence of a stray sheep or cow. And so, like sheep or cattle, they have been too often driven from their homes and their cultivated fields, the Government, through its officers, refusing to hear their protests, as though in equity as well as in law they had no rights in the least deserving consideration." (Heizer, 1979; 65-66)

To the State of California, there were really only two concerns regarding the indigenous people of the state. The foremost concern was protection of white settlers and miners from attack and loss of property. The secondary concern was the regulation of Indians as a labor force. As White settlement of the State continued and Indians became increasingly hostile to encroachment on their traditional lands and degradation of their own livelihood, the State's greatest concern turned toward removal of the Indians altogether. After all, removal had been the established policy of Americans since the beginning of the 19th Century.

In April of 1850, the State's first legislature passed An Act for the Government and Protection of Indians. While the State carefully prohibited slavery of any form, it embraced a system in which any "able-bodied Indians were liable to arrest 'on the complaint of any resident' if they could not support themselves or were found loitering or 'strolling about' or were 'leading an immoral or profligate course of life.' If it was determined by proper authority that an Indian was a 'vagrant,' he or she could be hired out within twenty-four hours for the highest price for any term not exceeding four months." (Rawls, 1984; 86) In effect, all Indians, including (perhaps, especially) children, faced indentured servitude effected through a simple procedure of arrest and assignment through any local justice-of-the-peace. Once indentured, the term limitation was easily (and always) exceeded. The result was a profitable "slave trade" in able-bodied Indian men, women, and children throughout Northern California. Children were readily bought and sold, for household work; and women were purchased for both household work and sexual liaisons.

The Federal government, however, had a long-standing relationship with Indians; though removal to the west had been the mainstay of Federal Indian policy. California was the first Federal territory where westward removal was no longer possible; and this left the Federal government in need of new visions. Furthermore, the Federal government, in its treaty of peace with Mexico, at Guadalupe Hidalgo, in 1848, had agreed to "protect rights to property and to religious and civil freedoms of Mexican citizens who elected to remain in the United States." (Stewart, 1978). Since Mexican administration of Alta California had at least technically extended citizenship to all Indians, this placed the Federal government in a position of responsibility for their welfare. In consequence, State and Federal relationships with Indians were always at odds, and the Federal role of protection was always difficult to realize across the great distance separating California from Washington.

Several Indian sub-agencies had already been created through the military administration of California prior to statehood. However, in 1851, new Federal agents were sent to make treaties with the Indians. Three agents were selected for California; these were Redick McKee, George W. Barbour, and O. M. Wozencraft. Unfortunately, there was no appreciation, in the East, for the number of tribes and tribelets resident in California or for the multitude of languages spoken there; little of the previous Federal experience with Indians was relevant to making treaties in California. And furthermore, the treaties attempted an innovation in Federal Indian policy. Rather than being "peace treaties" that attempted to guarantee safe and non-hostile removal to other lands, these treaties attempted to locate reservations on reduced portions of traditional lands, within the State itself.

While the three agents "successfully" negotiated eighteen treaties with groups of California Indians, including substantial reservation lands for their occupation and more substantial surrender of traditional lands for white settlement, later studies have shown that their lack of experience with California Indians was telling. Heizer and Kroeber, a century later, reported that "of the 139 signatory groups, 67 are identifiable as tribelets, 45 are merely village names, 14 are duplicates of names heard and spelled somewhat differently without the commissioners being aware of the fact, and 13 are either unidentifiable or personal names." (Heizer, 1978) Completed early in 1852, the treaties went to the United States Senate for ratification in July and ratification was denied, based on the overwhelming strength of opposition coming from the State of California itself.

The treaties had set aside eighteen reserves of land for the exclusive use of the Indian groups (a total of 11,700 square miles) and had promised various kinds of Federal aid (school, farming instruction and equipment, seed, cloth, etc.) as well as specific rights to maintain traditional hunting and fishing practices. In proportion, the amount of land surrendered to White occupation and use was huge; but Californians were quick to argue that the land reserved was too much and too good for use by indigenous people. The persistent view of Californians was that indigenous people possessed no culture worthy of any claim to habitable land and that they should be disposed of in any convenient way.

The Indian tribes were never informed of the Senate's decision against ratification and an unusual injunction of secrecy kept the treaty documents out of public scrutiny until 1905. With no legal treaties, however, the Federal government was still left with the problem of protecting the indigenous population of California; and it was becoming extremely clear that the Indians would be exterminated if nothing was done. The Federal solution, taken by Congress in 1853 and 1855, was to establish seven military reservations where Indians could be placed, isolated from contact with Whites, fed, and trained to become farmers and stock growers. The first of these was located at Tejon Pass in 1853, and the last was located in San Diego County as the Mission Indian reservation, in 1887. Among these was a reservation in Hoopa Valley, established in 1864, under the guise of a "treaty of peace and friendship between the United States Goverment and the Hoopa, South Fork, Redwood, and Grouse Creek Indians." (Heizer, 1978) But the Hoopa military reservation was actually established as a part of the same Congressional program and was not respected by the Federal government as a treatied reservation granting sovereignty to the Hupa people.

The dream of cultural assimilation was strongly connected to these establishments. The Daily Alta California suggested that the reservations would take only five years to deliver the Indians "from a state of semi-barbarism, indolence, mental imbecility, and moral debasement, to the condition of civilization, Christianity, industry, virtue, frugality, social and domestic happiness and public usefulness." (cited in Findlay, 1993; 19) Yet the same newspaper, in less than a decade, declared the reservations to be "vast elymosinary establishments for the support of pets and paupers." (Findlay, 1993; 27) Indeed, by the early 1860s, most of the "idealism" regarding reservations as a practical protection and medium of assimilation was gone and not likely to return.

No treaties were ever successfully negotiated and ratified between the Federal government and the indigenous people of California, though the Federal government continued to struggle with the problem of protecting Indian rights. In 1928, after the failed treaties had finally been uncovered, an act of Congress allowed Indians to sue the Federal government for the lost compensation involved in the 18 unratified treaties. The basis of compensation would be the reservation lands promised, not the vast amount of lands surrendered. The suit was prosecuted by the Attorney General for the State of California and was settled in 1944 with a total award of $17,053,941. However, the Federal government claimed to have spent $12,029,099 for the protection of California Indians and deducted this amount from the award. In 1950 Congress authorized a payment of $150 to each person "on the corrected and updated roster of California Indians prepared under the original provisions of the act."

The conceptual difference between a reservation established by treaty and a military stronghold maintained for "protection" is enormous. The treatied reservation represents an agreement to allow indigenous people to live on a parcel of land and to maintain their cultural ways therein. The treaty grants sovereignty to the indigenous people, and the basis of treatied sovereignty has been the strong arm of most Indian litigations since the Nineteenth Century. In contrast, the military stronghold represents a small holding area where Indians can be physically protected by the military but in which resumption of cultural life is impossible; hence, it is a place where acculturation to Anglo-European lifeways becomes a necessity. These reservations were given in trust by the Federal government and did not guarantee Indian sovereignty. Indeed, the early history of military reservations dramatically demonstrated the removability of the Indians at either Federal or local impulse.

Federal and other archives are crammed with materials that relate to the period from 1850 onward, and one must explore these materials carefully in order to understand to what degree protecting Indians was really involved in Federal policy. A document filed by E. F. Beale, Office of Superintendent of Indian Affairs, San Francisco, in 1852, is telling in this regard. (Heizer, 1979)

While much of Beale's report expressed frustration over the minute amount of money given for protecting the Indians, his values and motives came forward in his explanation of how he had chosen to spend the money. Having divided the state into three areas, Beale chose to put the money into programs in the southern part of the state. "In the south ... the people are entirely pastoral in their pursuits, and in consequence live on large ranchos, at long distances from each other. They are at the mercy of the Indians surrounding them. Nothing can be more defenseless than these solitary haciendas..." (emphasis added) Clearly, in Beale's mind, at least, the idea of protecting the Indians was really appeasement of Indians for the true motive of protecting United States citizens. Beale continued by observing that the Los Angeles cattle industry was especially vulnerable and that any interruption would drive meat prices out of reach in Northern California. Beale's recommendations evidenced no concern about the safety of Indians themselves nor did they analyze the areas in which Indians were most threatened by Whites. The concept of protection was entirely rationalized as an appeasement of Indians who might otherwise become hostile and impact the state's growing economy.

In many ways, it would seem that the Indians' plight was given up to fate by the early 1860s and the Federal system of establishing reservations withdrew into a skeleton operation that was mainly aimed at merely incarcerating Indians "for their own good." By the 1870s, the Indian population of California had almost hit bottom and the majority of Anglo-European Californians no longer viewed Indians as a problem. Indians had very largely disappeared from view. Ironically, the Indian Wars of the Great Plains were just beginning and would continue until 1890.

The Rush to California had left the majority of American Indians isolated on the Prairies and Plains, in the old "Indian Territory." But dissection of the land west of the Mississippi was triggered by the Homestead Act of 1865 and was further accelerated by gold discoveries in South Dakota and Colorado. As the reserves of Indian land in the West were concentrated and carved apart and as Indians were moved from one place to another to meet the convenience of Euro-American farmers and cattlemen, the American public finally began to take note of the Indians' fate. On the eve of the beginnings of serious anthropological study and reconstruction of indigeous cultures, a new social and political era began for American Indians. It was the era of reform movements. The question now was what should constitute "reform."

Reformers accepted reservation life as a fact and, equally, accepted the fact that only reservations in relatively desolate and useless land would be tolerable to the majority of White settlers. It was obvious that American Indians would not be able to survive in their traditional lifeways. The buffalo herds, the last mainstay of the Plains Indians, were being decimated by masses of White hunters seeking only the animals' furs. Environmental degradation in California had proceeded so far that hunting and gathering had become almost completely impossible. Reformers assumed that the only route to long-term survival of Native Americans was through cultural assimilation and this meant the destruction of tribal authority and culture. Assimilation would remain the official policy of the Bureau of Indian Affairs well into the Twentieth Century.

Cultural assimilation meant teaching Indians to embrace Christianity and to become farmers who could raise more than needed for subsistence and could, consequently, sell their over-production on the open market for an income profit. Ultimately, this meant destruction of tribal authority and sovereignty; Indians were to become individual citizens of the United States. Christian missionaries moved onto the reservations; indeed, the Christian denominations competed with each other to win Native American souls to their own beliefs. At the same time and very much in the understanding that assimilation was possible only for the very young, the BIA oversaw creation of Indian schools. Most of these were boarding schools which forced separation of Indian children from their families. Carlisle Indian Industrial School, founded in 1879 by Richard Pratt, a staunch advocate of immediate assimilation, set the process in motion. Carlisle was followed by boarding schools at Santa Fe, Carson, and Phoenix, all in 1890, as well as others, later on. Calling these institutions "reforms" remains ironic since, for a society whose own Constitution provided for freedom of speech and religion, the BIA was actually overseeing a massive experiment in brain washing in which Native American religions were deemed illegal and in which little children were forbidden to speak their own langauges. The boarding school project became a scandalous incarceration of at least one-fourth of the Indian children who grew up from the 1890s to the 1930s, depriving them of family relationships and warmth as well as preventing access to their cultural heritage and traditions.

Other Americans, on the other hand, conceived of the route to assimilation as a political process that would inevitably require termination of tribal sovereignty and deliverance of Native Americans to the laws of the United States. As early as 1871, an amendment to the annual Indian Appropriations Bill legally revoked tribal sovereignty and placed Native Americans under jurisdiction of the United States, blocking further treatment as independent nations. The Federal government could now simply legislate for Native American communities; and the implicit message was that Indians must make swift progress toward participating in this process by becoming citizens.

It is within this framework that one must view the General Allotment Act of 1887, also called the Dawes Severalty Act after its sponsor Senator Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts. While the Dawes Act allowed the President to move slowly in selecting Native American reservations that were ripe for allotment, its practical implications were ominous. Each adult head of family was allotted 160 acres; single adults were allotted 80 acres; and single minors were allotted 40 acres. While Indians could choose their own land, the President had the right to assign it within four years. Individuals who accepted allottment became citizens and fell under the laws of the state in which they resided. The allottment was given within a twenty-five year trust which prevented sale.

While the Dawes Act seemed to provide exactly the right conveyence from tribalism to citizenship that reformers had wanted, it also provided the legal and practical key to acquisition of Indian land that White settlers wanted. The final provision of the Dawes Act was that "surplus land," all remaining reservation land that had not been allotted to individual Indians living on the reservation, could be sold to settlers. In 1881, Indians had owned 155,632,312 acres of land on reservations. As allotment proceeded and surplus land was sold out to non-Indians, this figure was reduced to 104,319,349 acres, in 1890, and 77,865,373 acres, in 1900. (Olson and Wilson, 1984; 73) While, initially, Indians were prohibited from selling or leasing their allotted lands, these prohibitions eroded away rapidly. They had been put in place in order to guarantee that allotted Indians would move toward self-sufficiency through agriculture or cattle grazing. However, much of the land was useless or Indians were poorly prepared. It was in their own immediate interest and definitely the interests of White farmers, ranchers, or settlers to lease or sell their land. Hence, even more Indian land disappeared, in the interests of immediate survival. By 1907, even the Five Civilized Tribes, initially exempted from allotment, had passed through the process, lost most of their promised Indian Territory, and become citizens of the newly created State of Oklahoma.

In California, allotment had a far smaller effect since the number of reservations was small, in the 1880s. In fact, the problem was quite the opposite; California Indians lacked treaties and reservations and, for that matter, they lacked any significant attention from the Federal government. Many of California's Indians, especially in the southern portion of the state, were living a small bands, attempting to survive through agriculture, residing on public or private lands either by permission, habit, or neglect. When Anglo-Americans took an interest in the land, the Indians were simply evicted, usually with force and ignoring any improvements they had made.

No single person is more important to Indian reform in California than Helen Hunt Jackson. Born in 1830 to an academic family at Amherst College, Massachusetts, and only recently remarried to a Colorado banker, William Jackson, Helen Hunt Jackson became a passionate advocate for the Indians, in 1879, when she learned about the plight of the Ponca Indians in South Dakota. In 1881, her book A Century of Dishonor told the sad story of the Ponca, and Jackson used it to lobby actively for reformed Federal Indian policies. With the successful completion of these efforts and an invitation to write about California in Century Magazine, Jackson arrived in Los Angeles in 1881. She traveled widely in Southern California and what she found there was the wreckage of the Mission Indians, remnants of all the Southern California tribes who had been missionized, secularized, and then abandoned to mere survival. In 1882, Helen Hunt Jackson and Abbot Kinney were appointed special Federal agents and were assigned the task of visiting Mission Indians with the purpose of locating lands in the public domain that could be designated as reservations for them. It was during this period that Jackson wrote her protest novel, Ramona, dramatizing the tragic treatment of the Mission Indians. Jackson and Kinney filed a powerful report with the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. This represented a detailed study of Indians in the three southern most counties and especially undertook an appraisal of the dismal condition of their claims to the lands that they had pastured and farmed since the era of Mexican desecularization. While Jackson and Kinney reflected on the need for education, especially development of practical skills, and religious development, especially a more appropriate continuation of their traditional Catholicism, the single central need of these Indians was viewed as a recognition of their claims to Mexican land grants, a correction and "rounding out" of their Federal reserves, and a regular presence of Federal agents in the territory to discourage further abuses by white settlers.

Jackson and Kinney's final report and recommendations were submitted to U. S. Indian Commissioner Hiram Price in January 1884; however, legislation based on their recommendations failed to pass Congress. While Helen Hunt Jackson died, in 1885, her efforts were carried onward by a collection of reform groups throughout the United States, including the Women's National Indian Association, the Indian Rights Association, and the Lake Mohonk Conference. Thanks to their persistence and the long process of re-initiating legislation, annually, the "Act for the Relief of the Mission Indians in the State of California" was finally passed in January 1891. This act "established a $2,000-fund for the aged and destitute, alotted land in severalty with a twenty-five-year trust period . . . and called for the appointment of three commissioners to select reservations and exchange land." (Mathes, 1994; 341) Albert K. Smiley of Redlands, California; Joseph B. Moore of Lapeer, Michigan; and Charles C. Painter of Washington, D.C. were appointed to serve as the California Mission Indian Commission. In spite of incredible difficulties, the Commissions final report and recommendations were filed by the year's end and Congress had passed enabling legislation early in 1892. The actual tasks of surveying and exchanging land and the granting of legal titles lingered on into the Twentieth Century.

From 1892 onward, land purchases proceeded at a slow rate; these were usually small acreages of land, called rancherias, which were given to groups of Indians in trust. In total, about one hundred rancherias were established. The first rancheria was Rincon (1892) and the last was Chico Colony (1942). Rancherias varied in size from a few thousand acres to a single acre. In all, one hundred and seventeen reservations and rancherias are on record in California. (See The Native American Almanac)

One final twist of White-Indian relations throughout the period lies in a movement of the 1920s to transfer authority and responsibility out of Federal hands and into State hands. The movement became focused and intensified after passage of the California Indian Jurisdiction Act in 1928 and the transfer from Federal to State became know, ironically, as "termination." Since the movement was never unanimously supported by Indians themselves and termination was made optional, only 41 reservations or rancherias were terminated in 1958, when California Indian "rancheria bill" was enacted by Congress. Only a few other rancherias have terminated since 1958. The terminated lands passed from the status of Federal trust lands to the status of "fee patent lands" which would fall under state jurisdiction.

Cook, Sherburne F. The Conflict between the California Indian and White Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976)

Findlay, John M. "An Elusive Institution: The Birth of Indian Reservations in Gold Rush California" in Castile, George Pierre and Robert L. Bee (eds.) State and Reservation: New Perspectives on Federal Indian Policy (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1992)

Heizer, Robert F. The Destruction of the California Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993)

Heizer, Robert F. "Treaties" in HNAI, 8

Heizer, Robert F. Federal Concern about Conditions of California Indians, 1853 to 1913: Eight Documents (Socorro, NM: Ballena Press, 1979)

Hurtado, Albert L. Indian Survival on the California Frontier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988)

Mathes, Valerie Sherer. Helen Hunt Jackson and Her Indian Reform Legacy (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1990)

Mathes, Valerie Sherer. "The California Mission Indian Commission of 1891: The Legacy of Helen Hunt Jackson" in California History, Vol. 72, No. 4, Winter 1993/94 (San Francisco: The California Historical Society)

Olson, James S. and Raymond Wilson. Native Americans in the Twentieth Century (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1984)

Prucha, Francis Paul. The Churches and the Indian Schools, 1888-1912 (University of Nebraska Press, 1979)

Rawls, James J. Indians of California: The Changing Image (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984)

Stewart, Omer C. "Litigation and Its Effects" in HNAI, 8

Trimble, Stephen. The People: Indians of the American Southwest (Santa Fe: School of American Research, 1993)

Vane, Sylvia Brakke. "California Indians, Historians, and Ethnographers." in California History, Vol. 71 (San Francisco: California Historical Society, 1992)