Part IV: Surviving Columbus

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

This reading includes three chapters on the history of European interference with indigenous people of North America, primarily California. The first of these deals with the Spanish and Mexicans. The second deals with California Statehood and Federal Administration. The final chapter examines Native Americans in contemporary time.

The first Europeans to enter the land that became the United States were Spanish adventurers based in their Mexican stronghold, New Spain. Motivated by rumors of indigenous cities of fabulous wealth, the so-called Seven Cities of Cíbola, first, Fray Marcos de Niza (1539) and, then, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado and his compatriot, Pedro de Tova, (1540-41) journeyed into New Mexico and Arizona. What Coronado found, instead of spectacular wealth, was the descendants of the Anasazi and Freemont cultures, living in localized villages which the Spanish called pueblos and possessing nothing more than the remarkable skill of surviving comfortably in a fragile arid land.

Coronado's journey through these lands was typical of all of the Conquistadores of the period. He took the southern most pueblo of Zuni, Hawikuh, by storm and, later, when the Tiwa of the northern Rio Grande, resisted his demands for food and blankets, he destroyed the pueblos of Arenal and Moho, burning at the stake those who survived the assault. After Coronado's disappointed, and disappointing, return to New Spain, in 1541, there were no further expeditions north motivated by the lure of gold.

The first actual Spanish colony outside of New Spain was in Saint Augustine, Florida, founded by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés in 1565. In 1573 Spain attempted to restrain the Conquistadors through Royal Ordinances that restricted the extension of Spanish settlements and defined appropriate treatment for indigenous people. Thus, when interest in the pueblos was revived in 1581, it was motivated by colonization and missionization and not by dreams of conquest and wealth. The true beginning of Spanish dominion came in 1598 when Juan de Oñate led "400 soldiers, colonists, friars, and Mexican Indian servants northward to occupy the upper Rio Grande Valley." (Simmons, HNAI 9; 179) In September, the entire region was declared a Franciscan missionary province and Oñate established his base of operations and rule in San Juan pueblo. He was replaced in 1609 by Pedro de Peralta who founded Santa Fe and created the governor's palace and various government buildings at the expense of conscripted Indian labor.

The system of Spanish occupation throughout the period from 1598 to 1680, when the pueblo people combined forces in a general revolt, was incomprehensibly oppressive to the Indians. The Spanish missionaries, military personnel, and others, who were supposedly present to redeem Indian souls by conversion to Christianity, did little or nothing to develop their own economic base; thus, in the harsh tradition of Spanish feudalism, they relied almost completely on the pueblo people to supply them with their food, blankets, and labor. These things they simply took from the Indians by demand, supposedly by right of occupation and rule, but apparently without moral or social responsibility for the fate of the pueblo people. The pueblo people, in fact, were often left without sufficient food for their own survival or blankets for their own protection and warmth. During the decade between 1670 and 1680, the situation became desperate. Continuing drought conditions had lowered the food supply to a dangerous degree and Apaches, having acquired horses and horsemanship from the Spanish, now began using their tactical superiority to raid pueblo food supplies. In their attempt to cope with the fortunes of weather, the people resorted to ritual beliefs and ceremonies, which offended the "sensibilities" of the Franciscans, who responded by oppressing the pueblo people's "pagan rituals" even more enthusiastically. Caught in a desperate fight for both physical and spiritual survival, the rituals went "underground" (often being celebrated late at night) and violent revolt became inevitable.

By the time of the Pueblo Revolt in 1680, however, the Spanish monopoly in North America had already come to an end. With the defeat of the Spanish Armada Catolica, the holy naval crusade against England, in 1588, Spain lost its domination over the oceans. By the early 1600s, the English, Dutch, and French were all able to launch ships for North America, both for commerce and colonization.

The first English settlement of North America was at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, and was founded by a chartered comercial company, the Virginia Company. The Dutch settled in New York in 1612. In 1620, Plymouth Colony was established and in 1630 the Massachusetts Bay Colony was established. In contrast to the Spanish quest for precious metals, the English colonies were all motivated out of comercial land-development adventures or out of the quest for religious community free of persecution. Puritan colonization of New England was well underway by the time of the English Civil War, in the 1640s.

Throughout the 17th Century, the French also established footholds in North America. These were primarily along the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence waterway and were developed through the explorations of sieur de Robert Cavelier La Salle, beginning in 1666. La Salle and others developed a series of forts and trading posts throughout the region and pushed southwest into Michigan and Illinois. Pressing onward along the Illinois River, La Salle explored the Mississippi River down to its mouth and, in 1682, declared possession of the entire Mississippi drainage and tributaries in the name of Louis XIV, calling it Louisiana. The first actual settlement of French in Louisiana was at Biloxi in 1699. By the end of this century, the French had explored and laid claim to the largest portion of North America. The indigenous people of the eastern coast, the middlewest, the St. Lawrence waterway including neighboring parts of Canada, and New Mexico had all been substantially disrupted.

By 1750, only a narrow strip of mountain frontier, running from central Alabama northeast through Pennsylvania and New York to Maine, remained an unsettled buffer between French and English territories. Florida, Texas, and New Mexico were all thoroughly incorporated into New Spain. From 1750 through 1812, Indians of the eastern half of North America became increasingly involved in complex struggles between the English and the French, especially as English traders and American settlers pressed into the Ohio Valley. There was, of course, growing tension between the American colonists and the English; and, after the abandonment of English interests in the newly created United States, there was continuing tension between the Americans and the English Canadians. While alliances with a particular group occasionally secured Indian land and bolstered Indian power, they frequently pitted one Indian tribe against another in vicious ways or empowered one tribe to take advantage of others. Furthermore, as French and English influences withdrew and as Americans neutralized Canadian interests, the Indians were left facing the Americans who were increasingly confident of their own residence claim in the New World and increasingly more aggressive in pursuing their desires for more land.

The period from 1700 to 1850, east of the Mississippi, was a crucial period in the development of Indian-White relations. Throughout the period, Indians of this region came under increasing contact with French and English trappers, traders, and colonists. Trappers competed with Indians for game, often using superior implements. Traders offered Indians a variety of new articles that Indians were quick to integrate into their culture. Unfortunately, many of these items, like firearms, tied Indians into a system of dependence; others, like alcohol robbed them of their sanity and health. The colonists, those that we can rightly call Americans, took an increasingly hostile attitude toward Indians as they attempted to lay claim to progressively larger amounts of land, pushing westward away from the coast. The level and kind of contact varied from tribe to tribe; thus, one of the uncontrollable results was a sudden widening in the power gap between tribes and consequent destruction of long-term power balances. A dramatic example is to be seen in the Iroquois who obtained European weapons earlier than others nearby and used their new superiority to crush the Huron and establish a virtual empire in New York, Pennsylvania, and the Upper Ohio.

From 1812 through the 1850s, the Americans formulated, defended, litigated, and implemented a policy of removal of Indians westward, across the Mississippi to the "Indian Territory," in what eventually became Oklahoma, in 1907. The most famous victims of this policy development were the so-called Five Civilized Tribes, Indian people who had assimilated European culture and become farmers, even slave holders, in the South. It was this removal process that led to such atrocities as the "Trail of Tears," the forced march of the Cherokee Nation from their homeland in Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama, to Fort Gibson, in the Indian Territory. No objective observer of the time could have concluded that the Indians would be left alone in their new home for very long. Alexis de Tocqueville observed that,

"The conduct of the Americans of the United States toward the aborigenes is characterized . . . by a singular attachment to the formalities of the law. Provided that the Indians retain their barbarous condition, the Americans take no part in their affairs . . . [but] if an Indian nation happens to be so encroached upon as to be unable to subsist upon its territory, they afford it brotherly assistance in transporting it to a grave sufficiently remote from the land of its fathers. . . The Americans of the United States have accomplished this twofold purpose [extermination and denial of rights] with singular felicity; tranquilly, legally, philanthropically, without shedding blood, and without violating a single great principle of morality in the eyes of the world. It is impossible to destroy men with more respect for the laws of humanity." (De Tocqueville, 1851; 385-6) Also, "Indians readily discover that the settlement which is proposed to them is merely a temporary expedient. Who can assure them that they will at length be allowed to dwell in peace in their new retreat? The United States pledge themselves to the observance of the obligation; but the territory which they at present occupy was formerly secured to them by the most solemn oaths of Anglo-American faith. The American government does not indeed rob them of their lands, but it allows perpetual incursions to be made on them. In a few years the same white population which now flocks around them, will track them to the solitudes of the Arkansas; they will then be exposed to the same evils without the same remedies; and as the limits of the earth will at last fail them, their only refuge is the grave." (Ibid.; 382-3) "I believe that the Indian nations of North America are doomed to perish; and that whenever the Europeans shall be established on the shores of the Pacific ocean, that race of men will be no more." (Ibid.; 372)

Indeed, America's passion for land development produced a succession of attacks upon land in the Indian Territory. These began in the mode of punishing the Five Civilized Tribes for their support of the South in the Civil War, continued in the mode of allowing illegal settlement of Indian land by Americans, allowing cattle drives north and south through the Territory and constructing railroad lines, and concluding with the famous and colorful give away of "unassigned" Indian lands in April of 1889. It was this system of treatment and its rationalization that Americans carried into the administration of California from 1850 to the Century's end.

In California, with the exception of a few non-intrusive expeditions along the Colorado River and the Pacific Coast, real contact between Europeans and indigenous people did not begin until 1769, when Franciscan missionaries, accompanied by Spanish military, began settlement of the California coastline. Even then, while it would be impossible to overestimate the impact of the mission period, European influence was held to the coast and its environs until the early 19th Century. For some indigenous people of California, the first contacts with Europeans and Americans only began in the mid-19th Century. Thus, Indian-White relations in California are only 150 to 220 years old. As we shall see, these relations varied considerably in character as well. The initial thrust of Spanish influence was not military conquest but, rather, religious conversion combined with a political concept of colonization for the protection of Spanish interests in Alta California. By the time of statehood, the thrust of American influence was a fanatical thurst for gold.

While 150 to 200 years may seem to be a short time, it is approximately ten generations and it provided substantial opportunities for change even if only natural change. The process was far from "natural," though. Spanish, Mexicans, Russians, and Americans (Anglo-Europeans) all had their own agendas for California, and few of them viewed the natives as anything but primitives, at best available as a cheap labor source and, usually, only as an impediment to "progress." As people flocked into California, bringing their European lifeways, plants and animals, more than just the native populations were overrun. The impact on the natural environment, with which native survival was so intimately connected, was enormous. Even leaving native areas of habitation unhindered could never have been enough because the populations of game animals suffered disastrous reductions. Aided by imported diseases that swept through native communities like plagues, settlement pressure and ecological degradation quickly drew Native California life to an end. The period from 1850-1870 was the worst; in just two decades Native population declined to less than 30,000 and white population grew to over 700,000. The table below displays the fate of California Indians, an overall de-population of 90% in just one century.

(Cook, 1976; 236)

In this section, we consider first the era between 1769 and 1848 when California was administered by the Spanish and, later, by the Mexicans. This era is strongly related to the experiences of Indians and Spanish in the Southwest. Then, we consider the State of California and Federal administration through entry into the United States. Americans brought to California their long history of conflict with Indians and their policy of removal. And finally, we consider Indian life in the present age. In the confusion of cultural bifurcation but with the security of certain guarantees of sovereignty, California's indigenous people struggle, today, to find a formula for survival in an environment that is completely determined by the impact of two centuries of American development, utilization, and depletion.

Abel, Annie Heloise. The American Indian as Slaveholder and Secessionist (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992)

Castillo, Edward D. "The Impact of Euro-American Exploration and Settlement" in HNAI, 8

Cook, Sherburn. The Conflict Between the California Indian and White Civilization (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976)

De Tocqueville, Alexis. The Republic of the United States of America, and Its Political Institutions, Reviewed and Examined (New York: A. S. Barnes and Co., 1851)

Hagan, William T. American Indians, 3rd Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993)

Simmons, Marc. "History of Pueblo-Spanish Relations to 1821" in Sturtevant, William C. (gen. ed.) and Alfonso Ortiz (vol. ed.) Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 9, Southwest (Washington: The Smithsonian Institution, 1979)