Читать книгу History of Fresno County, Vol. 1 - Paul E. Vandor - Страница 13

Kit Carson, the scout, said that in 1829 the valleys of California were alive with Indians. On again visiting the territory in 1839, they had measurably disappeared. In 1851. James D. Savage, of whom more anon, gave the number of Indians on the coast as 83,000, an inflated figure, as were all the census estimates on Indians.

In October, 1856, the number of Indians on the reservations was reported to be:

Klamath, 2,500; Nome Lacke, 2,000; Mendocino, 500; Nome Cult, 3,000; Fresno and Kings River, 1,300; Tejon, 700: total 10,000.

Today the red man has practically disappeared from the haunts where he was once most numerous. It is a repetition of the old story with this doomed, unfortunate race. The passing of the Indian was hastened on by the gold diggers and the first settlers. He was an inoffensive being, but he was in the way of the white man, and the latter did not seek far or long for cause or reason to put him out of the way.

The California Indian was a nomad, moving with the seasons in the search for food, subsisting on acorns, seeds, berries and nuts, roots, fungi and herbs, fish, fowl and game — in fact nothing was overlooked as a diet. Grasshoppers, worms and the larvae of ants and insects were delicacies, and mustang horse flesh a dainty. Along the coast, sea-fish and mollusks were important dietary additions, and a dead, stranded whale was a prize to warrant general feasting. They lived in the most primitive habitations, dressed in skins, or woven bark or grass fiber, and used stone implements. The women did all the laborious work and wove beautiful baskets.

While the tribal individuals bore a general resemblance, there was a remarkable diversity in language. Their racial origin is an interesting problem. Living in a pleasant clime, with the food supply abundant in ordinary years and demanding no great exertion to procure — and then by the slavish squaws — the Indian was an indolent, shiftless creature, and there is a general consensus that in California he represented the lowest scale of human development. He did not take kindly to the labor of the civilization that the padres enforced, wherefore the frequent uprisings. With the confinement that they were subjected to in the close mission buildings, herded like so many cattle, and in the general demoralizing association with the whites, their decimation was rapid enough.

At the close of 1802, the Indian population at the eighteen missions is placed at 7,945 males and 7,617 females. In 1831 it was placed at 18,683, and in 1845 the estimate was that, while the white population had increased to about 8,000, the domesticated Indians, who twelve years before numbered close to 30,000, scarcely represented one-third of that number. There are no statistics of the wild Indians — gentiles as the Spaniards called them. Guesses ranged from 100.000 to 300,000. Yet another classification was made. All save Indians were gente de razon — rational people — in contradistinction to the natives, who were considered only as beasts — unable to reason.

The secularization of the missions with the return of the neophytes to savagery and wretchedness was their perdition. It also marked the decline of ecclesiastical power and influence in California. But no material loss was suffered by the Indians. They were no worse off than under the mission system, which held them as slaves, abject and groveling-. The missions themselves and the missionaries were the relic of a medieval age, and long had outlived their usefulness.

In 1856, when Fresno was organized as a county there were six reservations in the state under the superintendency of T. J. Henley. The Fresno and Kings River farms were, in this county, on the streams so named. They were established in 1854 and covered about 2,000 acres in extent, 1,000 under cultivation to wheat, barley and vegetables. The Indians gathered on the two farms numbered 1,300. M. B. Lewis was sub-agent of the Fresno reservation, with E. P. Hart as foreman, appointed in July, 1856, at $1,500 and $1,200 salaries, with J. B. Folsom as chief hunter. William J. Campbell was sub-agent at the other farm with one "Judge" John G. Marvin as quartermaster furnishing all the supplies, Charles A. Hart his wagon-master and D. J. Johnson an employee.

The number within the state jurisdiction was estimated at 61,600, of which 16,000 were on the reservations in March, 1857. Cost of maintenance in the state for 1855 was $236,000 and for 1856 $358,000. The idea of making treaties with them or "recognizing in any way the rights they claim to the soil" was a policy "rejected entirely" by the department, and according to Henley his wards were everywhere highly pleased with the policy proposed, "except in locations where malicious or interested persons have by false representations prejudiced them against it."

Henley was severe against this class, asserting that it had been "the cause of most of the Indian difficulties which had up to then occurred in the state," and that in "almost all cases where the Indians have been guilty of aggressions it has been to avenge some outrage committed upon them by the class of persons in question."

The late Galen Clark, who in 1854 mined in Mariposa, assisted in government surveying of west side San Joaquin Valley land and of canals for mining in the celebrated Mariposa Grant, who first visited the Yosemite in 1855 and in 1857 on a hunting trip discovered the Mariposa grove of big trees, for twenty-four years was the state guardian of the Yosemite Valley, and lies buried near Yosemite Falls, where, with his own hands, he dug his grave and quarried his own tombstone, came, by reason of his long associations, to know much of the traditions and customs of the Indians of Yosemite and of the tribes that once peopled this valley.

According to this authority, the tribes in the region of the Yosemite were affiliated by blood or intermarriage relationship. Before the coming of the whites, they had defined tribal hunting limits, though the higher Sierras were common ground. There was reciprocal barter between them, as on the west with the Paiutes on the east side of the range, in salt blocks from Mono Lake, and with the Mission Indians on the coast, in hunting knives and shells for ornament or money, beads, blankets and the like. They had an efficient relay courier system for 100 miles for the transmission of news, and a signal code with fire by night and smoke by day. Their winter conical huts, holding a family of six with all property, canines included, and with a fire in the center, were covered with cedar bark and had entrance on the south side. In summer brush arbors were occupied, the winter huts used for storage.

Their clothing before the reservation period was scant. Young children went naked. Males wore a skin breech-clout or short skirt; females, a deer skin skirt from waist to knees, at times fringed or fancily decorated. Both sexes wore deer or elk skin moccasins.

Clark said of the Sierra tribes that "They are naturally of a gentle and friendly disposition, but their experience with the white man has made them distant and uncommunicative to strangers." And "as a rule also they are trustworthy, and when confidence is placed in their honesty it is very rarely betrayed."

Large game they hunted with the bow and obsidian arrowheads. They followed the stealthy still hunt, or went on the general hunt, covering a large area and driving the game to a common center for indiscriminate slaughter. Fish was caught with line and bone hook, with single bone tine spear, by weir traps in stream, or scooped out in baskets after polluting the water with soap-root plant juice. Acorns constituted the main staple breadstuff, the nut ground to a meal and the bitter tannin laboriously leached out of the thin gruel poured out in clean sand. The dog was the only domestic animal.

The Indians of the Yosemite region were of religious or superstitious temperament, devout in their beliefs and observances, and easily worked upon by their medicine men. They had elaborate symbolic ceremonies with dancing an important feature. Both sexes took part, but they never danced as a recreation. The ceremonial around a fire was accompanied by drum beating and a monotonous chant, the dancer circling until falling exhausted. The great dance occasions were before going to war and when cremating the dead. They had also tribal festival gatherings.

Polygamy was not uncommon among the Mariposa and other county Indians, with two and three and even more wives. Chiefs and headmen established relations of amity with other tribes by taking wives out of them. The young wife was bought, payment for the chattel constituting a chief part of the marriage ceremonial, and the wife becoming personal property to be sold or gambled away according to the mood. Clark says that in the marriage relation the Indian was as a rule strictly faithful. If the woman was found to be unfaithful, the penalty was death. Man whipping or wife beating were unknown, whipping was not resorted to even for disobedience by children, being considered a more humiliating and disgraceful punishment than death. Disobedience was a fault rare among children.

It is Clark, who is authority for the statement, that after the 1850-51 hostilities and liberation after four years of confinement on the reservations — the Yosemites and other tribes on and north of the San Joaquin placed on the Fresno reservation and those south of the river on the Kings and Tejon reservations — with tribal relations and customs almost broken up, the food supply reduced with the settlement of the country, life was more precarious and many at times were near the starvation point.

"In these straitened and desperate circumstances," recites Clark, in a publication of 1904, "many of their young women were used as commercial property and peddled out to the mining camps and gambling saloons for money to buy food, clothing or whiskey, this latter article being obtained through some white person in violation of the law."

The universal practice was among the Sierra foothill tribes to burn the bodies of the dead with their effects and votive offerings. This was a semi-religious practice to cheat the evil spirit of his prey in the spirit or soul, the body being burned to set the soul free the sooner to the happier spirit world. In later years the-burial custom of the whites was adopted, but the things that were once burned as offerings were cut into fragments before burial, lest some white desecrate the grave by digging them up. These Diggers — a name given them in derision because not good fighters and from the practice of digging for tuberous roots of plants for food — held such sacred reverence for the dead that after reservation liberation they impoverished themselves for years by burning their best belongings at the annual mourning festivals. One of their beliefs was that the spirits of the bad served another earth life in the grizzly bear as punishment for misdeeds, wherefor no Indian would knowingly eat bear meat. In certain lines of artistic work, the Diggers excelled all others, notably in basket work and how and arrows, which were of superior workmanship and fine finish.

A great fund of mythological lore was in their possession, handed down orally from generation to generation, hut they were reluctant to tell the whites these often pretty and poetical legends.

The warlike valley tribes were the Tulareans of Tulare Lake, the Yosemites of the valley of that name, the Monos from the other side of the range, and the Chowchillas of the river valley of that name. At the, signing of the Fort Barbour treaty, the second and third named tribes had neither signed, nor surrendered, nor been rounded up. The best known tribes were the Pohonochees living near the waters of the Pohono or Bridal Veil Creek in summer and on the south fork of the Merced in winter about twelve miles below Wawona, the Potoencies on the Merced, Wiltucumnes on the Tuolumne, Nootchoos and Chowchillas in the Chowchilla Valley, the Honaches and Mewoos on the Fresno and vicinity and the Chookchachanees on the San Joaquin and vicinity.

The original name of the Yosemite Valley was Ah-wah-nee, meaning "deep grass valley." The word "yosemite" signifies "a full grown grizzly bear." The valley portion of the Sierra region was inhabited by a peaceful people, who indulged in few controversies and were less belligerent than any on the Pacific coast, usually settling disputes by talk in general council.

The treaty of peace and friendship submitted in council at Fort Barbour, and afterward repudiated by the government by the way, was signed up on April 29, 1851, by chiefs representing sixteen tribes. Of tribal names other than those mentioned, only one has been perpetuated — that of the Pitiaches, whose home was in the vicinity of the site of Fresno city and whose one time existence is recalled by the official designation of Pitiaches Tribe No. 144, I. O. R. M. of Fresno.

The Fresno Indians of today court the seclusion of their foothill or mountain rancherias. In the fruit season, they mingle with the whites on the plains to seek employment in orchard or vineyard; otherwise they are not seen save on the days of the visiting circus or for the Fourth of July parades and celebrations. Such a moving appeal was made to the supervisors of the county in March, 1917, that they authorized H. G. Brendel as superintendent of Indian missions to provide medical service for the poor Indians and Dr. Charles L. Trout of Clovis to attend the sick in the mountains and present bills to the county for payment. It was the first step the county has ever taken to render a service to the Indians, but the relief was like the locking of the stable door after the horse was stolen.

The missionaries school them and give them religious instruction, afford them medical attention according to the means provided them, and prevail on them when they have lived in the marital state according to loose tribal customs and have borne children to accompany them to the county seat and for the sake of the children take out license and be wedded according to the law of the land. The Indians have had intercourse long enough with the whites to have lost faith in their medicine men, though one of these charlatans was haled into court about a year ago for manslaughter in the killing of a tribesman .in giving the blood sucking treatment to a patient resulting in death. The charge was in the end dismissed. The missionaries have done all they can in the medical line until the demands on them became too great without money for medicine and mileage for the physician. Measles, pulmonary and bronchial troubles are the principal ailments, especially among the children.

"I have watched men, women and children die because of no medical service," said Superintendent Brendel in his appeal to the supervisors. "It is a long way back into the hills and an Indian will ordinarily not earn enough or more than to provide the merest necessary food to keep up life. Why during winter they almost starve and when sickness comes they generally die. Once there were many Indians back in the hills, but now we have only 687, a slight increase over last year. The diseases they are subject to eat up the population fast. I often wonder how it is that we have any left, for the government has neglected to give them the aid that reservation Indians are entitled to."

Back in earlier days, the government's agents signed treaties with the Indians providing that they gave up the valley lands for reservations in other prosperous sections of the country. Congress never ratified these treaties, the white man seized the valley lands and the Indians were left to content themselves with the barren foothill or mountain sections in which to build their homes in. The government as the only thing that it does for them gives two days of school sessions weekly. The state of California does nothing for them. Patents are granted by the general government for mountainous land — none other being available — to Indians that have severed the tribal relations, but the title is paternally held as a protection to the Indian in trust for twenty years.

The Indians are said to be good laborers, reliable, better than the Japanese, willing and docile but the squaw must hold the purse string, because strong drink is an allurement that the buck cannot resist. The county provision out of the public fund, small as it is, was made on the theory that the Indians are indigents to be aided as are the other poor of the county, and thus on a small scale a work as a mission charity effort was initiated for fees that little more than defray automobile mileage charges, while improving the general health and living conditions of the Indians. The surviving aborigines in the county are assembled on rancherias on Sycamore Creek, at Indian Mission, Table Mountain and in the foothill sections near and about Auberry.

The Indian population of California in 1915 was returned at 15,034. Indians are located in fifty-five of the fifty-eight counties of the state. In dealing with the California tribes, the government did not follow the policy pursued with the wild tribes of the plains in making treaties or giving them remuneration for lands acquired by whites. Allotments number 2,592 of 82,162 acres with 430,136 unallotted. The California Indians are of at least fourteen different linguistic stocks. They are located on twenty-six reservations, twenty-two of these mission reservations. Most of the mission tribes of different tribes are located on scattered small reservations over Riverside and San Diego Counties. The Tule River reservation of seventy-six square miles in Tulare County shelters the survivors of the one-time warlike Tulares that were once monarchs over all they surveyed on the San Joaquin plains.

The last and most remarkable and also the most formidable uprising in California was the 1872-73 Modoc war. That tribe defied and resisted government troops for months from their lava beds near the Oregon state line and treacherously assassinated at a peace council on April 11, 1873, Gen. E. R. S. Canby and Rev. Eleazor Thomas of Petaluma, Cal., one of the commissioners. The tribe was finally subjugated, four of the ringleaders in the murders hanged on October 3, 1873, two sentenced to life imprisonment at Alcatraz Island and the others — thirty-nine men, fifty-four women and sixty children — deported to Quapaw agency in Indian Territory.