The Wild Frontier (33 page)
Authors: William M. Osborn
The Seminole women did as the Creek women had done before them in the war, killing their small children so they would be free to fight beside their men.
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T
EXANS INVITED
Comanche
*
chiefs to peace talks in 1840. They then tried to seize the chiefs as hostages. The chiefs resisted. All were killed.
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The same year, there was an encounter between the Texans and the Comanche that resulted in the death of 7 Texans and the capture of 13. There were 35 Indians killed and 29 captured. When the Indians learned about the deaths of their people, they put 11 of their 13 captives to death “with great torture,” sparing only the 2 children, who had been adopted into the tribe.
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Texas was admitted into the Union in 1845. In 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo became effective. That treaty between the United States and Mexico provided that the United States would prevent incursions into Mexico by Indians from the United States. The Comanche were notorious for their raids into Mexico to steal horses. They were indignant about this provision of the treaty. Robert Simpson Neighbors had been appointed by President Polk to try to persuade the tribes in Texas to stay away from the settlers. He complained that “if a horse is stolen by an Indian … the first party of Indians that is fallen in with, is attacked and massacred” by the Texas Rangers.
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A Ranger company heard a rumor about the murder of a settler, came upon a band of Wichitas, who fled, and massacred 25 of them. The Wichitas killed 3 surveyors in return. Soon there was an all-out war. Another wagon train was
attacked later by Kiowa,
*
and perhaps some Comanche. Troops arriving after the attack found that the ruins of the burned wagons contained 16 bodies.
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The settlers who came into the Oregon country in the 1840s got along with the Indians reasonably well for a time. Marcus Whitman, a physician and missionary for the Presbyterian Church, and his wife set up a mission to the Cayuse Indians with Henry Spalding and his wife near Fort Walla Walla in Washington. (The 2 wives were the first white women to cross the Rocky Mountains.) But the Cayuse began to resent the number of settlers coming into their area. There was a measles epidemic in 1847. Dr. Whitman treated both settler and Indian children, but the settler children tended to recover, while the Cayuse children tended to die.
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Cayuse chief Tiloukaikt and warrior Tomahas believed Whitman was poisoning the Indian children. On November 29, the Cayuse attacked the mission, killing the Whitmans and 12 others. The settlers formed a volunteer army, and there was war until 1850. To make peace, the Cayuse turned over 5 of the perpetrators of the Whitman Massacre. They were tried, found guilty, and hanged.
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A volunteer army under clergyman Cornelius Gilliam with 550 Oregon militia went on a punitive expedition in 1848. Not all the Cayuse had supported the Whitman raid, but Gilliam attacked the first Cayuse camp he found. More than 20 peaceful Indians were killed, as well as 5 militia. When Gilliam accidentally killed himself with his gun, his troops lost interest in the campaign.
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C
ALIFORNIA ATROCITIES
were unique. The Indians, at least in the north where the gold was, were unorganized, poor, and lacking in warlike spirit.
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The miners, on the other hand, “were the extreme in frontiersmen, without respect for any law other than what they made themselves.”
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They have been described as including a “high proportion of ‘hard cases’: thieves, jailbirds, cutthroats, and assorted gallows bait.”
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The California gold rush began in 1848. It has been said, “The gold rush of 1849-50 brought into California a large number of Anglos who were single men and less responsible than colonists in other areas.”
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The
Daily Alta California
newspaper in 1851 referred to “oppressions from the lawless and reckless scum of our countrymen and others, which the gold fever and the new order of things generally has brought into the country.”
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California had a governor who announced that “a war of extermination will continue to be raised until the Indian race becomes extinct.”
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Ralph K. Andrist concluded that in no other part of the United States were the Indians “so barbarously treated and so wantonly murdered.”
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General George Crook described what it was like when he was a lieutenant in the mining town of Yreka, California:
It was of no unfrequent occurrence for an Indian to be shot down in cold blood, or a squaw to be raped by some brute. Such a thing as a white man being punished for outraging an Indian was unheard of.
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When California was annexed to the United States in 1848, there were about 100,000 Indians there. By 1859 there were only 30,000, and by 1900 only 15,000. The causes of this catastrophe are not completely clear, but what is clear is that atrocities by the settlers (which included prospectors, miners, and ranchers) and disease played a significant part.
Before 1827, diphtheria, measles, and pneumonia “ravaged Indians.” In 1833, other diseases such as cholera, smallpox, and syphilis “spread like wildfire,” and approximately 4,500 Indians from 4 tribes died from disease in that year. “Other diseases spread unabated.” From 1830 to 1848, almost 11,500 Indians died of “white man’s diseases.”
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Edward H. Spicer calculated that from 1769, when the Spanish missions were founded, until 1846, when California declared its independence from Mexico, the Indian population declined rapidly, perhaps by half, as a result of disease and poor living conditions. He added that by the late 1840s, the Indian population may have fallen to about 70,000.
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Alvin Josephy suggested that from 1849 to 1859, 70,000 California Indians died from one cause or another. “Disease and poverty were prevalent.”
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It was reported in 1851 that sickness was ravaging the Indians in the vicinity of the Sacramento River, there were unburied bodies on the road, and many were lying prostrate with disease.
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Disease and malnutrition undoubtedly killed more of the Indians than did violence.
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The Clifford Trafzer and Joel Hyer book
Exterminate Them!
compiled 115 California newspaper accounts dealing with settler relations with Indians. Trafzer is a Wyandot Indian. Many of the atrocity reports
here are taken from that book. The number of atrocities will never be known, but Trafzer and Hyer claimed “volunteer militia units murdered thousands” of Indians and enslaved thousands more.
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In 1860 the
San Francisco Bulletin
was appalled by what was happening:
We have been informed through the papers, of the murderous outrages committed on the aboriginal inhabitants of California by men with white skins. We regret to say that there is no exaggeration in these accounts. On the contrary … we can bring to light no circumstance to palliate or extenuate them in the slightest degree. In the Atlantic and Western States, the Indians have suffered wrongs and cruelties at the hands of the stronger race. But history has no parallel to the recent atrocities perpetrated in California. Even the record of Spanish butcheries in Mexico and Peru has nothing so diabolical.
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There was a form of atrocity in California seldom found elsewhere. Trafzer and Hyer, who are Indian advocates, asserted that because settlers had polluted the streams, driven off or killed local game, and disrupted traditional societies, “the actions of whites compelled many of California’s Indians to steal cattle and horses.”
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Be that as it may, numerous Indian thefts occurred, and sometimes the thief was killed.
In the late 1840s, after the miners had taken land occupied by Indians, some Indians started robbing the miners and pilfering their property. In retaliation the miners formed posses and killed both guilty and innocent Indians alike.
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One prospector accused Indians of stealing his pick. A chief visited the mining camp to inquire about it. He was shot. The Indians then wounded a prospector named Aldrich with 3 arrows.
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A Cahuilla Indian named Juan Diego was considered “loco,” or crazy. He rode his horse to find work and tied it at the corral of a Mr. Temple. He came home on a stolen horse. His wife asked whose it was, and Diego seemed confused. Then Temple came up, shot Diego dead, and went to a justice of the peace and claimed the Indian had tried to knife him.
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In 1850, storekeeper Jim Savage
*
was informed that his Miraposa store had been raided. He went there and found that his 3 men had been
murdered, his goods carried off, and his camp burned. Savage gathered 43 men and after walking many miles found an Indian camp. They were celebrating and “Savage could learn from what they said that they expected an attack from the Americans.” The Savage group charged the Indians, killed 27 of them, and burned the camp, leaving an old woman who had fought well to die in the fire.
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In 1853 Indians destroyed about $5,000 worth of stock owned by ranchers Thomas and Toombe, who then “had two men employed, at $8.00 per month, to hunt down and kill the Diggers, like other beasts of prey.” One of these men, John Breckenridge, armed only with a bowie knife, met 4 Indians (there is no indication they knew anything about the theft), and attacked them. They told him to leave, and when he did not, they shot arrows at him. Breckenridge killed one and captured one. The captured Indian was taken to Moon’s Ranch, where he was hanged by the citizens. The same year, the store of Bragg & Drew near the Mckeiumne River was robbed. Drew thought he knew who the robbers were and went to an Indian ranch, where some of the goods were found. A chief threatened to kill Drew. He retreated and gathered a party of 16, who returned to the ranch and demanded the goods. An Indian fired and missed, both sides then fired simultaneously, and 4 Indians were killed.
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In 1853, there was trouble near Tehama over some thefts. The miners slaughtered 15 or 20 Indians in retaliation.
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In Sonora the same year, Indians stole some horses and mules. A party of 17 men pursuing them was suddenly surrounded by 300 or 400 Indians, who attacked. Three Indians were killed.
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Near Sugar Loaf Mountain in 1853, several deaths occurred. Some cattle were stolen from Mr. Middleton; 2 white men attacked the Indians, and 8 Indians were killed. Later, an Indian was killed for stealing. Another was hanged for the same offense.
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Three years later, a miner’s sugar had been stolen by Indians 2 or 3 times. He then mixed his sugar with an ounce of strychnine; 8 or 10 died, and others were made severely ill.
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These thefts were, of course, crimes, but apparently no Indian was ever convicted of any such theft because he never got to trial. An atrocity was committed against each murdered Indian by his killers. Other atrocities for other reasons follow.
There were, of course, thefts where the alleged thief was not killed. Indians stole the stock of John Sutter, whose discovery of gold started the gold rush, stole hundreds of Mexican cattle and horses after the Mexican War started in 1846, and stole livestock elsewhere. One rancher in 1850 had all his stock stolen 14 times in 3 years.
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It has
been claimed that the thefts were acts of Indian resistance, but the resistance was broader in scope:
Besides stealing from Anglos and Chinese, Indians defended their homelands by attacking American settlements, burning ranches, and killing whites. They ambushed mail carriers, merchants, miners, and anyone else who trespassed on their lands…. Some fought American militia units.
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The Indians were driven from the land they occupied by the settlers. When the Indians resisted by attacking the gold miners, all the Indians in the area were hunted down, women were gang-raped, men were captured and forced to do field labor, and children were treated like slaves.
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Edward H. Spicer put it as clearly as anyone:
The coming of the Anglo-Americans in 1848-1849 after the U.S. war with Mexico extended the [California] Indians’ condition of absolute subordination to the whole state…. The idea of Indian rights to land or to anything else was wholly foreign. Indians were murdered, plundered, pushed from what land they held, and then ignored in the constitutional government ultimately established (except for specific denial of the right to testify in court). The result was not only death and loss of property, but 75 years of social limbo, which no other Indians in the United States experienced. Despite efforts by a few reformers on behalf of white-Indian relations during the early 1850s, neither the federal government nor the state recognized the Indians’ existence. They were not citizens, but neither were they wards of the state. The state appointed a superintendent of Indian affairs whose office did nothing, and the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs took no responsibility. The result was steady separation of Indians from nearly all their land, and frequent starvation. Some whites hunted Indians for sport and rounded up children and sold them.
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In 1849, prospectors from Oregon attacked a Maidu Indian village in California, raped many women, and shot some Indians who attempted to intervene. Soon after that, Maidu warriors in turn attacked Oregon miners, killing 5 of them. Oregon men stormed an Indian village and killed at least 12. The miners then murdered 8 Indian hostages.
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The same year, an old Indian came to a mining camp. A miner claimed that one of the Indian’s horses was his. The Indian said he had bought it from a white man. The miner took it, the Indian rode off, said something offensive to the miner, and the miner shot him.
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Finally, in 1849 James M. Vail was missing and feared captured or killed by the Indians.
A search party found the smoking ruins of a house with tracks leading from it. The tracks were followed to an Indian, and he was killed.
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