Through a Glass Darkly

            The number of historical documents which mention Kumeyaay baskets is overwhelming.  Exiguously published, they are interleaved with Indian agents’ reports, correspondence, newspaper articles, and miscellanea in a variety of repositories.  The challenge is to extract significant, relevant conclusions from these documents, at best a tripartite task: 1) ferreting out the locations where documents have been deposited, 2) sifting through the source documents to locate data while understanding which data may be important, and 3) understanding how the documents relate to each other and to past and current practices and attitudes of cultural insiders and outsiders.

            Each basket, like a text, reveals its secrets to those who can observe and interpret them. The extraction task is repeated with each basket, to bring the history of individual baskets and their makers alive.  Careful examination reveals details of manufacture which reflect specific human processes in time and space. 

            To uncover the maximum amount of material possible about Kumeyaay basketry the archives and collections of the following institutions have been consulted: the Phoebe Apperson Hearst Museum and the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley; the  Huntington Library, San Marino, CA; the Huntington Free Library, Bronx, NY; the San Diego Museum of Man, San Diego, CA; the Riverside Municipal Museum, Riverside, CA; the San Diego Historical Society archives, San Diego, CA; and the Southwest Museum, Highland Park, CA.  A brief resume of the contents of the more important archival collections as they pertain to Kumeyaay basketry follows, to help the reader understand the interconnectedness of each collection.

            The San Diego Historical Society research archive contains paper and photographs only, including some of the writings of Edward H. , an entrepreneur from the area, who was a store and resort owner, a dedicated photographer and a collector of Indian-made objects.  The archive contains many photographs of people referred to in the archives of other collections.

            The National Archives, Pacific Southwest Region in Laguna Niguel, CA is another rich source of information on behaviors and attitudes surrounding basketmaking over an even more broad span of time, from about 1918 until 1943.  Contained in the Mission Indian Agency records, the Central Classified Files 1920 - 1950, and the New Central Classified Files 1920 - 1953, are the desk records and files of the Mission Indian superintendents; census rolls from 1922 for the 28 reservations under the ’s jurisdiction; acts of legislation which prohibit and otherwise restrict the rights of Indians to burn off their land; inquiries from businessmen wanting quickly constructed, cheap basketry perfume-bottle covers and bread baskets; the results of an inquiry by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to ascertain the names of the best Mission Indian basketmakers and other artisans of the era; an inventory of purchases of baskets and objects from reservation people in Alta California between 1931 and 1937; the annual income reports for reservations in 1939 and 1940; and a record of the incomes from different crafts and traditional economic strategies.  Remarkably, in these files rests an original label from the linen thread used in the Sybil Carter Indian Lace Association project mentioned frequently in materials in other archives.

            The Phoebe Apperson Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley owns baskets and other objects referred to in the correspondence from Alfred Louis Kroeber to anthropologist Constance Goddard DuBois.

            Although the Bancroft LIBRARY at the University of California, Berkeley and the Huntington Library in San Marino are not major sources of information about Kumeyaay basketry, specifically, they provide clear evidence of the Mexican, and subsequently, American political and social climate which surrounded and engulfed Indian people.  This climate is so important the remainder of this chapter focuses there; it underpins any historically informed theory which may be developed.

            The San Diego Museum of Man houses two albums of photographs taken by DuBois which put faces to the names mentioned in the two teachers’ letters now housed at the Huntington Free Library in the Bronx, NY.  One contains the only known photograph of a type of fabric art called drawn work, learned by Kumeyaay women nearly a hundred years before from Spanish women. 

            The archives of the Huntington Free Library, Bronx, NY house the correspondence to and writings of Constance Goddard DuBois.  A popular fiction writer cum anthropologist, DuBois left her Connecticut home for many summers to work among the Kumeyaay.  Between 1900 and 1909, she corresponded with a host of anthropology notables, including Alfred L. , David P. Barrows, Clark Wissler, Otis Tufton Mason, and C. Hart Merriam, but the most relevant body of letters in the collection are from two government  teachers, Mary (Maria) Watkins at Mesa Grande Indian Reservation and Mamie Robinson at Campo Indian Reservation.  The letters are packed with information about basketry because these teachers bought baskets and sent them to Connecticut for DuBois to sell during the winters.  DuBois found east-coast museums, themselves in the midst of a collecting frenzy, a good market for Kumeyaay cultural materials.  She gave public lectures, charging admission and selling baskets and other artifacts to the audience.  She used this money to pay the Kumeyaay women for their baskets and to provide rations” of $3.00 per month for the aged, disabled, and indigent of Mesa Grande and Campo Reservations.

            During these nine years, first Mary Watkins and then Mamie Robinson supplied a continual stream of Kumeyaay baskets, dance regalia, blankets, skirts, and other lightweight material culture objects forced into sale by deteriorated economic conditions in Kumeyaay villages on and off reservations.  In all, more than 100 pieces of correspondence place basketmaking firmly in its cultural context and more than twenty drafts of articles written by Du Bois deal extensively with basketmaking and the basketmakers, providing details found no where else.  The letters also document the activities of the Sybil Carter Indian Lace Association among the Indian people of Southern California between 1900 and 1908.  All letters from Mary Watkins and Mamie Robinson referred to in this chapter are from this collection unless otherwise noted.

            DuBois was the woman to whom most of the letters are addressed. She authored the majority of the papers in the collection in seasonal alternation with her ethnologic and collecting work among the Kumeyaay between 1897 and 1909.  Like Watkins and Robinson her desire to work with the Kumeyaay people was precipitated by her commitment to the Episcopalian ideal of Christ-like behavior among the poor.

            There were certainly poor Indian people much closer to Connecticut than the Kumeyaay.  In fact, the Episcopalians worked extensive missions among the Oneida in New York and Ojibwa in Minnesota beginning in 1890 (NAPSR, New Central Classified Files, 1920-1953.  Box 65: 967).  It is probable that the settlement of DuBois’ sister and brother-in-law in Chula Vista, now a suburb of San Diego, figured largely in her choice.  Although the circumstances of her first trip to Mesa Grande remain obscure, she appears to have come by train to visit her sister, whose husband was employed by the railroad, headquartered at the time in National City.  On a side trip to the local mountains DuBois first met a people largely unknown to Easterners, living in miserable poverty, ill health, and hunger.  DuBois would spend the next twelve years of her life rallying support for the Indians of Southern California.  The papers in the collection document the cyclical nature of the writings.  They illustrate and document not only the increasing involvement of DuBois in the lives of the Kumeyaay, but of the growth of a bond of affection between DuBois and Watkins.  After their first meeting in 1900, Mary Watkins predicted the long-lasting position of advocacy DuBois would maintain over the years

Tuesday’s mail brought the letter so full of interest to me and mine.  How little I knew that day as I stood talking in the road that through you, rather than through the Government, all my longings, my hopes would be realized.  And I think that you did not think on this mountain waited the work that will make so many better and happier.  But God’s hand leads surely (HFL, CGD papers, reel 1: 3/13/1900).

            During the long Connecticut winters between 1900 and 1908 DuBois produced a steady stream of material for publication in the popular and academic press, hoping to make the Kumeyaay more visible to a nation in a basket collecting craze.  She was a popular romance novelist in her day, and wrote A Soul in Bronze (1900; 1907a), a novel featuring a college educated Southern California Indian hero ultimately jailed for a murder he did not commit.  In love with the White heroine, and realizing his love must remain unrequited, the hero chooses to remain in jail to help other Indian prisoners, rather than to live in the White world without her.  Mary Watkins wrote of her enthusiasm for the book, “I am sure that A Soul in Bronze will be a success.  Even Mrs. Stone[1] who does not like Indians is very much interested and pleased.”

                DuBois also wrote continually about Kumeyaay religious and philosophical beliefs and practices for the publications of the University of California, Department of Anthropology and for the Smithsonian Institution.  She maintained a regular correspondence with A. L. Kroeber in Berkeley regarding the publications.

            She petitioned Government and elected officials urging them to act in the best interest of the Indian people by restoring their human rights, their land-use rights, and by conferring ownership of their traditional lands to them.  She worked assiduously to prevent the misery and slow death suffered by so many Kumeyaay as a result of Congressional action or conversely, the refusal of Congress to act.

            DuBois, Watkins and Robinson provide an insight which is unique in several ways.  Most notable is their documentation of details other historians apparently didn’t find worth recording.  They detailed the impoverished lives and agonizing starvation deaths of people considered in Eurocentric academic circles to be “without history.”  Their viewpoint is uniquely feminine in an era when women had not yet shown in any numbers in academic and sociological publishing.  Watkins and Robinson have provided a multilevel nonjudgmental comparison of various economic strategies practiced by Kumeyaay people in that era.  They document minute details of daily life that male anthropologists were denied knowledge of, didn’t notice, or disregarded.

            It is important to restate Eric Wolf’s point that history is made up of meaningless and meaningful human interactions (1982: 6), “the final result was itself only the contested outcome of many contradictory relationships.”  No historic event or condition ever occurs in and of itself.  The occurrence is always influenced by the events surrounding it.  Everything affects everything else.  A static historical tableau is not an adequate means for understanding the “basket craze” which swept the country in the early 1900s or how the expansion of the railroad affected that craze and ultimately the lives of individual Indian people in San Diego County.

            The combined picture which can be pieced together from documents in these several repositories is quite complex and rich in detail, even though it comprises only a few frames in the motion picture of thousands of years of basketry praxis.  The last two hundred years of basketmaking is like a blink of the eye when compared to more than 10,000 years of archaeologically documented basketmaking history.  The archaic history of basketmaking comprises by far the greatest part of Kumeyaay basketmaking history.  This chapter looks at the time when enormous change challenged the survival of an ancient artistic tradition and paradoxically assured its preservation: the years between the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the beginning of World War II.

Southern California Indian Survival 1848 - 1860

            The Kumeyaay, Kamia, Luiseño, Cupeño, and Cahuilla people once formed the major population of San Diego County.  The political boundaries of San Diego County, as established by the men framing the California State Constitution in 1849, spread from the Pacific Ocean on the west, eastward to the Arizona border, north to Los Angeles County, and south to the new border between Baja California, Mexico and Alta or American California.

            To understand the political structure of California in 1848 we must look to the establishment of the first Europhone^[2] colonies here.  The Californias, the northern half of which was ceded to the United States by Mexico under the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, were a part of the spoils of war Spain surrendered to Mexico at the close of the Mexican War of Independence in 1821.  Russia and England wanted to exploit the rich resources of the Pacific Coast but the Spaniards preempted their claims by establishing permanent colonies in San Diego and Monterey, Alta California by 1777.  For one-hundred and fifty years California remained on the extensive list of Spanish colonies.

            The tipai and ipai peoples, named the Diegueño by the Spanish in 1776, and today known by the name, Kumeyaay,^[3] had endured the process of Missionization under which the Spaniards made extensive use of forced Indian labor.  The Spanish believed they were sent by God to save the souls of the Indians, thereby raising them out of their state of ignorance and savagery.   This was nearly equivalent to extinction.

            The Spanish were able to capitalize upon well established systems of intensive gardening and harvesting natural foods developed before the arrival of outsiders.  Chief Patencio of Palm Springs indicated this while talking about a flash flood which ripped through Chino Canyon in the mid 1860s

There was good land there and my people raised fine crops from garden seed. But now it is all washed away.  The great gorge that must be crossed to reach the hotspring was all good land at the time that I speak of.  Smooth and level.  Some of the creek was good land, too...All the harvest they had raised was gone, and all the good land, it was gone, too.  Where the grass was green for the animals, and the soil was good to raise things to eat for the people, there were only piles of great rocks and washed-out gorges.  My people never tried to raise anything there any more.

It may be assumed from the 1860s date that farming was introduced by the Spanish or Mexicans but Cahuilla mythology offers us another clue.  Patencio retold part of the creation story (Patencio 1943: 24 - 25), how Mukat gave food to his people, “My teeth will be your corn; the melons are my heart...beans, which were the fingers of Mo-cot.”  Pumpkins, beans, and corn must be grown, they are not wild crops.  The position of corn, beans, and melons in the order of creation and their preHispanic names, indicate that at least the Cahuilla were gardening before the arrival of the Spanish.

            Although the evidence among the Kumeyaay is less plentiful it is notable that there are PreHispanic words for the act of planting and for seeds to be planted.  It is also well established that when Alarcón met the Yuma, the ancestors of the Kumeyaay, in 1540 they were already growing beans, corn, squash, and gourds (Kroeber 1965 [1925]: 803).  Shipek reported (1993: 381) that the elders told her that

 Corn, beans and squash were grown in mountain and desert locations beneath running springs, beside wet meadows, or in places where summer rainfall runoff would spread through the fields.  Some Kumeyaay went to the New River if the Colorado had overflowed into it that year.  There they cooperated to build levees, and diversion dams, and to clear fields for planting.

            In the preceding generations Kumeyaay families frequently went to camps to gather and store food together, whole lineages joining to share in the bounty.  When the harvest demanded that gatherers remain in camp for an extended period of time, the whole family went, unless danger or infirmity prevented the travel.  Some foods, particularly agave, because of the brute force required to harvest the plants, the dangerous spines, and the acid juice, were harvested by the men and strongest boys alone.  Then the small children remained in home camps with the women and eldest family members.

            These practices began long before the Spanish opened the first Mission in Alta California. In their time of domination, the Spaniards forced their own idea of appropriate family structure on the Indian people under the thrall of the  Mission, forcing men and women to live apart.  They frequently required the men and strongest boys to travel long distances, not to gather acorns or agave, but to haul materials necessary for establishing the Spanish occupation of Kumeyaay homelands as seen in the following account. Margaret Langdon published a portion of a 1961 interview^[4] with Richard Nejo in News From Native California (Winter 2000) in which he said

At that time there were a lot of Indians down here and they made them work building those churches.  And they farmed all that land around the Mission there, corn and beans, some of that is still there.  Those Missions were built by the Indians and the timber was brought from Volcan on their shoulders.  It took about fifty men to bring one down, and those timber were about a hundred feet long; and they brought them down...Up that canyon they built a canal.  They brought the water down in the canal that was about two feet wide, I guess, and about three feet deep.  And the bricks were about fourteen inches thick.  They built it clear to the Mission to irrigate the crops.

            Syphilis, measles and other contagious diseases ran rampant in the missions, leaving most Indian people who went there, dead.  Slowly, the Spanish found that the missions could not produce the wealth hoped for by the Crown because they could not establish a stable Indian labor population.  State support of the missions was soon cut off, but this had little long-term significance because California was to become a territory of the new Mexican Republic subsequent to the War for Independence.

            The fledgling Mexican government, remembering its Indian roots, conferred the rights of citizenship to all Indian people in 1821 (Phillips 1981: 61).  In 1829, the first Mexican governor, José Maria Echeandia ordered Indian children removed from servitude in Mexican homes and returned to the homes of their parents (Shoup and Milliken 1999: 85).  It is telling that in spite of the recognition the new Mexican government gave Indian people by conferring them with citizenship, Kumeyaay people were murdered wholesale by government soldiers (McGrew 1922: 86).  An account of the lives of the Kumeyaay under the rule of Echeandia, in the late 1820s is given in McGrew (1922: 32)

 The old governor had some trouble with the Indians, and kept his troops busy much of the time in keeping them scared away from the port.  The California soldiers brought in the ears of their victims to show what the day’s work had been.  On one occasion a lieutenant is said to have brought in twenty pairs of ears from Indians slain in this section.

            Another example of the schizophrenic attitude of Mexican Governor Echeandia, engendered by the need for laborers, came when a smallpox epidemic hit Northern California in 1829.  Coincidentally, a party of American traders and trappers headed by Sylvester Pattie were languishing under arrest in San Diego (Caughey 1938: 258).  They bargained for their release by asserting that they had a large hidden supply of vaccine

 [J. O.] Pattie let it be known that he had a supply of [smallpox] vaccine, and the Governor soon contracted with him to vaccinate the Californians, officials, soldiers, settlers, padres, and Mission Indians.  He toured California in his capacity as “Surgeon General to his Excellency, the Governor of California” inoculating one thousand in San Diego, four thousand at San Juan Capistrano, two thousand in Los Angeles, and lesser numbers elsewhere to make a grand total of twenty-two thousand.

            It is highly unlikely that Pattie had any doses, much less twenty-two thousand doses of the vaccine; he had straggled half-dead into Baja California, and had been in jail for months.  Still, his words point out that Echeandia would have vaccinated the Indian population at that time; they by far outnumbered the Mexicans and were desperately needed for abor.  This stands in stark contrast to the Americans who turned a blind eye, forty years later, when smallpox epidemics swept through the California Indian and Americanized Mexican population.

              The Mexican reign of terror was to be short lived, however; the U. S. declared war against Mexico in 1845 and an occupation force of U. S. Marines seized San Diego.  The war between Mexico and the U. S. provided a bright moment in the lives of Indian people who hoped they might again one day be free (HFL, CGD papers, reel 3: c. 1903)

 While the cannon were booming at the famous battle of San Pasqual old Angela sat weaving the circles in this worn basket.  She sat on the mountains overlooking the valley watching the hated white man and the yet more hated Mexicans murder each other.  She said, ‘They will all be dead and we shall be free.’  She was almost a hundred years old when she died and saw her land swallowed up by the gringo.

            In the end, the U. S. and Mexico divided Kumeyaay homelands between themselves.  When Alta California was accessioned by the United States, the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo stipulated specifically, among other things, 1) Indian people be provided for by distributing to them the land which had once comprised the Mission system and 2) all Mexican citizens could choose to become American citizens or they could remain citizens of Mexico.

            When the dust of the Mexican-American War settled, the State and Federal Government stood mute as the Mission lands were occupied by Anglophones and Indian people were driven east and south (Forbes 1969: 61) instead of being treated like citizens of any country.  Katherine Saubel recollects some things she heard about that time (Dozier 1998:135)

...the Anglos took over.  They were just as bad as the Spanish.  They were just there to destroy the Indians.

            That’s when we really became, you might say, beggars, because we had no place to hunt, no place to gather any more.  We were just held down to the different areas.  Sometimes to areas where we didn’t even belong -- we were moved around by whoever was in power.  It was really a trauma for my people.  They became so, how would you say...They were always hungry now, they were always in a sad situation.  I guess they had to live with what little they could get just to survive.  But they were really destroyed.

            By 1847, American control of California had been firmly established; the title of Military Governor shifted from General Stephen Watts Kearney, to a man whom Hurtado (1988: 92 - 93) indicated rose rapidly in the ranks of the military during the Black Hawk War, Colonel Richard Barnes Mason.  Mason appointed Jesse B. Hunter, Captain of Company B of the Mormon Battalion, as the first Indian subagent of Southern California^[5].

            A bit more needs to be said here about Mason and his role in enforcing United States federal Indian Policy; this is a very important point.  President Andrew Jackson believed total removal and eventual annihilation of Indian people was the only path to what he called their “civilization.”  The Black Hawk War was a series of military actions directed against the Sac and Fox Indian people of Illinois and Wisconsin implementing this policy of removal to reservations.  Mason became, in effect, an enforcer of the United States Federal Indian Removal Policy established between 1820 and 1850.  For Indian people, the War marked the beginning of the tradition of the Long Walk, a military enforced march of masses of Indian people to some distant location, typically west of the Mississippi River, usually in the dead of winter.  Every Long Walk resulted in deaths from exposure, malnutrition, and drowning of more than fifty percent of those forced to march at gun point.  The survivors were forever marked by grief, trauma, and the results of prolonged malnutrition, ie, blindness, osteoporosis, depression and the like.^[6] 

            The last such Long Walk occurred in Southern California in May of 1903, when the Cupeño and Kumeyaay people were removed from Warner’s Valley and moved south to the Luiseño reservation at Pala.  Although the death rate here was lower, it was significant that many of the old people went into the hills to die rather than to be dispossessed of their homes and moved to the territory of their rivals.

            When Mason was made the second Military Governor of California, he  brought with him the genocidal impulses which had won him many rapid promotions during the Black Hawk War.  It was no coincidence that Mason, himself a Southerner, would appoint a man who knew the slave laws of the South to manage Southern California Indian affairs.

            As a result of the rapid-fire destructive changes forced upon the Southern California Indian population, Kumeyaay culture, in 1848, was still in the throes of upheaval.  Labor for the ranchos was as serious a problem for the Americans as it had been for the Spaniards and Mexicans.  The entire population of San Diego County in the first official federal census in 1849 (McGrew 1922: 69) was 798 people.  This number, of course, excludes hundreds and perhaps thousands of Indian people, who were not counted in the census.  Six hundred and fifty of those 798 people lived in the city of San Diego.  This left 148 nonindigenous people to master the thousands of square miles of San Diego County the United States had claimed as spoils of the War with Mexico.

            The Spanish had established the prototype for California Indian labor by exploitation at the Missions.  The Mexicans picked up, more or less, where the Spaniards left off, even though they freed Indian children from servitude in Mexican homes.  They had cities to build, not just missions, and this took a great deal of labor.  The Americans, in their turn, would try to force Southern California Indians to build their empire by imposing Southern slave laws upon the population and inventing a few new ones of their own.  Hurtado (1988: 92) observed that like Mason, Hunter was from a wealthy Virginia family and had every opportunity, in his youth, to see how the labor of the population of black slaves was managed in the American South.  Hunter issued a series of orders which restrained Indian people from gathering together, except of course as laborers for the nonIndian population.  He also ordered Indian people to carry passports with them when they traveled away from their reservation.  This law was still in effect as late as 1885 when it was used arbitrarily, to control Indian behavior.  At age 80, Richard Nejo (Langdon 2000) reminisced about the arrest of a man he knew who went, as was usual at the end of summer, to harvest his daughter and son-in-law’s wheat crop.  His failure to obtain the permission of the Indian agent was the charge levied against him

...every year he’d go over there and help harvest the wheat.  Well, he went away this time...he come back by the agent’s house... the agent arrested him for going out of the reservation without permission...

The man was sentenced to chop thirty cords of wood, presumably for a White American not his own family, and spent thirty days in jail.

            The need for labor spawned blatant violations of Indian human rights.    Indian people had long been captured in raids by Mexican slavers who supplied the Ranchos with cheap labor (Forbes 1969: 56) during the Mexican period.  Under the Americans they fared no better.  An 1850 - 1860s slave market in Los Angeles did a brisk business (Hurtado 1988: 75, 92).  Local laws laid traps for the legal enslavement of Indian people; any Indian considered idle, at best an arbitrary judgment, was subject to arrest and a fine (Carrico 1987: 39 - 41).  Any adult Indian who could not pay a fine or a citation would have his debt purchased by a citizen with capital.  The citizen then owned the labor of the Indian until the debt was paid off (Caughey 1952: 51).  An argument that the slave market was in Los Angeles and not San Diego ignores the fact that as much as two-thirds of the labor force in Los Angeles came from the San Diego area (Phillips 1981: 35).

            Indian people could be jailed and held indefinitely without having charges filed against them; they were not allowed to post bail even if they had the money.  They were not guaranteed the right to a speedy trial nor an attorney nor any other concession from the court because California Indian people were denied the rights of citizenship guaranteed them in 1848 by the government of the United States.

            It was even easier to control the labor of Indian children who were routinely kidnapped and presented as orphaned (Carrico 1987: 39).  Even families of modest means could acquire an Indian servant or two as virtually any Indian child could be removed from their home by a White citizen who had only to show the courts how it would benefit the Indian child to live in the White home.  The children worked in exchange for room and board, frequently until they reached the age of majority (Carrico 1987: 41), and although some were well enough treated, the record shows that some were beaten and otherwise abused.  All of them had their right to liberty violated and were deprived of their most valued and valuable resource, their families.  In response to the labor shortage, these actions by Indian subagent Hunter steadily attacked the human rights of Southern California Indian people to a degree which was genocidal in effect if not intent. 

Indian agents, too, profited personally from Indian labor.  They were Presidential appointees and many saw their agency as a management mechanism for controlling Indian labor, not as a position from which to advocate for Indian rights.  Cave J. Couts, a prominent San Diego citizen, and nephew of the Secretary of the United States Treasury, used both his 1851 marriage into the wealthy and powerful Bandini family and his 1853 appointment as Indian Subagent of San Diego County to better his own social and economic position.  As a wedding present,  Abel Sterns gave his sister-in-law, Ysadora Bandini, 2,000 acres of land once attached to the Mission San Luis Rey.  Two Indian men, Andreas and José Manuel, had been deeded the land in 1845 by the Mexican government (Phillips 1981: 37).  When the Anglophone Americans took over, Sterns, was able to preempt the Indians’ land claims.  Couts used his appointment as Indian Subagent to force Indians to build Rancho Guajome for him, rounding them up as if they were part of the livestock included in the land holdings (McGrew 1922: 86).            ...At that time there was a great number of Indians in and around San Luis Rey, and it was an easy matter for Colonel Couts, as he was an Indian agent, to command the services of enough laborers to do his work.  It was not long before the result of the patient labor of 300 Indians took the form of an immense adobe house, built in a square, containing twenty rooms, a fine court-yard in the center, well filled with orange and lemon trees and every variety of flower; immense barns, stables, sheds, and corrals were added, after extensive quarters for the servants were built; then to finish the whole a neat chapel was built and formally dedicated to the worship of God.  His military training enabled him to control and manage the Indians, as only he could.

            Notice that the housing for the servants, mostly Indian people, was built only after the house of the Couts family and the stables, sheds and corrals for livestock were built, most probably a true scale for assessment of social position in the mid 1850s.

                        Between 1855 and 1866 Couts was indicted for the murders of no fewer than six Indians and one "Negro workman."  He was acquitted on each charge because of a technicality: in the case of a man he beat to death with his whip, because of an accusation, after his conviction, that one grand juror was an "alien" and therefore not eligible to sit on a jury.  Once the verdict was invalidated, Couts could not be retried on the same charge of murder.  At another time, the district attorney had failed to post his bond of office (Moyer 1969: 71).  No one batted an eye at the possibility that the Indian subagent, the official of the U.S. Government, had murdered his wards.

            For those Indian people who avoided enslavement by finding paid employment, the picture was not much brighter.  Carrico (1989: 29) states that in 1853

Whites hired at least 100 Indians to help divert the San Diego River from its original flood channel through Old Town.  The Indians received $15.00 per month, tent housing, and some basic food stuffs.  In contrast, White laborers received $60.00 per month on the same job.

B. D. Wilson, federal Sub-Agent for Indian affairs in Southern California, wrote in his 1852 report (21)

If it be true that they [Indian men] cannot do half the work a white man can, ‘tis equally true that custom at best never allows them more than half the wages of the latter, and, generally, much less than half.  The common pay of an Indian farm hand is from eight to ten dollars per month; and one dollar per day the highest in the towns -- but few pay so much.  No white man here, whether American, Sonoran, or Californian, will work for such wages, nor anything like it.

            Indian people who wanted to avoid the many forms of forced servitude or enslavement were compelled to leave the coastal and valley areas and seek refuge in the more mountainous regions of their traditional territory (Shipek 1991: 26).  The invisibility provided them by removal into the hills was a double edged sword.  It allowed the Kumeyaay, to a certain extent, to avoid contact with outsiders, sparing them usurpation and likely murder, but invisibility could not save them from the trials and suffering ahead of them.

            In 1850 the state legislature effectively eliminated the ability of those who fled to the mountains to hunt by prohibiting burning, traditionally used to drive small game; it also outlawed the sale or transfer of guns into Indian hands (Carrico 1987: 42 - 44).  By 1859 most Southern California Indian people were dead from starvation, disease, and murder.  A few were relocated and hungry.  The remaining Indians were not so much employed, as enslaved to the Americans, who imagined themselves to be wresting paradise from wilderness.

Southern California Indian Survival 1861 - 1875

            The period between 1860 and 1875 dealt a further series of terrible blows to southern California Indian people.  Drought and overgrazing ravaged the landscape, changes in federal Indian policy reduced the Indian population to wards of the government, and waves of disease and slow starvation swept through Indian communities.

            New epidemics, especially smallpox, raged through Alta California, in some cases depopulating whole villages.  It is difficult for a 21st century American to understand the terror and horror associated with this disease before the wide availability of vaccine.  People were contagious before they showed serious symptoms, causing a high contagion rate and public pandemonium.  High fevers and convulsions were not uncommon; painful, weeping pustules, accompanied by delirium and followed by a tortured death.

            As a little girl, Dee Alvarez (personal communication 1991) heard an elder female relative tell how she had narrowly escaped her own death.  The elder had contracted the smallpox; those who could have nursed her back to health were either dead or ill themselves.  Her fever rose until she became delirious.  With no one to care for her, she wandered out into the desert and collapsed under a shrub.  As she neared death, a stranger, a White passer-by, rescued her and helped her slowly return to health.  Dee sat pensively for a long  moment, then added, “I wonder how many were never found.”  Alvino Siva, sitting near her, swore a letter exists which verifies that the Government knew the blankets given out in Southern California to the Cahuilla in 1861 by the U. S. Army were infected with smallpox.  Epidemic years saw more food in the field return to the earth unharvested because the large number of people needed to gather and prepare labor-intensive seed foods were themselves sick or dying or were caring for the sick or dying.

            A second blow was dealt by a combination of drought and stock ranching.  Livestock grazing began in 1776, when Juan Bautista de Anza, opened the way for the overland importation of animals from Sonora, Mexico.  The Cahuilla people from Coyote Canyon remember that winter as one of starvation, because the 3,500 head of stock de Anza moved through the Canyon ate the plants the Cahuilla relied upon for food.  The deaths of the Cahuilla of Coyote Canyon during the winter of 1776 were the harbingers of the multiple hardships and deaths stock ranching would visit on Indian people in Southern Alta California from that time on.

            Each acre grazed by livestock was one more made unavailable to Indian people for harvesting plants and animals for food, medicine, and other uses.  The forage needed by indigenous large game animals was cleared away and the numbers declined.  Mesquite trees, long a staple food source for Indian people, was a favored food of cattle and horses.  Immature oaks were another favorite food for stock; these they prevented from producing acorns, the

most heavily relied upon food for California Indian people.  Deer grass, a critical element in basketmaking was another favorite food of range herds.  Each reduction of the traditional Indian food, medicine, and materials supply meant an increased reliance on European economies.

            Europhone colonies were established with stock ranching in mind.  Indian people tended large herds of cattle under the rule of the Spanish Missions; the hides and tallow were harvested for shipment to Mexico and points east.  “Vast numbers of horses” roamed and tens of thousands of sheep were raised for their wool (Cleland 1929: 7, 8) at the Missions.  Cleland (1929: 6) says that by 1800 more than 100,000 cattle descended from those brought by de Anza ranged free in California.

            In San Diego, Don Pio Pico began stocking Rancho Jamul with horses and cattle as soon as he received the Mexican grant in 1829.  Cleland reported 162,000 horned cattle, 13,700 horses, and 127,000 sheep, goats, and pigs, ranging at San Diego, San Luis Rey, and San Juan Capistrano (1929: 11) in 1834.  This count does not include the European introduced animal populations outside of these three tiny Mission holdings.  A drought in 1856 transformed the decline of the endemic plant and animal populations into a death sentence for Indian people (Carrico 1989:60).  The next twenty-years was to be a sequence of starving times caused by drought and compounded by overgrazing.

            The drought of 1860 - 1861 (see Table 3.1) and the resultant barren hillsides caused the starvation of between one-half and three-fourths of the cattle in Southern California.  Caughey (1938: 315) estimates that by 1863 the number of cattle in Southern California had risen to between 300,000 and 400,000.  Then came another year of drought; by the end of January 1864, barely three inches of rain had fallen.  The open range animals, in search for diminishing forage, roamed farther and ate plants formerly passed over, reducing the landscape to a few shrubs stripped to the heartwood.

            Each of the droughts of the 1860s was followed by severe flash flooding.  The land could not absorb the intense downpours and much soil was washed away because of the enormous volume of water and because the plant cover had been removed and the roots no longer held the soil.  Chief Patencio (1943: 57), a Cahuilla from the Palm Springs area, tells about this process

...such a storm was not remembered among the Indians.  The floods began roaring down the canyons.  My people had only time to catch up their children and rush up the mountain side to save their lives.  When the water from the cloud-burst had passed on, everything had gone with it.  The homes of my people and all they had were gone for ever.

            Reliance on traditional subsistence patterns, even for those Indian people who lived far from the urban centers, was further limited by overgrazing compounded by these violent rains.

            The drought broke in January of 1866.  The following four years allowed the herds to swell again, this time far beyond the predrought numbers of animals.  Rainfall in those years was consistently two to five inches above the twenty-year average, allowing some regrowth of the overgrazed landscape, but competition from naturalized European plants further limited regrowth.

            A fair example of this repopulation can be seen at Monserratte Rancho granted to Ysidro María Alvarado by Pio Pico in 1846.  Alvarado started small; by the time of his death from smallpox in 1863, his personal property amounted to "180 steers, twenty cows, 100 sheep, and fifty horses.”  In 1869, under the direction of Ysidro's son, Tomás, the animal count at Monserratte had burgeoned to 3,000 cattle, 13,000 sheep, and 300 horses (Moyer 1969: 100).

            The most terrible drought of all was yet to come, however.  It began slowly in January 1870 and by February 1873 fewer than sixteen inches of rain had fallen in San Diego County, far below the annual average of about 9 inches.  The starving herds decimated the native landscape of bunch grasses (such as deer grass), annuals, and shrubs which would never recover from this assault.

Table  2.1  San Diego Precipitation Totals  by Month from 1853 thru 1873

(Recorded in 100ths of an inch as reported in the National Climatic Data Center data sets.)