Indians is a fair showing of what, with little variation, has been the
fate of the Mission Indians all through Southern California. The
combination of cruelty and unprincipled greed on the part of the
American settlers, with culpable ignorance, indifference, and neglect
on the part of the Government at Washington has resulted in an
aggregate of monstrous injustice, which no one can fully realize
without studying the facts on the ground. In the winter of 1882 I
visited this San Pasqual valley. I drove over from San Diego with the
Catholic priest, who goes there three or four Sundays in a year, to
hold service in a little adobe chapel built by the Indians in the days
of their prosperity. This beautiful valley is from one to three miles
wide, and perhaps twelve long. It is walled by high-rolling,
soft-contoured hills, which are now one continuous wheat-field. There
are, in sight of the chapel, a dozen or so adobe houses, many of which
were built by the Indians; in all of them except one are now living
the robber whites, who have driven the Indians out; only one Indian
still remains in the valley. He earns a meagre living for himself and
family by doing day's work for the farmers who have taken his land.
The rest of the Indians are hidden away in the cañons and rifts of the
near hills,--wherever they can find a bit of ground to keep a horse or
two and raise a little grain. They have sought the most inaccessible
spots, reached often by miles of difficult trail. They have fled into
secret lairs like hunted wild beasts. The Catholic priest of San Diego
is much beloved by them. He has been their friend for many years. When
he goes to hold service, they gather from their various hiding-places
and refuges; sometimes, on a special _fête_ day, over two hundred
come. But on the day I was there, the priest being a young man who was
a stranger to them, only a few were present. It was a pitiful sight.
The dilapidated adobe building, empty and comfortless; the ragged
poverty-stricken creatures, kneeling on the bare ground,--a few
Mexicans, with some gaudiness of attire, setting off the Indians'
poverty still more. In front of the chapel, on a rough cross-beam
supported by two forked posts, set awry in the ground, swung a bell
bearing the date of 1770. It was one of the bells of the old San Diego
Mission. Standing bareheaded, the priest rang it long and loud: he
rang it several times before the leisurely groups that were plainly to
be seen in doorways or on roadsides bestirred themselves to make any
haste to come. After the service I had a long talk, through an
interpreter, with an aged Indian, the oldest now living in the county.
He is said to be considerably over a hundred, and his looks
corroborate the statement. He is almost blind, and has snow-white
hair, and a strange voice, a kind of shrill whisper. He says he
recollects the rebuilding of the San Diego Mission; though he was a
very little boy then, he helped to carry the mud mortar. This was one
hundred and three years ago. Instances of much greater longevity than
this, however, are not uncommon among the California Indians. I asked
if he had a good time in the mission. "Yes, yes," he said, turning his
sightless eyes up to the sky; "much good time," "plenty to eat,"
"_atole_," "_pozzole_," "meat;" now, "no meat;" "all the time to beg,
beg;" "all the time hungry." His wife, who is older than he, is still
living, though "her hair is not so white." She was ill, and was with
relatives far away in the mountains; he lifted his hand and pointed in
the direction of the place. "Much sick, much sick; she will never walk
any more," he said, with deep feeling in his voice.
During the afternoon the Indians were continually coming and going at
the shop connected with the inn where we had stopped, some four miles
from the valley. The keeper of the shop and inn said he always trusted
them. They were "good pay." "Give them their time and they'll always
pay; and if they die their relations will pay the last cent." Some of
them he would "trust any time as high as twenty dollars." When I asked
him how they earned their money, he seemed to have no very distinct
idea. Some of them had a little stock; they might now and then sell a
horse or a cow, he said; they hired as laborers whenever they could
get a chance, working at sheep-shearing in the spring and autumn, and
at grape-picking in the vintage season. A few of them had a little
wheat to sell; sometimes they paid him in wheat. There were not nearly
so many of them, however, as there had been when he first opened his
shop; not half so many, he thought. Where had they gone? He shrugged
his shoulders. "Who knows?" he said.
The most wretched of all the Mission Indians now, however, are not
these who have been thus driven into hill fastnesses and waterless
valleys to wrest a living where white men would starve. There is in
their fate the climax of misery, but not of degradation. The latter
cannot be reached in the wilderness. It takes the neighborhood of the
white man to accomplish it. On the outskirts of the town of San Diego
are to be seen, here and there, huddled groups of what, at a distance,
might be taken for piles of refuse and brush, old blankets, old
patches of sail-cloth, old calico, dead pine boughs, and sticks all
heaped together in shapeless mounds; hollow, one perceives on coming
nearer them, and high enough for human beings to creep under. These
are the homes of Indians. I have seen the poorest huts of the most
poverty-stricken wilds in Italy, Bavaria, Norway, and New Mexico; but
never have I seen anything, in shape of shelter for human creatures,
so loathsome as the kennels in which some of the San Diego Indians are
living. Most of these Indians are miserable, worthless beggars,
drunkards of course, and worse. Even for its own sake, it would seem
that the town would devise some scheme of help and redemption for such
outcasts. There is a school in San Diego for the Indian children; it
is supported in part by the Government, in part by charity; but work
must be practically thrown away on children that are to spend eighteen
hours out of the twenty-four surrounded by such filth and vice.
Coming from the study of the records of the old mission times, with
the picture fresh and vivid of the tranquil industry and comfort of
the Indians' lives in the mission establishments, one gazes with
double grief on such a spectacle as this. Some of these Indian hovels
are within a short distance of the beach where the friars first
landed, in 1769, and began their work. No doubt, Father Junipero and
Father Crespí, arm in arm, in ardent converse, full of glowing
anticipation of the grand future results of their labors, walked again
and again, up and down, on the very spot where these miserable
wretches are living to-day. One cannot fancy Father Junipero's fiery
soul, to whatever far sphere it may have been translated, looking down
on this ruin without pangs of indignation.
There are still left in the mountain ranges of South California a few
Indian villages which will probably, for some time to come, preserve
their independent existence. Some of them number as many as two or
three hundred inhabitants. Each has its chief, or, as he is now
called, "capitan." They have their own system of government of the
villages; it is autocratic, but in the main it works well. In one of
these villages, that of the Cahuillas, situated in the San Jacinto
range, is a school whose teacher is paid by the United States
Government. She is a widow with one little daughter. She has built for
herself a room adjoining the school-house. In this she lives alone,
with her child, in the heart of the Indian village; there is not a
white person within ten miles. She says that the village is as
well-ordered, quiet, and peaceable as it is possible for a village to
be; and she feels far safer, surrounded by these three hundred
Cahuillas, than she would feel in most of the California towns. The
Cahuillas (pronounced Kaweeyahs) were one of the fiercest and most
powerful of the tribes. The name signifies "master," or "powerful
nation." A great number of the neophytes of the San Gabriel Mission
were from this tribe; but a large proportion of them were never
attached to any mission.
Their last great chief, Juan Antonio, died twenty years ago. At the
time of the Mexican War he received the title of General from General
Kearney, and never afterward appeared in the villages of the whites
without some fragmentary attempts at military uniform. He must have
been a grand character, with all his barbarism. He ruled his band like
an emperor, and never rode abroad without an escort of from twenty to
thirty men. When he stopped one of his Indians ran forward, bent down,
took off his spurs, then, kneeling on all-fours, made of his back a
stool, on which Juan stepped in dismounting and mounting. In 1850 an
Indian of this tribe, having murdered another Indian, was taken
prisoner by the civil authorities and carried to Jurupa to be tried.
Before the proceedings had begun, Juan, with a big following of armed
Indians, dashed up to the court-house, strode in alone, and demanded
that the prisoner be surrendered to him.
"I come not here as a child," he said. "I wish to punish my people my
own way. If they deserve hanging, I will hang them. If a white man
deserves hanging, let the white man hang him. I am done."
The prisoner was given up. The Indians strapped him on a horse, and
rode back to their village, where, in an open grave, the body of the
murdered man had been laid. Into this grave, on the top of the corpse
of his victim, Juan Antonio, with his own hands, flung the murderer
alive, and ordered the grave instantly filled up with earth.
There are said to have been other instances of his dealings with
offenders nearly as summary and severe as this. He is described as
looking like an old African lion, shaggy and fierce; but he was always
cordial and affectionate in his relations with the whites. He died in
1863, of small-pox, in a terrible epidemic which carried off thousands
of Indians.
This Cahuilla village is in a small valley, high up in the San Jacinto
range. The Indians are very poor, but they are industrious and
hard-working. The men raise stock, and go out in bands as
sheep-shearers and harvesters. The women make baskets, lace, and from
the fibre of the yucca plant, beautiful and durable mats, called
"cocas," which are much sought after by California ranchmen as
saddle-mats. The yucca fibres are soaked and beaten like flax; some
are dyed brown, some bleached white, and the two woven together in a
great variety of patterns.
In the San Jacinto valley, some thirty miles south of these Cahuillas,
is another Indian village called Saboba. These Indians have occupied
and cultivated this ground since the days of the missions. They have
good adobe houses, many acres of wheat-fields, little peach and
apricot orchards, irrigating ditches, and some fences. In one of the
houses I found a neatly laid wooden floor, a sewing-machine, and the
walls covered with pictures cut from illustrated newspapers which had
been given to them by the school teacher. There is a Government school
here, numbering from twenty to thirty; the children read as well as
average white children of their age, and in manners and in apparent
interest in their studies, were far above the average of children in
the public schools.
One of the colony schemes, so common now in California, has been
formed for the opening up and settling of the San Jacinto valley. This
Indian village will be in the colony's way. In fact, the colony must
have its lands and its water. It is only a question of a very little
time, the driving out of these Saboba families as the Temeculas and
San Pasquales were driven,--by force, just as truly as if at the point
of the bayonet.
In one of the beautiful cañons opening on this valley is the home of
Victoriano, an aged chief of the band. He is living with his daughter
and grandchildren, in a comfortable adobe house at the head of the
cañon. The vineyard and peach orchard which his father planted there,
are in good bearing. His grandson Jesus, a young man twenty years old,
in the summer of 1881 ploughed up and planted twenty acres of wheat.
The boy also studied so faithfully in school that year--his first year
at school--that he learned to read well in the "Fourth Reader;" this
in spite of his being absent six weeks, in both spring and autumn,
with the sheep-shearing band. A letter of his, written at my request
to the Secretary of the Interior in behalf of his people, is touching
in its simple dignity.
SAN JACINTO, CAL., May 29, 1882.
MR. TELLER.
DEAR SIR,--At the request of my friends, I write you in regard
to the land of my people.
More than one hundred years ago, my great-grandfather, who was
chief of his tribe, settled with his people in the San Jacinto
valley. The people have always been peaceful, never caring for
war, and have welcomed Americans into the valley.
Some years ago a grant of land was given to the Estudillos by
the Mexican Government. The first survey did not take in any of
the land claimed by the Indians; but four years ago a new
survey was made, taking in all the little farms, the stream of
water, and the village. Upon this survey the United States
Government gave a patent. It seems hard for us to be driven
from our homes that we love as much as other people do theirs;
and this danger is at our doors now, for the grant is being
divided and the village and land will be assigned to some of
the present owners of the grant.
And now, dear sir, after this statement of facts, I, for my
people (I ask nothing for myself), appeal to you for help.
Cannot you find some way to right this great wrong done to a
quiet and industrious people?
Hoping that we may have justice done us, I am
Respectfully yours,
JOSÉ JESUS CASTILLO.
He was at first unwilling to write it, fearing he should be supposed
to be begging for himself rather than for his people. His father was a
Mexican; and he has hoped that on that account their family would be
exempt from the fate of the village when the colony comes into the
valley. But it is not probable that in a country where water is gold,
a stream of water such as runs by Victoriano's door will be left long
in the possession of any Indian family, whatever may be its relations
to rich Mexican proprietors in the neighborhood. Jesus's mother is a
tall, superbly formed woman, with a clear skin, hazel nut-brown eyes
that thrill one with their limpid brightness, a nose straight and
strong, and a mouth like an Egyptian priestess. She is past forty, but
she is strikingly handsome still; and one does not wonder at hearing
the tragedy of her early youth, when, for years, she believed herself
the wife of Jesus's father, lived in his house as a wife, worked as a
wife, and bore him his children. Her heart broke when she was sent
adrift, a sadder than Hagar, with her half-disowned offspring. Money
and lands did not heal the wound. Her face is dark with the sting of
it to-day. When I asked her to sell me the lace-trimmed pillow-case
and sheet from her bed, her cheeks flushed at first, and she looked
away haughtily before replying. But, after a moment, she consented.
They needed the money. She knows well that days of trouble are in
store for them.
Since the writing of this paper news has come that the long-expected
blow has fallen on this Indian village. The colony scheme has been
completed; the valley has been divided up; the land on which the
village of Saboba stands is now the property of a San Bernardino
merchant. Any day he chooses, he can eject these Indians as the
Temecula and the San Pasqual bands were ejected, and with far more
show of legal right.
In the vicinity of the San Juan Capistrano Mission are living a few
families of Indians, some of them the former neophytes of the mission.
An old woman there, named Carmen, is a splendid specimen of the best
longevity which her race and the California air can produce. We found
her in bed, where she spends most of her time,--not lying, but sitting
cross-legged, looking brisk and energetic, and always busy making
lace. Nobody makes finer lace than hers. Yet she laughed when we asked
if she could see to do such fine work without spectacles.
"Where could I get spectacles?" she said, her eyes twinkling. Then she
stretched out her hand for the spectacles of our old Mexican friend
who had asked her this question for us; took them, turned them over
curiously, tried to look through them, shook her head, and handed them
back to him with a shrug and a smile. She was twenty years older than
he; but her strong, young eyes could not see through his glasses. He
recollected her well, fifty years before, an active, handsome woman,
taking care of the sacristy, washing the priests' laces, mending
vestments, and filling various offices of trust in the mission. A
sailor from a French vessel lying in the harbor wished to marry her;
but the friars would not give their consent, because the man was a
drunkard and dishonest. Carmen was well disposed to him, and much
flattered by his love-making. He used to write letters to her, which
she brought to this Mexican boy to read. It was a droll sight to see
her face, as he, now white-haired and looking fully as old as she,
reminded her of that time and of those letters, tapping her jocosely
on her cheek, and saying some things I am sure he did not quite
literally translate to us. She fairly colored, buried her face in her
hands for a second, then laughed till she shook, and answered in
voluble Spanish, of which also I suspect we did not get a full
translation. She was the happiest Indian we saw; indeed, the only one
who seemed really gay of heart or even content.
A few rods from the old mission church of San Gabriel, in a hut made
of bundles of the tule reeds lashed to sycamore poles, as the San
Gabriel Indians made them a hundred years ago, live two old Indian
women, Laura and Benjamina. Laura is one hundred and two years old,
Benjamina one hundred and seventeen. The record of their baptisms is
still to be seen in the church books, so there can be no dispute as to
their age. It seems not at all incredible, however. If I had been told
that Benjamina was a three-thousand-year-old Nile mummy, resuscitated
by some mysterious process, I should not have demurred much at the
tale. The first time I saw them, the two were crouching over a fire on
the ground, under a sort of booth porch, in front of their hovel.
Laura was making a feint of grinding acorn-meal in a stone bowl;
Benjamina was raking the ashes, with her claw-like old fingers, for
hot coals to start the fire afresh; her skin was like an elephant's,
shrivelled, black, hanging in folds and welts on her neck and breast
and bony arms; it was not like anything human; her shrunken eyes,
bright as beads, peered out from under thickets of coarse grizzled
gray hair. Laura wore a white cloth band around her head, tied on with
a strip of scarlet flannel; above that, a tattered black shawl, which
gave her the look of an aged imp. Old baskets, old pots, old pans, old
stone mortars and pestles, broken tiles and bricks, rags, straw,
boxes, legless chairs,--in short, all conceivable rubbish,--were
strewn about or piled up in the place, making the weirdest of
backgrounds for the aged crones' figures. Inside the hut were two
bedsteads and a few boxes, baskets, and nets; and drying grapes and
peppers hung on the walls. A few feet away was another hut, only a
trifle better than this; four generations were living in the two.
Benjamina's step-daughter, aged eighty, was a fine creature. With a
white band straight around her forehead close to the eyebrows and a
gay plaid handkerchief thrown on above it, falling squarely each side
of her face, she looked like an old Bedouin sheik.
Our Mexican friend remembered Laura as she was fifty years ago. She
was then, even at fifty-two, celebrated as one of the swiftest runners
and best ball-players in all the San Gabriel games. She was a singer,
too, in the choir. Coaxing her up on her feet, patting her shoulders,
entreating and caressing her as one would a child, he succeeded in
persuading her to chant for us the Lord's Prayer and part of the
litanies, as she had been wont to do it in the old days. It was a
grotesque and incredible sight. The more she stirred and sang and
lifted her arms, the less alive she looked. We asked the step-daughter
if they were happy and wished to live. Laughing, she repeated the
question to them. "Oh, yes, we wish to live forever," they replied.
They were greatly terrified, the daughter said, when the railway cars
first ran through San Gabriel. They thought it was the devil bringing
fire to burn up the world. Their chief solace is tobacco. To beg it,
Benjamina will creep about in the village by the hour, bent double
over her staff, tottering at every step. They sit for the most part
silent, motionless, on the ground; their knees drawn up, their hands
clasped over them, their heads sunk on their breasts. In my drives in
the San Gabriel valley I often saw them sitting thus, as if they were
dead. The sight had an indescribable fascination. It seemed that to be
able to penetrate into the recesses of their thoughts would be to lay
hold upon secrets as old as the earth.
One of the most beautiful appanages of the San Luis Rey Mission, in
the time of its prosperity, was the Pala valley. It lies about
twenty-five miles east of San Luis, among broken spurs of the Coast
Range, watered by the San Luis River, and also by its own little
stream, the Pala Creek. It was always a favorite home of the Indians;
and at the time of the secularization, over a thousand of them used to
gather at the weekly mass in its chapel. Now, on the occasional visits
of the San Juan Capistrano priest, to hold service there, the
dilapidated little church is not half filled, and the numbers are
growing smaller each year. The buildings are all in decay; the stone
steps leading to the belfry have crumbled; the walls of the little
graveyard are broken in many places, the paling and the graves are
thrown down. On the day we were there, a memorial service for the dead
was going on in the chapel; a great square altar was draped with
black, decorated with silver lace and ghastly funereal emblems;
candles were burning; a row of kneeling black-shawled women were
holding lighted candies in their hands; two old Indians were chanting
a Latin Mass from a tattered missal bound in rawhide; the whole place
was full of chilly gloom, in sharp contrast to the bright valley
outside, with its sunlight and silence. This mass was for the soul of
an old Indian woman named Margarita, sister of Manuelito, a somewhat
famous chief of several bands of the San Luiseños. Her home was at the
Potrero,--a mountain meadow, or pasture, as the word signifies,--about
ten miles from Pala, high up the mountain-side, and reached by an
almost impassable road. This farm--or "saeter" it would be called in
Norway,--was given to Margarita by the friars; and by some exceptional
good fortune she had a title which, it is said, can be maintained by
her heirs. In 1871, in a revolt of some of Manuelito's bands,
Margarita was hung up by her wrists till she was near dying, but was
cut down at the last minute and saved.
One of her daughters speaks a little English; and finding that we had
visited Pala solely on account of our interest in the Indians, she
asked us to come up to the Potrero and pass the night. She said
timidly that they had plenty of beds, and would do all that they knew
how to do to make us comfortable. One might be in many a dear-priced
hotel less comfortably lodged and served than we were by these
hospitable Indians in their mud house, floored with earth. In my
bedroom were three beds, all neatly made, with lace-trimmed sheets and
pillow-cases and patchwork coverlids. One small square window with a
wooden shutter was the only aperture for air, and there was no
furniture except one chair and a half-dozen trunks. The Indians, like
the Norwegian peasants, keep their clothes and various properties all
neatly packed away in boxes or trunks. As I fell asleep, I wondered
if in the morning I should see Indian heads on the pillows opposite
me; the whole place was swarming with men, women, and babies, and it
seemed impossible for them to spare so many beds; but, no, when I
waked, there were the beds still undisturbed; a soft-eyed Indian girl
was on her knees rummaging in one of the trunks; seeing me awake, she
murmured a few words in Indian, which conveyed her apology as well as
if I had understood them. From the very bottom of the trunk she drew
out a gilt-edged china mug, darted out of the room, and came back
bringing it filled with fresh water. As she set it in the chair, in
which she had already put a tin pan of water and a clean coarse towel,
she smiled, and made a sign that it was for my teeth. There was a
thoughtfulness and delicacy in the attention which lifted it far
beyond the level of its literal value. The gilt-edged mug was her most
precious possession; and, in remembering water for the teeth, she had
provided me with the last superfluity in the way of white man's
comfort of which she could think.
The food which they gave us was a surprise; it was far better than we
had found the night before in the house of an Austrian colonel's son,
at Pala. Chicken, deliciously cooked, with rice and chile;
soda-biscuits delicately made; good milk and butter, all laid in
orderly fashion, with a clean table-cloth, and clean, white stone
china. When I said to our hostess that I regretted very much that they
had given up their beds in my room, that they ought not to have done
it, she answered me with a wave of her hand that "it was nothing; they
hoped I had slept well; that they had plenty of other beds." The
hospitable lie did not deceive me, for by examination I had convinced
myself that the greater part of the family must have slept on the bare
earth in the kitchen. They would not have taken pay for our lodging,
except that they had just been forced to give so much for the mass for
Margarita's soul, and it had been hard for them to raise the money.
Twelve dollars the priest had charged for the mass; and in addition
they had to pay for the candles, silver lace, black cloth, etc.,
nearly as much more. They had earnestly desired to have the mass said
at the Potrero, but the priest would not come up there for less than
twenty dollars, and that, Antonia said, with a sigh, they could not
possibly pay. We left at six o'clock in the morning; Margarita's
husband, the "capitan," riding off with us to see us safe on our way.
When we had passed the worst gullies and boulders, he whirled his
horse, lifted his ragged old sombrero with the grace of a cavalier,
smiled, wished us good-day and good luck, and was out of sight in a
second, his little wild pony galloping up the rough trail as if it
were as smooth as a race-course.