1849-1900

As to what would happen to the original population, already devastated by the Spanish and Mexican occupations, it was clear as the words of Peter Barnett, California’s first American governor in 1851:

“That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the two races until the Indian race becomes extinct, must be expected; while we cannot anticipate this result with but painful regret, the inevitable destiny of the race is beyond the power and wisdom of man to avert.”

The governor during this time placed a bounty on the scalp of any native killed by white settlers. When California became the property of the US in 1848 as a spoil of the Mexican American War and then a state in 1850, it became an imperative to made room for the new “settlers” and make claim on any gold on traditional tribal lands. Natives were in the way, seen as threats or nuisances to be wiped out, displaced, decimated. That could apply also to mestizos, part Mexican, part native.

“By demonstrating that the state would not punish Indian killers, but instead reward them, militia expeditions helped inspire vigilantes… and the US Army also joined in the killing. An estimated 100,000 died during the first two years of the Gold Rush. By 1873 only 30,000 remained of around 150,000, and the state had spent about $1.7 million to make it happen.”  Madley, American Genocide.

During the periods of Spanish and Mexican occupation, California’s estimated native populations fell from 300,000 to 150,000, with more than half of the loss at or near the coastal missions. Under US rule 1846-1870 their numbers plunged as low as 30,000. By 1880 census takers recorded just 16,277 California natives. Knights Ferry became a refuge and melting pot for those vanished in the wars of Tuolumne, Stanislaus, and lower Calaveras. Those tribes north of the San Joaquin River were decimated first by missionaries, massacres, malaria, and finally by gunpower and the Gold Rush. 

“They made choices about their futures based on their sense of history and their standards of practice, accommodating, working, fighting, hiding out—in a word, surviving—they were the seeds for today’s California Indian population. Despite the odds, California has the US largest Native American population, home to 109 federally recognized tribes.”  Madley, American Genocide.

In the valley some native tribes have established casinos, adding to our common vocabulary of Spanish and English names those of Chuchansi, Mono, Tachi.

At almost the same time the United States took over Mexico’s northern lands in 1848, news of the discovery of gold went out from Sacramento. Deposits of gold may have been discovered earlier, in 1839 along the coast, by natives along valley riverbeds, by Francisco López in Santa Feliciana Canyon as early as 1842 with a cry of ¡Chispa! (spark) as he dug among onions. 

Within a year a flood of gold seekers from everywhere outnumbered 10 to 1 the small Mexican Californio population that existed. The first miners to arrive were from Sonora in northern Mexico and from Chile, experienced in mining and successful in the beginning. Next came Chinese seeking the “Golden Mountain” and by 1849 the beginning of the Yankee ‘49ers. 

“Gold conveyed an irresistible magic, visions of wealth, luxury, splendor. Consider its impact on 19^th century people. Farmers dropped plows, teachers fled classrooms, husbands left families, wives abandoned mates, clerks gave up books, doctors exchanged bags for pick and shovel. It touched off an unprecedented movement of people to California, as thousands trekked across the nation by the Oregon or Santa Fe trails, or came by ship around South America, some up to the Valley through the Tejon Pass and following the eastern foothills of the Sierra to avoid the marshes and tules.”

Alex Saragoza in Land Between Rivers.

The first mines were in north and central Sierra. Soon the southern mines developed in the Central Valley along the hills of the tributaries of the San Joaquin River, in the foothills from the Mokelumne River to Kern, in Millerton, Dry Creek, Hornitos, Kings River, and Hanford. 

FOREIGN MINERS TAX

The initial onslaught hit the “diggings” where gold was found more easily at first by those with the experience and skills. That phase soon ended as competition intensified and resentment built toward “foreigners” whose success led to efforts to push them out of the diggings, often by violence The camps were segregated and developed their own laws in the absence of authorities. Whatever biased judicial system there was offered scant help to the “greasers,” the derogatory term for Spanish speaking miners. 

Miners could make an average of $1/day, but the California Foreign Miners License tax legislation of 1850 was an attempt to drive out the “foreigners” (any Mexican, Chilean, Chinese or native). Charging $20 a month for the fee to mine effectively drove away many before it was repealed in 1851. Businesses affected by the loss of miners as customers opposed it–and “maybe” it violated the Treaty.  

RACISM AND PREJUDICE IN THE MINES

Mexicans who poured into California during this period were still inflamed with anti-American prejudices from the Mexican War. Americans also regarded Mexicans suspiciously and with contempt. Vigilante law was widespread with no effective government from 1846-1850.  Two thirds of the miners in the northern regions of Calaveras, Tuolumne and Mariposa County were driven out by the Yankees, some 15,000.  It was worse in the southern mines. Up to 1860 Mexicans were the majority in all the counties of the southern mines. By 1862 many left.  By 1870 they had disappeared. Threats of violence, vigilantes, robbery, fraud, and lynching pushed most of the Mexicans to Southern California and old coastal towns and Chileans to the north. Others and their native brothers fled to the foothills, hired out to rancheros, or established small settlements. Some became bandits, even some of the gringos.

THE GOLD RUSH SET AN UNFORTUNATE PATTERN OF RELATIONSHIPS

Some Yankees did make their fortune, like Levi Strauss who created and sold his “jeans” to the miners or Leland Stanford who created businesses in San Francisco, became governor in 1861, senator in 1885 and a railroad baron. A few rancheros sold cattle to meet the demand for meat. For most former mexicanos it was a loss of potential entrepreneurs, investors, businessmen, landowners.

California’s population in this period was overwhelmingly male. The few women recruited or indentured as laundresses or in the gambling houses were seeking their share of the gold, many from Latin American seaports where females outnumbered men, “gold diggers.” In contrast, many Sonorans came with families to settle and returned to Mexico in the winter. Early on there were also violent clashes of miners and landowners, many miners giving up and squatting on ranchero lands. 

The average output from the gold fields 1850-1865 was $50 million per year, down to $10-$20 million after 1865, then industrialized in 1910. Land, oil, water became the new gold. 

Reflecting on decades past, the Spaniards, who left in 1820, were 28 years from the discovery and the Mexicans only a month. In the long run the Gold Rush era was a mixed blessing, a product of mass hysteria that set the tone and state of mind in which greed predominated and disorder and violence were too frequent. Most important for this camino, the Gold Rush set an unfortunate pattern of relationship between Mexicans and Americans. 

The rancheros with their Mexican land grants did not fare much better than the Mexican miners. By 1846 lands and cattle had passed into the hands of private landowners who collectively owned 1/8 of the state in units from 4,500-50,000 acres. By the time of the Treaty in 1848 (with its guarantee of ownership) 200 Mexican families owned 14 million acres–something that was seen as undemocratic, enviable, greedy, resented, and most of all coveted. Over half of the grants had been filed in the last seven years of Mexican rule, including those in the valley. A significant number were given to non-Mexicans, and some were held by women (who could own and inherit land in the former Mexican system), making them powerful targets for marriage–marry a daughter of one of the big landowners was a quieter way to clean her family of its assets than to lend money to the ‘old man.’ 

RANCHEROS BECAME LAND RICH AND CASH-POOR

The United States had guaranteed in the Treaty existing rights of land. To settle the complex problem, the Land Act of 1851 established a Land Commission to adjudicate claims from 1851-1856. Some Mexican land grants had unmet conditions, vague or overlapping boundaries, or faulty legal titles. Fraudulent land claims cast suspicion on valid ones. Spanish speaking rancheros required English speaking lawyers to defend them in an American court system and sometimes took their fees in portions of land. Some co-signed loans for family or friends they could not replay or sold to land speculators. Some cases took years to defend. Many lost their claims through delays, eaten away by increased taxes and lawyer fees, or unable to document proof of ownership. Although eventually two thirds of the claims were upheld, it took years in costly appeals and by then the land value was dramatically decreased or sold off. Of course, there was also fraud.  

“It is the conquered who are humbled before the conqueror asking for his protection, while enjoying what little their misfortune has left them. It is those who have been sold like sheep—it is those who were abandoned by Mexico. They do not understand the prevalent language of their native soil. They are foreigners in their own land. I have seen seventy- and sixty-year-olds cry like children because they had been uprooted from the lands of their fathers. They have been humiliated and insulted. they have been refused the privilege of taking water from their own wells. They have been denied the privilege of cutting their own firewood.” Pablo de la Guerra, 1856, Speech to the CA Senate

Antonio Maria Pico and forty others in 1859 signed a petition to US Senate and House, saying they had been “compelled to sell little by little by little.” 

SQUATTERS BEGAN TO OCCUPY THE LAND GRANTS

Discouraged miners had begun to occupy Spanish and Mexican land grants in the Central Valley by 1850—squatters. In 1841, the first Squatters Act allowed squatters to preempt other claims and pay $1.25 per acre for up to 160 acres, whittling away some lands of the ranchos. In 1862 the first Federal Homestead Act made the land available to homesteaders if it was rejected by land grant claims.

BY 1870 ALMOST ALL LAND GRANTS HAD BEEN TAKEN OVER BY AMERICANS

Despite the obstacles, the Commission did approve 553 claims totaling some 8,850, 000 acres. The 197 rejected grantees had failed to adequately document their claim, were withdrawn, or were deemed fraud. By the 1890s the ranchero class of the Californios was destroyed. Some were able to hold on to remnants of their original massive land grants, most were not. 

The Castro land grant in Fresno was not much defended and gradually broken up. Don Pacheco was one of the few valley grant owners to keep his claim, ultimately partially taken from the family in the next century for the California aqueduct. Looking further south, by 1860 four vast southern grants were absorbed into Rancho Tejon.

A SHIFT FROM CATTLEMEN TO FARMERS

The rapid increase in claims for land grants had coincided with the rise in importance of the hide and tallow trade and the expectation that land values would increase following American occupation. The rancho system had depended on native labor and large tracts of land for livestock. Many became prosperous selling beef at increased prices, especially to the miners. The flood of 1861, followed by two years of drought 1862-1864, devastated the industry and wiped out many ranchers. It would take a huge increase in population to remake the valley for viable agricultural production–which happened eventually via the Gold Rush. 

Spanish speaking people played important, but often unrecognized roles in the early years of California history, for the newcomers were only dimly aware of California’s Hispanic past.