Authors: H.W. Brands
Johnston’s report had the desired effect, producing an official call for two hundred men to mobilize in pursuit of the aboriginal insurgents. The mustering was complicated by two factors. First, the Indians had stolen or scattered most of the horses and mules in the region, compelling the militiamen to find substitutes. Second, even in the face of imminent war, many of the miners couldn’t tear themselves from the diggings. Ben McCullough, on leave from the Texas Rangers, with whom he had become famous for his exploits against the Comanches, was asked to lead the Mariposa Battalion, as the militia group was called. McCullough declined the command, saying it would bring him neither honor nor pecuniary advantage. (Another Texas Ranger, Jack Hays, currently sheriff of San Francisco
County, was shamed into joining. “He says if we come to fighting, he will be in with us,” Eccleston recorded.)
Eventually, however, the two hundred were enrolled, and the campaign began. Savage served as guide. “From his long acquaintance with the Indians, Mr. Savage has learned their ways so thoroughly that they cannot deceive him,” noted T. G. Palmer, an obviously impressed member of the company. “He has been one of their greatest chiefs, and speaks their language as well as they can themselves. No dog can follow a trail like he can. No horse can endure half so much. He sleeps but little, can go days without food, and can run a hundred miles in a day and night over the mountains and then sit and laugh for hours over a camp-fire as fresh and lively as if he had just been taking a little walk for exercise. With him for a guide we felt little fear of not being able to find them.”
Savage found his quarry, but only after a wearing chase into the heart of the mountains. With the Indians still a few miles off, he called a halt and ordered the men to dismount and tie their horses to bushes. He selected sixty for the attack, leaving the others to guard the horses and baggage. “About two o’clock we started in Indian file, as still as it was possible for sixty men to move in the dark,” Palmer recorded. “For three long hours did we walk slowly and cautiously over the rocks and bushes, through the deepest ravines and up steep and ragged mountains, until within half a mile of the enemy. Here every one took off his boots, when we again pushed forward to about two hundred yards from the camp. Another halt was called to wait for daylight, while Savage went forward to reconnoiter.”
Savage discovered that the Indians were more numerous than he thought. At least three tribes were represented, including some 150 of the formidable Chowchillas. Savage had hoped to surprise the village and take the Indians prisoner, with few casualties, but circumstances now forced a change of strategy. “Daylight by this time began to appear,” Palmer wrote.
We had been lying in our stocking-feet on the ground on the top of a mountain within a few paces of the snow for more than an hour, almost frozen by the intense cold, not daring to move or
speak a word. It was not yet light enough to see the sight of our rifles, when an Indian’s head was seen rising on the hill before us. For a moment his eyes wandered, then rested on us, and with a yell like a coyote he turned for the Rancharia [village]. Never did I hear before such an infernal howling, whooping and yelling, as saluted us then from the throats of about six hundred savages, as they rushed down the hill into the gim-o-sell bushes below.
Our huzzahs could, however, hardly have sounded more pleasant to them, as when finding we were discovered, we charged on their town. Fifty rifles cracked almost instantaneously; a dozen Indians lay groaning before their huts, and many supposed we had undisturbed possession. Our firing had ceased and we were looking around for plunder, when a rifle fired from the bushes below struck a young Texan, Charley Huston, standing by my side. He fell with a single groan, and we all supposed him dead. My first impression was that I was shot, for I plainly heard the ball strike and almost felt it. This was a surprise that almost whipped us, for not knowing that the Indian had fire-arms, we were only expecting arrows. Before that shot was fired, I had always entertained the idea that I could run about as fast as common men (and I was one of the first in the charge), but by the time I had collected my wandering senses, I was nearly alone, the majority of the party some thirty paces ahead, and running as if they never intended to stop.
With difficulty, Savage halted the headlong retreat and regrouped the men. While the Indians fired from the trees and then disappeared, he or ganized a second charge on the village, which succeeded against little op position. He thereupon ordered the place put to the torch. “We burned a hundred wigwams, several tons of dried horse and mule meat, a great num ber of bows and arrows, and took six mules,” Palmer explained.
As the Mariposa war commenced, so it continued. Rarely were the white militiamen able to kill or capture Indian warriors, and even the In dian women and children melted into the mountains. But the Indian stores of food were less portable and therefore more vulnerable. Acorns were one
staple of the Indian diet; so also the seeds of various pine trees, and wild oats and rye. Certain insects and their larvae were dried and stored, along with worms. “We had not the time, nor had we supplied ourselves sufficiently, to hunt them out,” explained Lafayette Bunnell, a member of the Mariposa Battalion. “It was therefore decided that the best policy was to destroy their huts and stores, with a view of starving them out.” This policy was pursued with a vengeance. “Burnt over 5000 bushels of acorns, and any quantity of old baskets,” Robert Eccleston wrote in his diary. Another entry noted similarly: “We burnt over 1000 bushels of acorns and also a good many old Rancharias, some of which were not long deserted.”
In the best of times, Indian life along the Sierra front was precarious. Winters were often lean, with cached provisions barely lasting till spring. The scorched-earth policy of the Mariposa Battalion threatened entire tribes with starvation; though the Indians might never lose a battle, they could easily lose the war.
The whites complemented their campaign of destruction with promises of support for those Indians who came down from the mountains and made treaties of peace with the new rulers of California. Some tribes, perhaps hungrier than the rest, accepted the terms of surrender and met with the peace commissioners appointed by the federal government. Others held out longer. The Chowchillas remained at large until the death of their chief José Rey, which evidently dispirited them. “Their courage must have died with José Rey,” Lafayette Bunnell surmised.
The last of the holdouts were a band of the Yosemite tribe. With the aid of some Indians who acted as scouts, the Mariposa militiamen captured the old Yosemite chief Teneiya. Shortly after his capture Teneiya came upon the body of his favorite son, who had been killed under circumstances even some of the whites found distressing. The young man had been captured, but was allowed to attempt an escape, whereupon he was gunned down by a member of the battalion—“who had been led by an old Texan sinner to think that killing Indians or Mexicans was a duty,” an angry Bunnell explained.
The sight of his dead son pushed Teneiya to the point of despair. “
Kill me
, sir captain!” he implored of the officer in charge (in Spanish, as Bunnell
recalled the speech). “Yes,
kill me
, as you killed my son; as you would kill my people if they would come to you! You would kill all my race if you had the power….You have made me sorrowful, my life dark. You killed the child of my heart; why not kill the father?” But then he offered a warning.
Wait a little; when I am dead I will call to my people to come to you. I will call louder than you have had me call, that they shall hear me in their sleep, and come to avenge the death of their chief and his son. Yes, sir American, my spirit will make trouble for you and your people, as you have caused trouble to me and my people. With the wizards, I will follow the white men and make them fear me.
You may kill me, sir captain, but you shall not live in peace. I will follow in your footsteps; I will not leave my home but be with the spirits among the rocks, the water-falls, in the rivers and in the winds. Wheresoever you go I will be with you. You will not see me, but you will fear the spirit of the old chief, and grow cold. The great spirits have spoken! I am done.
A curse from the Yosemite chief carried more weight in that part of the country than a similar threat from other Indian leaders would have. The Yosemites inhabited a valley on the upper Merced River that was so deep, and guarded by such towering cliffs and rockfalls, that it was thought to be enchanted. “We are afraid to go to this valley, for there are many witches there,” the chief of another tribe told the Mariposa militiamen.
To guard against the evil spirits, the militiamen enlisted Teneiya. At first he went unwillingly, but as he grew convinced that continued resistance would lead only to the utter destruction of his people, he accepted the need to bring the rest of the tribe down from the granite-guarded valley.
By most reckoning, the Mariposa contingent to which Lafayette Bunnell belonged was the first group of white men to penetrate Yosemite Valley. Others had seen some of the prominent features from afar; indeed, Half Dome’s distinctive profile could (and can, when the air is very clear) be discerned
from the San Joaquin lowlands, eighty or ninety miles away. But none had ever entered the valley carved by the great glaciers; none had approached Half Dome or El Capitan or the cliffs from which the magnificent waterfalls leap. Bunnell was one of those who had observed the tops of the ramparts from afar, and had wondered what they looked like close at hand. Now he knew. “The immensity of rock I had seen in my vision on the Old Bear Valley trail from Ridley’s Ferry was here presented to my astonished gaze. The mystery of that scene was here disclosed. My awe was increased by this nearer view.” He added, “The grandeur of the scene was but softened by the haze that hung over the valley—light as gossamer— and by the clouds which partially dimmed the higher cliffs and mountains. This obscurity of vision but increased the awe with which I beheld it, and as I looked, a peculiar exalted sensation seemed to fill my whole being, and I found myself in tears with emotion.”
At the same time, Bunnell understood an answer Teneiya had given when asked why, after the other tribes made their peace with the whites, so few of the Yosemites had done so. “This is all of my people that are willing to go with me to the plains,” Teneiya said. Now having seen their aweinspring home in the mountains, Bunnell appreciated their unwillingness.
Finally even the Yosemite holdouts surrendered. Starving, haggard from incessant flight, they reluctantly gave up their home and their way of living, in exchange for promises of food on a reservation. One of the young chiefs, who at first defied Teneiya, explained their change of heart. “Where can we now go that the Americans will not follow us? Where can we make our homes, that you will not find us?”
T
HE PLIGHT OF THE
Yosemites was painfully poignant, not simply for losing their beautiful home but also for the fact that until the recent war they had largely been spared—by their isolation—the vices of the white man’s liquor and the white man’s injustice. Teneiya was asked what was lacking to make the Yosemites a happy people. One thing only, he replied: “The whites would not leave us alone.”
The whites wouldn’t leave the Indians alone, nor would they allow the
Indians the time to adapt to changing circumstances in California. Perhaps the sheer numbers of whites doomed the Indians, as comparable numbers did in other parts of what became the United States. Yet the Indians had managed to adapt to the Spanish and Mexicans, and at the beginning of the Gold Rush they showed signs of adapting to the Americans. In the end, however, the Americans’ hurry made any permanent arrangement impossible. Governor Burnett bluntly described why the Indians had to go. “The white man, to whom time is money, and who labors hard all day to create the comforts of life, cannot sit up all night to watch his property…. After being robbed a few times, he becomes desperate, and resolves upon a war of extermination.” Needless to say, Burnett here elided the whites’ role in provoking the Indians to robbery and other forms of resistance, but he correctly identified the reason—“time is money”—for the lack of that patience in whites which alone might have made accommodation possible. And he forecast the ultimate result: “A war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct.”
In fact no general war of extermination took place, and the Indians were not—quite—extinguished. Violence against Indians was a regular aspect of life in California, but, as in other parts of the United States, disease and displacement claimed a larger toll. By 1860 the number of California Indians had fallen to about thirty thousand, or one-fifth of what it had been at the time of the gold discovery. Sporadic resistance to white encroachment continued, but after the mid-1850s it was nothing many whites worried about.
The destruction of the Indians produced collateral damage among whites. Despite his part in waging the Mariposa war, James Savage proved too Indian-friendly for some of his fellow Anglos. In 1852 the Yokuts tribe complained of encroachment by white miners upon the reservation they had agreed to accept from the federal government. Savage thought the Indians had cause for complaint, and he took their side. But a man named Walter Harvey, who was both a competing trader and a Tulare County judge, raised a band of volunteers against the Yokuts. A lopsided skirmish ensued in which more than two dozen Indians were killed or wounded, against a single white man hurt. Savage reiterated his support for the Indians,
criticizing Harvey in language a third party characterized as manifesting “high indignation.” Harvey, who apparently considered himself a hero in the engagement, took offense at Savage’s remarks and threatened to kill him.
Harvey found his opportunity a short while later. As Savage hastened to catch up with a group of whites heading for a grand council of the Yokuts, Harvey lay behind the group in wait for him. On the banks of the Kings River, the two men met. An angry argument followed. Bystanders got between the pair, but Harvey nonetheless pulled a pistol and shot Savage dead.