Mass murder made acquiring slaves easier

 

Grace Carpenter's depiction of captured Indian children

Boy, when I read that title, it seems harsh, but why shouldn’t I call it as it was… The Act for the Government and Protection of Indians was established in California in 1850, and among other provisions it allowed for the legal indenture of Native Americans under many circumstances. 

Indenture is a pretty word for slavery.  In the case of children, the indenture granted the petitioner a certificate,   “authorizing him or her to have the care, custody, control, and earnings of such minor, until he or she obtain the age of majority. Every male Indian shall be deemed to have attained his majority at eighteen, and the female at fifteen years.”

 The ages were extended under many circumstances and adults were often indentured in a similar manner.

Because Indian children considered “quite docile and very good servants, learning to work and to speak English very readily,” they were coveted by families seeking cheap and reliable labor and people would pay to have them  [Humboldt times, Oct 5, 1861] . 

 Human trafficking in Indian children became a popular and lucrative business  in Humboldt County but, because Indian parents were generally “loath to part with their offspring at such ages as would make them most susceptible of training”  [Humboldt Times, March 1, 1860] traders used other means to acquire them.

The murder that began an obsession…

Lately I’ve had folks ask me why I’ve started this blog, and thought it might be good to repost my little “story” for those who missed it before.

 A few years ago I was combing the basement of the county courthouse looking for old records and ran across the copy of an inquest that occurred after an Indian woman was murdered in Arcata in 1862. She was blind, her children were with her, and the murderers used a hatchet to do the job.  Oh, and she was warned she was in danger and chose to stay in Arcata anyway  because she thought her kids would have a better chance of surviving if she was killed here… Crazy stuff that got me fascinated with her and obsessed with learning her story…

I started researching the “settlement period” of Humboldt county and learned so much I’d had no clue about, even though I’d grown up here.  Things like California made it legal to “indenture” (pretty word for legally inslave) Native Americans in the 1850s and 1860s.  That Humboldt County was infamous for our human traffickers who kidnapped and sold Indian children.   That Eureka was once dubbed “Murderville” by those in San Francisco because of the blatent atrocities that happened here against the natives.

I also kept learning about the murdered woman, called Lucy.  I tracked some of her descendants and kept trying to write something, anything,  about her.

So I was still working on Lucy’s story on and off when we moved to an old farmhouse in Blue Lake about a year and a half ago.  I was upstairs waiting for a house inspector, and among the old newspapers used to insulate the walls I found the obituary of Lucy’s son, dated 1928. It describes his mother’s murder.

So, Lucy’s ghost was giving me a poke and I’ve gotten back into it. I am working on an article about Lucy for the Humbodlt Historian and will figure out where to go with it after that. In the mean time, all these stories I’ve found about that time period are in my head and I want to share them.  I think it is important that people know the history here… it wasn’t that far back and if you talk with Native Americans , you’ll find the effects of previous oppression (and aggression) still ripple through the community.

I also want people to know about Lucy, that she existed. That she was courageous and her courage probably saved her children’s lives.   So many natives died here and we’ll never even know their names.    I hope to honor them through the story of Lucy.

Wrong upon wrong

Unidentified man in front of traditional house

After the massacres  “Exodus”  wrote a letter to the San Francisco Bulletin.  In the letter (s) he observed

“Individuals constitute a community, and the acts of each member make up the common character of the whole body.  It must be expected that villains will grumble and snarl; but it is the duty of the Press, the Bench, the Pulpit, and of every honest man, to denounce crime.  This is a duty which we owe to Heaven and the society  in which we live—not merely a passive duty, for their villainies must go unpunished, and each good citizen will be victimized in his turn—but an active, zealous duty, bringing to justice especially those who out-savage the savage.  We must not lay the flattering unction to our souls that in the great day of account and retribution, when the catalogue of human frailties and crimes is read out, we have disapproved sufficiently by our silence along, lest the Mene Tekel—“thou art weighted in the balance and found wanting”—be pronounced against us and “thou shouldst not follow a multitude to do evil”. [San Francisco Bulletin,  April 23, 1860]

Exodus was prompted by what he (I’m just going to say “he” though ok, it might have been a woman) saw as a compounding of wrong upon wrong.

Many, or a few very verbal and outspoken, in Humboldt County saw the massacre as the inevitable result of racial intermixing and segregation as the only solution.  I could comment on the following, but the articles say too much already…

 1860, Mar. 28–Plan to Remedy the Indian Difficulty

To any one who has given the subject the least attention, or is acquainted with the Indian character, it must be apparent that the two races cannot live together.  The Indians  of this coast are not capable of either honesty, industry, or gratitude.  They cannot be controlled except with a strong hand. Before they can be made to respect and obey, they must be taught to fear the consequences of disobedience. The natives must be removed by some means or the county abandoned to their possession. To make war upon them with the purpose of indiscriminate “extermination,” is neither wise or humane, neither good policy nor right.  Some other mode to rid the country of their dangerous presence should be adopted. Those living near the settlements should be removed to the Reservation.

 We are authorized by the Superintendent of Indian Affairs of this State, to say that he will receive and retain them, if he can have the assistance and cooperation of our citizens. That officers require assistance in collecting the Indians together, and an assurance from our people to the Indians that they will not be permitted again to live in this county. This plan, no doubt, is perfectly practicable, and in a short time we may have riddance of a very large number, who, if they do not themselves commit depredations, have furnished arms and ammunition to the mountain Indians. The removal of these “friendly” Indians will cut off the supplies and break up the hiding places of those openly hostile.  To carry this plan into effect there must be favorable concert of action on the part of the people.  Let there be not favorites excepted, and no tampering with the Indians allowed. All of the coast Indians out of the way, measures can be taken toward those openly hostile, living in the mountains, that will effectually put a stop to their depredations. [The Northern Californian]

 

You could get hit by a truck tomorrow

Don't have a clue as to who these people are...

 

In my last post I urged people to talk to their elders and learn their family stories, family history.   Without meaning to lecture, today I will go further and say WRITE IT DOWN.   Any of it, all of it.  Memories are amazingly unreliable things… and while stories are interesting, they have a way of morphing with each telling, until they become the bullshistory that Ernie talks about. 

After Bret Harte left (or was forced from) Humboldt County, he didn’t write about his three years here (hence the “lost years” description).   Other than his editorials, and what he consciously or unconsciously reveals in his fiction, we don’t really know much about his experiences and likely never will. That part of history, that perspective,  is lost forever.

Don’t let that happen to your descendants.  While I’m being bossy, I’m going to go ahead and remind folks that this is history too.  This moment, right now.  Any genealogist hungry for family stories will appreciate what I’m saying here.   Record your own stories and your ghost will feel the love a hundred years from now.

Ghosts aren’t the boss of me, but they still kinda push me around

Bret Harte

So I wrote Saturday’s post in what felt like an act of defiance, demonstrating that I have conscious control over the direction of my blog.  I talked about my love of historic homes and posted the photo of one where Bret Harte,  a well known 19^th  century write and mentor to Mark Twain, once lived. 

Yet, as some readers may know, the story of Bret Harte leads me right back to the story of the Indian Island massacre.  His story of the massacre.  So much for conscious control :-/.

Some call Bret Harte’s time in Humboldt County his lost years.  He arrived here Humboldt in 1857, twenty-one years old, slender, quiet and a bit of a “dandy”,  in contrast to many of the local frontiersmen, who were rough, tough and armed.  Harte made friends here, but stayed out of the saloons and away from the miners and others who mocked his fine clothes and good vocabulary.

Harte came up here likely at the urging of his sister, Margaret Wyman, who lived in Union and was married to a local judge.  After his arrival, he taught local children, wrote stories and poems,  and eventually landed a job with the Union (Arcata) newspaper, the Northern Californian. 

Harte was acting editor of the paper in the last weeks of February, 1860 and is credited by many for bringing the details of the massacre before the public eye by publishing a description in the Northern Californian.  (I’ll post his article at the end of this post, so only folks that want to read it will see the details).

It was rumored that he was confronted by an angry mob for his sympathetic stance for the Natives and driven out of the county  to San Francisco, never to return.

After leaving the North Coast, Harte found  work editing the Californian and then The Overland Monthly.  It was in these that he published his well known The Luck of Roaring Camp, The Outlaws of Poker Flat and other well known short stories and poems that focused on frontier life in the west.

Harte did not write specifically about his experiences in Humboldt County-though it is obvious in his stories, such as the Three Vagabonds of Trinidad.

Ernie has helped to highlight that it wasn’t just bad guys here, and that a climate of hatred and fear permeated much of the local culture.  For Harte and others like him, it must have been overwhelming…

 

A thing explained…?

Hopefuls on their way to California

Maybe, just maybe, there is some explanation for what happened here.

My daughter came to visit yesterday and I told her about Ben Madley’s paper—his discovery of certain patterns in any invasion.

1)      The indigenous people are surprised and unprepared for invaders and fail to realize they are a threat

2)      The native people start responding , resisting and retaliating to – the incursion and abuses suffered at the hands of the invaders

3)      The invaders see the native response as a threat to life, limb and successful settlement, and eventually determine that isolation or extermination is the only answer .  Of course many believed the savages couldn’t be trusted and wouldn’t stay put on the reservations, so extermination seemed to be the only choice.

I am starting to wonder if part of the reason things were so violent here is that though the natives in this area started at phase one, the invaders came in with phase three attitudes. Many emigrants grew up in areas where all three phases had occurred and crossed country where they were yet happening.  Some lost family to Indians and many more lived in mortal fear they might.   Many of the settlers that arrived in California were  already convinced that  Natives were violent, blood-thirsty, scalp stealing savages  that needed killing before they killed you. Any perceived threat was met with an extreme response because east of California, natives were a threat… not that you could blame those Natives if they experience anything like what happened here.

Of course others just equated  genocide with  natural progress.  Manifest destiny and all that.

When thugs ruled

Early Fort Humboldt, established to address the "Indian problem"

Recently blog  reader Ernie B    observed  HERE  that at least some of the perpetrators involved in the massacres may have been coerced into doing so. 

 “… As you continue your research you will find that rule by intimidation was very prevalent. Many thugs had henchmen to do their dirty work. People that crossed the thugs were shot, and witnesses would swear that it was self defense. Many small ranchers were poisoned with strychnine…

It is not a stretch to think that the people that joined Larrabee in the Indian Island massacre were there through intimidation, or the desire to prove themselves to be one of the gang. Very much similar to some motorcycle gangs of today…

Most likely the people that were helping Larrabee were intimidated into being there, and that is why we don’t know who they were. They didn’t want anybody to know. Just a educated guess. “ ~Ernie B, 8 Aug 2009

Note  to readers unfamiliar with our history:   Hank Larrabee was often named in military and other documents as a perpetrator of the Indian Island massacre and other atrocities against the natives.

Ernie may be  on to something here… one of the most striking things about the massacre was the lack of justice demanded by the public on behalf of those murdered.   The perpetrators, though apparently known by at least a few, were never called to answer for their crimes.  It would be easy to assume that the  residents around the Bay didn’t care enough to bother…. but perhaps there was another reason.  

After  the massacre, the following letter was sent to the editor of the San Francisco Bulletin:

”Having lately arrived here from Humboldt Bay, I take the opportunity to inform the public…  of a few of the recent instances of shameful and horrible crime committed upon the Indians  in Humboldt county by white men (here the author describes the February massacres and then)…  Some time about the 18th March last, three desperate ruffians, armed with hatchets, entered the hotel at Hydesville, and demanded of the proprietor by what authority he had written a letter to Liuet. Hardcastel, of the U.S.A. at Fort Humboldt,  and if he had not convinced said ruffians that the letter was strictly private, and had no allusions to Indian affairs, and no communications for the Bulletin, he would have been assassinated on the spot. The names of these ruffians I shall withhold for the present.   Society is completely demoralized on Eel River; and the Thugs are largely in the majority, led on by Wiley of the Humboldt Times, and by Van Nest the Sheriff. Young men talk and think of nothing else but hanging and killing young Diggers and their mothers.  The pulpit is silent, and the preachers say not a word.  In fact, they dare not…  Men who detest and abhor the thugging system, from circumstances which surround them, are silent.  Two or three men who were on the last Grand Jury which sat at Eureka were thugs. … I append my name, privately , to this record of some of the atrocious deeds that have recently been perpetrated in Humboldt county. I have left that quarter for good; but as I have a few friends in the place, I do not wish that they should be molested for any doings of mine, and you had better, therefore, not communicate my name, except under such circumstances as you may consider necessary or proper for the public good. [Daily Evening Bulletin-: San Francisco, June 1, 1860]

It is unfortunate for us that the Bulletin editor chose not to make the writer’s name public and that the writer declined to name the thugs, though both decisions were probably fortunate for the author and his friends.  This was an ugly time….  and though I would love to judge those who refused to advocate on behalf of the Natives,  I do know it wouldn’t be fair.

My family recently watched Pale Rider, with Clint Eastwood, which was a typical western story, gold rush, good guys, bad guys who have the local law in their back pocket, and a hero that comes in and saves the town.

Kinda similar here.  Except it looks like perhaps the bad guys were the law… and no good guys came in to save the Indians.

Survivors

 

White man w/ Native family

 James Brown was a person of interest during the inquest called to investigate Lucy Romero’s murder .   

 Note: many of the Prestons believed that Lucy was murdered because she witnessed the Indian Island massacre and could implicate the killers.  This is unlikely, though, as she was killed two years after the massacre.

  During the inquest, witnesses recounted conversations they had with Brown,  though Brown himself was never called to testify.   One said Brown thought it would be “better for the County if all the Indians were all killed, squaws and all.” Another witness, added, though,  that he heard “Mr. Brown say… that he (Brown) would not kill any person’s squaw or little Indian” [Inquest record investigating the death of Lucy Romero, Jan 1862].

 So…?  So James Brown was one of the few men publically implicated in the Indian Island massacre (argh, I can’t find my source right now, but am pretty sure historians Jerry Rohde and Susie Van Kirk  will back me up on this one).  And many of the women that survived the massacre on Indian Island were “squaws” of white men. Lucy Romero, Sarah McQuire’s mother (Sarah’s father was white), Matilda Spears, Nancy Hitchcock, Josephine Beach, Hatteway’s squaw…

 Perhaps even  the monsters that slaughtered so many on the Island had some sense of honor and intentionally spared the women and children that ‘belonged” to their friends and neighbors (Brown was neighbors or had business dealings with the Hitchcock, Spears and Beach–he also owned property near Hatteway and Romero and would likely have known them).

Mad River Billy was a favorite among the settlers, and he, too, survived.  You don’t steal another man’s horse, you don’t shoot his squaw or “pet” Indian…

 The following is a list of names and records indicating massacre survivors, though many of the records describe that person as “the only survivor”… If others can add info or other names, it would be appreciated.

 

Gunther’s memory of the massacre

Gunther's mansion on Indian Island: HSU Photo Archives

I’ve decided that sometimes, when I am going out of town or have little to say, I will simply post excerpts/information I’ve dug up over the years that others may not have seen (this time I’m going out of town) .

I won’t fixate on the massacres of February 1860, but thought a little more information from a different perspective couldn’t hurt.

This also emphasizes a point brought up in one of Ernie’s comments that many folks here disagreed with the harsh treatment of the Natives, but were scared.   A man capable of killing an infant with a hatchet was not a man you wanted for an enemy, especially if you had a family.  These were scary people and scary times,  yet many had risked everything to come ”out west” and had to make it work.   So you kept your mouth shut…

The following is from Genocide in Northwestern California, by Jack Norton—pg. 86-88, quoting  Andrew M. Genzoli and Wallace E. Martin, Redwood Cavalcade… Pioneer Life, Times (Eureka, California Schooner Features, 1968), pp. 11-13

Years after the Indian Island massacre,  Robert Gunther was asked to address a special ban­quet at the Old Sequoia Yacht Club, which for years stood on the south end of Gunther Island (Indian Island). In a surprisingly can­did presentation, he reviewed the heinous acts of butchery, but also stated that secretly the parties who did the killing had been pointed out. The following description of activities involved in the genocide committed by a gang of ruffians euphemistically called “the good citizens of Humboldt” bears repeating in full:

Early in 1860, I learned that Indian Island was for sale. It was owned by a Captain Moore who took up eighty acres on Washington’s birthday, 1860, and three days later, the Indian massacre occurred.

What can’t be understood

Indian Island-site of one massacre

When I first learned that Lucy had been on Indian Island at the time of the massacre, I tried to imagine her experience.

The holocaust was the closest thing that came to mind.  The same genocide. The same mindless slaughter.  Millions died in Germany and probably only thousands here, but families were ripped apart and the  bodies piled up just the same.   

There are differences I still can’t quite get my head around. We’ve seen movies where there is a heavy knock on the door and man with a German accent demands entrance, looking for Jews.  We’ve read Anne Frank and seen images of cattle cars filled with hollow eyed captives….    

But the women and children slaughtered on Indian Island were attacked before daybreak and killed without warning. 

“…the assassins…stealthily approached the shore and landed…     They … penetrate each lodge; one holds the light to show where to strike, and while the faces of the poor women and children … are… turned up…, they begin their work of death with axes, hatches and knives.  Amidst the wailing of mutilated infants, the cries of agony of children, the shrieks and groans of mothers in death, the savage blows are given, cutting through bone, and brain.  The cries for mercy are met by joke and libidinous remark, while the bloody ax descends with unpitying stroke, again and again, doing its work of death, the hatchet and knife finishing what the ax left undone.  A few escaped—a child under the body of its dead mother, a young woman wounded, and another who hid in the bushes.

 In an hour they had accomplished their work and were gone, laden with the spoil of Indian blankets, leaving their victims strewed around, weltering in their gore—some dead, some dying, some writhing in pain and anguish, exhibiting a scene such as not tongue can tell, and no eye had ever seen before on our continent, even thought savages practiced in cruelty were the perpetrators.  ~ Reader, this is no fancied sketch, no exaggerated tale; it falls short of the stern reality.  But a short time after, the writer was upon the ground with feet treading in human blood, horrified with the awful and sickening sights which met the eye wherever it turned. Here was another fatally wounded hugging the mutilated carcass of her dying infant to her bosom; there, a poor children of two years old, with its ear and scalp tore from the side of its little head.  Here a father frantic with grief over the blooding corpses of his four little children and wife; there a brother and sister bitterly weeping an, and trying to soothe with cold water, the pallid face of a dying relative.  Here, an aged female still living and sitting up, though covered with ghastly wounds, and dyed in her own blood; there a living infant by its dead mother, desirous of drawing some nourishment from a source that had ceased to flow.  ~The wounded, dead and dying were found all around and in every lodge the skulls and frames of women and children cleft with axes and hatchets, and stabbed with knives, and the brains of an infant oozing from its broken head to the ground… “  [Daily Evening Bulletin, S.F., 13 March 1860]

Indian Island was only one massacre, made public by the proximity to Eureka.  Many other natives were killed in their villages and in the surrounding countryside, atrocities hidden by isolation and secrecy.   

Maybe such a thing shouldn’t be imagined.