The Other Slavery (40 page)

Since the dawn of the nineteenth century, the Russian empire had explored the west coast of North America from Alaska to California. In 1812 the Russians bolstered their presence by establishing Fort Ross by Bodega Bay. For some years, this outpost near the rugged coast of northern California thrived. But when the population of sea otters began to decline due to overhunting, the Russians decided to sell their fort, which consisted of twenty-four main buildings (complete with wooden floors and glass windows), ten kitchens, eight sheds, and eight
bathhouses. They identified Captain Sutter as a possible buyer. In early September 1841, the governor of Fort Ross, Alexander Rotchev, made his way to Sutter’s home with the surprising offer to sell him the entire fort and its outlying ranches, including furnishings, tools, and cattle, for $30,000. Sutter already owed nearly $4,000 to the Russian-American Company. The price of the fort would simply be added to his existing account. Sutter was elated by the opportunity and flattered by the confidence the Russians placed in him. The contracting parties drew up a payment plan. Sutter would pay the company only $2,000 in 1841, but his payments would increase to $5,000 in 1842 and 1843, then balloon to $10,000 in 1844 and 1845. In the cash-starved economy of Mexican California, however, these enormous sums could only be paid in kind. For Captain Sutter this meant thousands of bushels of wheat and hundreds of quintals of soap, peas, beans, suet, and tallow. (One quintal in colonial Mexico equaled 46 kilograms, or about 100 pounds.) Ever the optimist and without thinking too much, Sutter accepted the terms. After all, he had lived on credit all his life.
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To meet his enormous obligations, Sutter resorted to every tool in the labor kit. Sutter’s fort lay on the border between the Miwoks and Nisenans, so he began luring workers from these groups by giving out presents of beads, blankets, and shirts. He also assiduously cultivated Miwok and Nisenan headmen. Once these Indians had moved close to Sutter’s fort, its proprietor offered them porridge every morning—as Dr. Sandels witnessed—and paid them with clothes. In fact, Sutter established something of a “company store” system. In lieu of cash, Indian laborers received metal disks that they donned as necklaces. Star-shaped holes were punched in the disks to keep track of the amount of work they did. They could then redeem the disks in Sutter’s store: two weeks of work would earn a cotton shirt or a pair of pantaloons. Using this method, Captain Sutter was able to attract and maintain hundreds of Miwoks and Nisenans for each working season. But in addition to dangling carrots, Captain Sutter also resorted to the proverbial stick. The famous trailblazer John C. Frémont visited Sutter’s fort in 1843–1844. He noted that at first the proprietor had faced some difficulties with the Indian laborers, “but by the occasional exercise of well-timed
authority, he had succeeded in converting them into peaceable and industrious people.”
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After settling down in California, Sutter’s first objective had been to raise a private army. At first it consisted of a small group of white men, but it soon grew to about 150 infantrymen and 50 cavalrymen, the majority of them Indian soldiers. They wore uniforms acquired from the Russians—green and blue with red trim—and responded to commands issued in German. It was an unusual martial display in the wilds of California. One of the occupations of this army was to persuade reluctant or uncooperative Indians to work. A Nisenan man named William Joseph recalled that although Sutter paid his workers, if they failed to work, his henchmen “whipped them with a big whip made of cowhide.” Working for Sutter was evidently not a choice but an obligation, especially in the critical years when the large payments to the Russian-American Company were due.
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Sutter’s private army also allowed him to participate in the Indian slave trade. Over the years, Sutter learned much about this traffic. As he wrote in his personal reminiscences, “It was common in those days to seize Indian women and children and sell them; this the Californians did as well as Indians.” Early on, Captain Sutter had to deal with slavers operating in his domain. In the fall 1840, a group of Indians from the mission of San José arrived at Sutter’s fort. They were bearing passports from the Vallejos and asked for permission to visit some of their friends and relatives in the area. Instead, however, they struck a nearby ranchería of Yalisumni Nisenans while the men were away working for Sutter, killing the elderly and carrying off the women. The attackers intended to sell their prisoners to the ranches by the coast, “as was common in those days.” But this was not to be. Sutter personally led a detachment of soldiers in pursuit of the marauding Indians, caught the perpetrators, and brought them to his fort for execution.
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Such experiences paved Sutter’s way into the slaving business. But what really pushed him into that traffic was the need to punish hostile Indians and the realization that this could be done in an economically advantageous manner. Sutter’s presence by the Sacramento River had polarized the indigenous inhabitants. Some Miwoks and Nisenans were
his allies and laborers—however reluctantly—but many others refused to submit and attempted to steal from Sutter and even murder him. In 1844–1845, when Sutter’s political influence was on the wane and huge payments to the Russians were due, he opted to use an iron fist on the Natives. “I see now how it is,” Sutter wrote to his most trusted agent, who was in the process of developing a new farm; “if they are not Keept strickly under fear, it will be no good.”
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Sutter’s personal army came alive in those years, persuading unreliable laborers, breaking up bands of hostile Indians, and punishing cattle rustlers. All of these activities became potential sources of slaves. Unguarded private letters reveal the deliberate way in which Sutter approached this line of business. “I shall send you some young Indians,” Sutter wrote to his neighbor and creditor Antonio Suñol in May 1845, “after our campaign against horse-thieves, which will take place after the wheat harvest.” A few weeks later, true to his word, Sutter dispatched thirty-one Indians, “as usual, dying of hunger.” Some other such transactions have come to light.
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It is difficult to gauge the full scope of Sutter’s slaving activities. In Hubert Howe Bancroft’s monumental history of California, based on many firsthand accounts, including Sutter’s, the historian concluded that from the start, the Swiss captain had seized Indian children, “who were retained as servants, or slaves, at his own establishment or sent to his friends in different parts of the country.” Similarly, Albert Hurtado, the scholar who is most familiar with Sutter’s correspondence, has observed that the Indian wars undoubtedly helped Sutter improve his balance sheet vis-à-vis his creditors. One of Sutter’s employees, Heinrich Lienhard, even claimed that his boss kept a harem of Indian women and young girls in a room right next to this office. These accusations, while plausible, remain uncorroborated.
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Although Captain Sutter combined some features of the peonage system with occasional slave raiding, other Euro-American settlers became more specialized in the traffic of Indians. Andrew Kelsey and his brothers arrived in California in the first overland wagon train from Missouri in 1841. By 1844 Andrew, Benjamin, and Samuel had settled in the Napa Valley, where they raised cattle for the tallow trade. During these
years, the Kelseys interacted closely with the Vallejos, who lived in the adjacent valley. The Kelseys, as well as other ranchers in the area, relied on Indian workers brought from the Clear Lake region directly to the north.
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Today, State Route 29 runs north through the wineries of the Napa Valley before meandering through Mount Saint Helena and descending to Clear Lake. Visitors are astounded by the size of the lake—the largest freshwater lake entirely within California. (Lake Tahoe straddles the California-Nevada border.) Though far less famous than the Napa Valley today, Clear Lake has its own share of visitors, who enjoy the houses and condos along the shore. The lake itself is alive with water-skiers, kayakers, and motorboaters. Fortunately, Clear Lake is large enough to accommodate these human activities and still sustain remarkable wildlife. Egrets, herons, bald eagles, hawks, ospreys, and many other birds can be spotted in the area. Anglers are especially keen on the lake’s bass. Clear Lake ranks as one of the top bass-fishing spots in the United States and is sometimes called “the Bass Capital of the West.”

It is precisely this natural abundance that has made Clear Lake a magnet for human populations since time immemorial. In the early nineteenth century, the lake was even bigger than it is today. It supported eighteen different rancherías, each consisting of about 100 to 150 individuals occupying different islands or portions of the shore. They were mostly Pomo Indians, with Miwok and Wappo linguistic groups represented at either end of the lake. Each band claimed some lands and hunting grounds and enjoyed a diverse diet. In the spring, the Indians caught the plentiful fish swimming upstream in basket traps or even with their bare hands. In the summer, they dived for clams and dug up roots to eat. In the fall, they gathered acorns and hunted the thousands of water fowl descending on the lake. Even though they possessed an extraordinarily varied and abundant supply of food, the Indians of the lake also traded actively among themselves and with more distant tribes. The lake rancherías exchanged everyday necessities such as fish, baskets, animal skins, and clams. From the coast they imported salt and seashells, while exporting in return obsidian from nearby Mount Saint Helena (an extinct volcano), fish, and acorns. Despite being threatened by smallpox
in the 1830s, the total indigenous population living around Clear Lake in the early 1840s was probably about three thousand.
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The first outsider to establish a beachhead in Clear Lake was none other than Salvador Vallejo. Around 1839 or 1840, he built a log house and a corral on the southern shore of the lake just north of present-day Kelseyville. It was little more than a rude wooden shelter and a few poles driven into the ground forming a kind of stockade. The younger Vallejo kept a
mayordomo
(caretaker) there to manage the place and direct the dozen or so Pomo Indians who constructed buildings, maintained the property, and tended the horses and cattle brought from Sonoma. Subsequently, on the basis of these improvements, Vallejo applied for a land grant encompassing much of the southern shore.
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From time to time, Salvador Vallejo also visited Clear Lake to recruit Indian workers for the ranches in Sonoma and Napa, thus setting an important precedent. In one notorious expedition in 1843, he led a group of eighty Mexican ranchers and as many Indian allies into the region. The riders first attempted, unsuccessfully, to recruit the Koi Indians by giving them beads and other presents, while asking them to relocate to the Mexican ranches. Next they approached the Elem Indians, on Rattlesnake Island, who also refused. Finally they reached the Kam-dot Indians, who organized a great council in a
temescal,
or sweathouse, to which Vallejo was invited. The Indians began gathering in the conical structure, about the size of a circus ring, by the lake. The building was completely enclosed except for a small hole at the top to let out the smoke. The only way in or out was through a narrow tunnel that could be used by only one person at a time. The participants set a fire in the middle of the structure, and once they were sweating profusely, they would escape through the tunnel to plunge into the lake. According to Vallejo’s own version of events, he believed that the sweathouse invitation was a ruse. So with half the Indian men inside, naked and unarmed, he and his men set the building on fire while blocking the tunnel. Then the rest of the men and “the squaws and children were made prisoners and driven down into Napa Valley and there compelled to go to work”—a prize of three hundred Indians, young and old, male and female.
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The American takeover of California forced the Vallejos to consolidate their holdings. In 1847 Salvador Vallejo sold his Clear Lake cattle operation to Andrew Kelsey and a younger American named Charles Stone. The two partners promptly relocated to the southern shore of the lake and treated the Indians like slaves. They forced four or five hundred Pomo Indians to build a sturdy adobe house measuring about forty feet long and fifteen feet wide, complete with a fireplace, in only two months. The Americans meted out cruel punishments for minor infractions. Perhaps the very isolation of these two white men living in a remote outpost, completely surrounded by Natives, as well as the need to keep firm control, prompted them to terrorize the local inhabitants. Whatever the cause, the accounts of both whites and Indians are consistent. Americans who stayed with Kelsey and Stone reported that their hosts flogged Indians for entertainment and even shot random Natives just for the fun of seeing them jump. Thomas Knight, an American who settled in the Napa Valley in 1845, said that one of the preferred methods of punishment was to hang Indians by their thumbs in the adobe house for two or three days, allowing their toes to just touch the floor. Kelsey and Stone also raped young Indian women. Indeed, according to another white Napa Valley resident, one of their motivations for relocating to remote Clear Lake was to gain the freedom to satisfy “their unbridled lusts among the youthful females.”
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In the meantime, the conscription of Indians continued. In 1848 Kelsey and Stone rounded up 172 Indians and had them driven to the ranches of Napa and Sonoma for compulsory work. The discovery of gold brought even more misery to the Indians of the lake. In the fall of 1849, the two partners sent around 50 Pomo Indians to the headwaters of the Sacramento River to pan for gold. The timing of this venture could not have been worse. At the absolute peak of gold fever, throngs of prospectors from Oregon and southern California were converging on the region. Benjamin Kelsey drove the Pomos to the goldfields without incident, but once there he realized that the hordes of prospectors had created an acute shortage of provisions. Basic foodstuffs were fetching extremely high prices. Thus Kelsey was persuaded that he and the other investors would be better off if they simply sold all their provisions
rather than look for gold. And so he liquidated his supplies, leaving the Indians to fend for themselves. Hunger was not the only peril. The goldfields were in an area surrounded by the traditional enemies of the Pomos. An outbreak of malaria made their situation even more difficult. Of the 50 or so Indians who went to the goldfields, only three made it back to Clear Lake. As one contemporary chronicler wrote, “Sons and brothers who had gone away in the full prime of their manhood, had fallen victims to hunger, disease, and the enemy’s bow and arrow.”
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