Indian Survival on the California Frontier

by Albert L. Hurtado

During the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when vast numbers of whites poured into California, the native Indian population was decimated through disease, starvation, homicide, and a declining birth rate. In this prize-winning book, Albert L. Hurtado focuses on the Indians who survived this harrowing time. Hurtado considers the ways in which native life and culture persisted, how the survivors integrated their lives with white society, and how the now-dominant whites related to the Indians living and working with them.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Native American

269 pages, Paperback

First published September 28, 1988

About the author

Albert L. Hurtado is professor emeritus at the University of Oklahoma, where he held the Paul H. and Doris Eaton Travis Chair in Modern American History. He has published award- winning books and articles about the American West and Indian history.

Reviews

[Tascha Folsoi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an extraordinary work that anybody who is interested in California should read. We wonder why we never learn about California history in schools. Given that we teach it in the fourth grade only and that it is such a brutal and disappointing history, we have unfortunately made no appropriate place for it in K-12 education. Some version of the contents of this book should surely be incorporated into our state curriculum.

The book follows the experiences Indian people had first with the Spanish, who put them in missions and secured their labor but did not seek to eradicate them. Then Anglo people came and wanted to maintain them in the state as they were a major source of labor. As industrialization came in the form of the McCormick reaper, which revolutionized farming, Indians found themselves under greater threat, particularly with the arrival so many white settlers as this further diminished the need for their labor. The US policy of providing reservation lands was not something white people were willing to accommodate as the number of Indian people living in the state would have required relinquishing far more land than Americans could see themselves doing.

Men became farm and ranch laborers and the female population declined. It was much harder to live as couples because the genders needed to pursue work apart from one another. in the 1860s, they began to face a huge population decline that only began to reverse in the 20th century.

Native people adapted and remained in California despite every effort to ruin them. Orphaned children were allowed to be sold into slavery and children who are not orphaned became the victim of trafficking as well. Indigenous people who were believed to be unemployed could be arrested and sold into weekly slavery, paid in alcohol, and were then arrested and sold into more slavery.

While native people lost claim to most of their land, they have endured. I know that today the largest population of native Americans in the country resides in Los Angeles.

Hurtado devoted an entire chapter to the plight of Native American women, including the sexual violence visited on them and other obstacles that they had to overcome.

This is a very important read and well worth it. It is an academic book in the sense that it doesn’t focus on personalities to capture popular attention. But it is an easy and straightforward read.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

An anthropological study, but not dry. As a new Californian, I begin to feel more connected with this state as I learn more about its history. This study focuses mainly on the central valley region and south to the missions at L.A. Many despicable things were done to the indigenous people, but this study also contains accounts of admirable resistance. I also enjoy reading about the cultural mixing that occurred in CA. The most interesting things I have learned are about John Sutter, who founded a fort at modern-day Sacramento. That guy was a complicated dude. He enrolled the Indians in a kind of serfdom, protecting them from more hostile settlers with force, but he also took advantage of the people economically, culturally, and sometimes sexually.

[Dan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I can't believe I actually read this.

[Stephanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another one for work.

[Geoffrey Hazelton · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting but somewhat scholarly work. It makes it's point that the clash of cultures was to doom the Indians in California and elsewhere.